Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) [New ed.] 9783034309912, 9783035307412, 3034309910

Citation preview

Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere Contemporary and Historical Perspectives

BERND FISCHER AND M AY M E R G E N T H A L E R ( E D S )

Peter Lang

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION The last decade has seen renewed interest in political theories of the public sphere, reacting to new challenges posed by globalization, communication technology, and intra- and international conflicts. However, the role of culture and aesthetics in the formation of the public sphere has received insufficient analytical attention. The essays in this volume explore different strategies for enriching the ongoing debates on this issue, ranging from historical case studies to theoretical examinations of cultural interdependencies and the aesthetic potential of literature and art. The contributions implicitly challenge Jürgen Habermas’ assumption that the public discourse about art and literature should be seen as a mere precursor to the emergence of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, which, from his point of view, is best discussed in the terminology of political theory. Topics range from the French Revolution’s exclusive social metaphors to Herder’s anticipation of virtual publics, from the distortions of public communication to revolutionary potentials of popular taste, and from postcolonial feuilletons to the global bio-political imaginaries evoked by mobile communication. The essays are intended for scholars and students in political theory and philosophy as well as in German, Latin American, and Modern Hebrew literature and culture.

Bernd Fischer is Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. His specializations include literature and thought from the eighteeenth to the twenty-first century, nationalism, transculturality, and aesthetics of recognition. May Mergenthaler is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. Her specialities are Romanticism, contemporary poetry, and theories of literature and poetic language.

www.peterlang.com

Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 24 EDITORIAL BOARD

RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere Contemporary and Historical Perspectives Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio­ grafie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cultural transformations of the public sphere : contemporary and historical perspectives / Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds.). pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-03-430991-2 (alk. paper) 1. Communities. 2. Civil society. 3. Public spaces. I. Fischer, Bernd, 1953- II. Mergenthaler, May. HM761.C85 2014 306.2--dc23 2014039259 Cover image: Public Sphere (detail), 2014 © Curtis Goldstein. Photographs from magazines and advertisements, cardboard, glue, table, glass, LED lights. 54 x 35 x 35 in. overall. Reproduced with kind permission of the artist. ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-3-0343-0991-2 (print) ISBN 978-3-0353-0741-2 (eBook) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2015 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents

Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler

Introduction1 part i Historical Perspectives: Real and Imaginary, Inclusive and Exclusive Public Spheres

13

Dorothea von Mücke

Public Space and the Public: Johann Gottfried Herder’s Approach to Real and Imagined Communities

15

Susanne Lüdemann

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

41

part ii Cultural and Theoretical Transformations I: The Limits of Public Representation

61

Jade Larissa Schiff

Repressive Democracy: Pathological and Ontological Distortion in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action

63

Edgar Landgraf

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

93

Christian J. Emden

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere? Habermas and the Modern State

121

vi

part iii Cultural and Theoretical Transformations II: The Aesthetic Potentials of Public Spheres

155

Juliane Rebentisch

Mass – People – Multitude: A Reflection on the Source of Democratic Legitimacy 

157

Christoph Menke

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

183

Kam Shapiro

Biopolitical Reflections: Cognitive, Aesthetic and Reflexive Mappings of Global Economies

203

part iv Three Case Studies: From Postcolonial to Global Literary Public Spheres

229

Fernando Unzueta

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere in Latin America

231

Ignacio Corona

Gendering the Public Sphere: Literary Journalism by Women in Mexico and Brazil

271

Oded Nir

Totalizing Imaginaries: Collectivity and Utopia in Modern Hebrew Fiction from Altneuland to Neuland

305

Notes on Contributors

337

Index341

Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler

Introduction

The idea for this volume developed during a larger interdisciplinary project on ‘The Public Sphere and Modern Social Imaginaries’, a lecture series and a conference that took place at The Ohio State University between 2009 and 2012. We invited those participants and several additional colleagues, who were particularly interested in conceptual work on the cultural implications and aesthetic formations of the public sphere, to contribute to this volume. Our thanks go foremost to the authors, who responded so convincingly to our invitation; to the participants of the conference and the lecture series; and to the colleagues from OSU’s departments of Comparative Studies, History, Political Science, Spanish and Portuguese, and Germanic Languages and Literatures who participated in the conception and organization of the larger project. Special thanks are due to Alice Schlingman, who helped with the editorial work that fell largely into May Mergenthaler’s hands. Finally, we would like to thank the College (now Division) of Humanities for generously supporting the lecture series, the conference, and the publication of this volume. Pondering the potentials, limits, hopes and hazards of expounding the role of aesthetics and culture in the formation of public spheres and social imaginaries, it is perhaps helpful to search for possible beginnings. When Immanuel Kant, in his ‘Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784), introduced his notion of a public [Publikum] that has the potential to enlighten itself, his anticipated model was a yet to be established uncensored intellectual exchange of ideas and arguments. Reason alone was to determine the validity of any published argument, and in the process of its quasi-scholarly self-enlightenment, the public would not only debate innovative and diverse ideas, it would also learn how to reason. Culture and aesthetics did not come into view. For Kant, gratuitous rhetorical devices, polemical structures and aesthetic embellishments were, as he

2

Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler

pointed out throughout his work, warning signs for a cautious and sceptical reception, signals that the presented argument might somehow be insufficient or faulty. If at all, culture is in this essay revealed as the history of political and religious indoctrination that has kept the public in a state of immaturity and servitude, incapable of overcoming the convenience of being told what to think and too gutless to use its own capacity for reason. It is not until Kant speculates on the possibility of his political telos, the (ultimately world-encompassing) republic of republics, that culture raises its (still) ugly head again. By the time he writes Perpetual Peace (1795), he concedes that the public does not seem to want such a world state, because it (stubbornly) insists on difference and wants the particularity of its languages and religions to be recognized in political structures and societal formations. At least for the time being, Kant is forced to dismiss, as he says, ‘in hypothesi what is right in thesi’ and replace his vision of a world republic (including the utopian notion of world citizenship rights) with the much weaker proposal of an alliance, at best a federation, of autonomous states. Aside from the (French) politics of the day, it was, no doubt, Johann Gottfried Herder’s alternative conceptualization of history that must have convinced Kant to scale back his political project: primarily Herder’s ethical demand for the recognition of the world’s cultures or civilizations by the unique standards of their own inherent measures and, following from this, their right to find their own political (national) structures and build their own unique societies. Herder – this point is often neglected – was less interested in sub-national cultures, such as sociolects, dialects, and cultural or religious regionalisms. Quite to the contrary, in order to develop (and educate) a national German public, he felt it quite imperative to enforce a standard German language and to build a common national canon for a reading public to come. While Kant leaves no doubt that in his political model it is the (republican) constitution that eventually transforms people into a nation (and not the other way around), he was also quite aware of the challenges that sub-national cultural orientations could pose to his vision of a national and latently cosmopolitan public. In September 1784 (a few months before Kant), Moses Mendelssohn had published his essay ‘On the Question: What does it Mean to Enlighten?’ If Kant and Herder, in the context of their

Introduction

3

divergent political ambitions, converge on employing the term ‘public’ – a term that allows for connotations of a reading and viewing public in the communicative and commercial sense of an audience – rather than Habermas’ abstract notion of a public sphere, Mendelssohn’s pragmatic Enlightenment is deferential to an abstract concept of Bildung and operates in a political sphere, where philosophy stands ready, as he says, to cover its mouth in the face of political atrocities and inequalities, for it is all too familiar with its own political limitations; and one of his primary appeals is that it ought to be equally aware of its own potential for inadvertently wrecking established cultures and societies when it is tempted to confront them with an unprepared and unrehearsed bout of knowledge. For Mendelssohn, a people’s enlightenment and its culture ought to develop in lockstep. But Mendelssohn does not stop there and proposes that a nation that approaches the pinnacle of its potential Bildung is already in danger of falling ill from an overdose of national intemperance and overindulgence. Healthy nations, Mendelssohn seems to imply, need the spike of inner struggle and strife, of claims for divergent particularities. While philosophy may have no option but to imagine one public for itself and address humanity as such – for ‘man as man is not in need of culture, but is in need of enlightenment’ – it must in Mendelssohn’s concept become aware that it has, in turn, a much harder time reaching man as citizen, as a member of a particular nation, religion, language, estate or profession. This is, of course, the reason why Kant divides man into two personas, private and public, whereby it is the individual’s role in society that is public, while his role within a self-enlightening public is private, in the sense of free. Kant’s answer to these challenges can be found in his attempt to get to the heart of culture via a rigorous analysis of the individual aesthetic experience and the commonality of taste. His critique of aesthetic judgement uncovers metaphysical assumptions of the dominant discourse on the educational and social value of art and attempts to offer a new foundation by acknowledging the autonomy of an individual’s pure experience of beauty and her coinstantaneous desire for its societal recognition and universal approval (resulting in a latent discourse on taste that forcefully wants to unfold). Kant shied away from attempting to integrate his analysis of aesthetic judgement into his political deliberations, but – as is

4

Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler

already evident with Friedrich Schiller’s notion of aesthetic play, which, in itself, is conceivable as an aesthetic sphere of private/public cultural and political formation – he has opened a barrel that remains far from being drained. Terminologies have evolved and political expediencies have changed, but we believe that many of these fundamental tensions between philosophical, cultural and aesthetic formations of the public (and their eighteenthcentury conceptualizations) are still with us today, and some are explored and often radically reconfigured in the essays collected in this volume. In particular, the contributions by Emden, Rebentisch, Menke and Shapiro are, in one way or another, indebted to Kant’s conceptual universe. Herder’s legacy can be studied primarily in the essays by von Mücke, Lüdemann, Unzueta and Nir. And some of Mendelssohn’s conceptual concerns are newly explored by Schiff, Landgraf and Corona. In the first section, the chapter ‘Public Space and the Public: Johann Gottfried Herder’s Approach to Real and Imagined Communities’ by Dorothea von Mücke explores Herder’s changing views of the public, from a historical – before and after the French Revolution – as well as contemporary – after the media-fuelled uprisings in the Middle East – perspective. In the two versions of his essay ‘Haben wir noch das Publikum und Vaterland der Alten?’ [Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancients?] from 1765 and 1795, respectively, Herder conceives of the public in two distinct ways that both present potential alternatives to the model of a deliberative and liberal public sphere as developed by Habermas, finding its origin in eighteenth-century bourgeois society. While Habermas’ public sphere is a descendent of the ancient Greek polis and exemplifies Kantian principles of critical and rational thought, Herder, in the first version of his essay, extols the public institutions in a monarchy as places where all subjects can gather and benefit from services directed toward the common good, like law, education and social welfare. He wrote the second version in reaction to the terror regimes following the French Revolution with an elaboration on how different realms of society invoke different kinds of publics, viewing not Greek politics but art as capable of appealing to and helping to bring about an ideal public – one that is neither submissive as in religion, nor ideological as in philosophy, but imaginative, self-reflexive

Introduction

5

and critical. Herder, von Mücke maintains, reminds us of the importance of both real spaces and the freedom of aesthetic realms for the emergence of thriving civic societies. The French Revolution stands at the centre of Susanne Lüdemann’s essay, ‘Fraternity as a Social Metaphor’, which confirms the critical view of the revolutionary public at play in Herder. Yet, Lüdemann, like Herder, locates the dangers of this public not in being manipulated by political leaders, but precisely in what he suggests as a remedy: social imaginaries. She analyses the exclusive and ultimately destructive role that the social metaphor of fraternity played in the aftermath of the Revolution and the foundation of France’s First Republic. In Lüdemann’s view, social bodies need embodiments and affective bonds, so that after the beheading of the King of France, Louis XVI, a vacuum emerged that had to be filled. The republican constitution with its abstract guarantees of freedom and equality did not suffice to hold together a polity and hence, these ideals were supplemented by the political imaginary of a universal fraternity. However, as Lüdemann shows, the notion of fraternity led in the end – perhaps unavoidably – to its opposite: universal distrust and a regime of terror. She argues, with Jacques Derrida, that fraternity is marked by a paradox: it must be politically constructed and upheld by rituals, like the citizens’ oath, while at the same time presupposing its existence as natural. The revolutionaries promised that all humans were brothers, but very soon, women and foreigners were excluded from the republican band of brothers, which ultimately dissolved violently, through rising internal strife and suspicion of secession. Lüdemann thus invites us to reflect on the possibility of creating political imaginaries that avoid both exclusion and self-destruction. The positive potentials of aesthetic imagination for the public sphere are discussed in the third section of our volume. The second section, ‘Cultural and Theoretical Transformations I: The Limits of Public Representation’, lays the theoretical groundwork for this section by presenting critical analyses of and supplements to Habermas’ notion of the public sphere. The included essays point out the gaps in the concept of the public sphere and already suggest that these gaps may perhaps be filled with the help of imagination and art.

6

Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler

Jade Larissa Schiff argues in ‘Repressive Democracy: Pathological and Ontological Distortion in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action’ that the theory of communicative action underlying Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, with its presupposition of transparent and rational communication, neglects what Schiff calls ‘ontological distortion’: ‘reciprocal misunderstandings, not of meanings, but of lifeworlds, of whole conceptions of how the world is and ought to be.’ Such distortions are necessary for a functioning liberal, democratic public sphere, according to Schiff, because they provide citizens with the – at least in part illusory – assumption that they share the same lifeworld and subscribe to the same norms, allowing them to exchange ideas and form shared opinions. These misunderstandings of lifeworlds are, however, also dangerous for the pluralistic character of a democracy, since they exclude, even repress, in a Freudian sense, other, competing worldviews. Schiff develops her argument on the basis of Habermas’ own discussion of distorted communication [ver­zerrte Kommunikation] and his use of Freudian psychoanalysis. In her view, Habermas does not distinguish between pathological and ontological distortion, which results from his falsely understanding all repression and distortion as pathological, while Freud believed that a stable collective existence needs some basic – ‘ontological’ – forms of repression. Edgar Landgraf ’s essay ‘Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann’ calls into question the fundamental assumptions underlying Habermas’ view of the relationship between the public and the state. The author bases his discussion on Lippmann’s belief, formed in response to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, that public opinion can never be representative and finds expression only in general terms (‘yes’ or ‘no’), and on Lippmann’s proposed remedy: the decoupling of ‘the political decision-making process from public opinion’. According to Landgraf, Lippmann pointed to a crucial feature of political systems that Niklas Luhmann later elaborated: the systemic autonomy of government and administration with respect to the public, which Luhmann conceived as a Publikum, an audience. In his view, the public and public opinion do not really legitimize the decisions of the government, but merely serve ‘as communication devices for its [the government’s] self-legitimization’. Public opinion, furthermore, does not express a majority view,

Introduction

7

but acts as a ‘communication filter’ that determines and excludes what is private. However, for Landgraf, the paradox, described by Luhmann, that the public is simultaneously excluded and – in a highly mediated and limited fashion – included in the political process, is not detrimental to democracies and other forms of government. Rather, it is the only way these regimes can maintain stability, while adjusting to the unpredictable changes of modern societies. To illustrate this flexible structure, Landgraf compares it to theatre and improvisation. Christian J. Emden confirms, in ‘Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere? Habermas and the Modern State’, that the relationship between government and public is paradoxical and that this structure is a necessary component of a thriving democracy. At the same time, he conceives of the paradox of the public sphere, and of democracy, in a fundamentally different way, taking his recourse from Habermas. According to Emden, it consists in the fact that the constituent, legitimizing power of the public can manifest itself only in the shape of the constituted norms and institutions of the state and that, consequently, the public’s opinion and influence becomes recognizable only in hindsight. At the basis of this paradox lies the constitutional paradox described by Hannah Arendt, Derrida and others, that in establishing a constitution, the constituent power (the public, or their representatives) can grant itself what is principally unlimited power only retrospectively and, at the same time, must curtail this power, so as not to destabilize the very constitution it has created. Thus, unlike Landgraf, Emden believes that the public actually possesses constituent power and is not merely a ‘communication device’ for an autonomous government’s selflegitimization. At the same time, he also views this power as to a large extent shaped by the state. Emden even suggests that, according to Habermas’ normative understanding of democracy, the state leaves limited room for the public to exercise its constituent power on its own terms. Yet, instead of calling for an insurgent democracy, like Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt and others, Emden maintains that, in order to return power to the public, a functioning democracy requires space for struggle, or agon (Wenman; Mouffe), between the government and the people. The third section of the volume, ‘Cultural and Theoretical Transformations II: The Aesthetic Potentials of Public Spheres’, opens with

8

Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler

an essay by Juliane Rebentisch that reflects on the conditions that enable the conflictual and productive relationships between the people and the government, necessary for democracies, as described by Emden. In ‘Mass – People – Multitude: A Reflection on the Source of Democratic Legitimacy’, Rebentisch first explores how people can maintain their individuality and power of reflective judgement, which Habermas views as necessary for a functioning public sphere, by critiquing the notion that democracies face the threat of being ruled by a uniform, manipulable and irrational masses – thus fending off Herder’s worries, as described by von Mücke. Rebentisch then defends Hardt and Negri’s idea of the ‘multitude’ (of people) against the latters’ call for absolute democracy, that is, a direct rule of the multitude. Rebentisch believes that Plato’s and Nietzsche’s classic critiques of the rule of the masses, which they both liken to theatre audiences, misunderstands the nature of theatre, and of aesthetic and political judgement. The very openness of the audience for new influences from the stages of theatre and politics does not, in Rebentisch’s view, suggest their unlimited manipulability, but rather their ability to make ‘free judgements’ and to lead self-determined lives, in ways that also challenge the boundaries between public and private. The multiplicity of perspectives present in any people prevents their unification in a mass – people are a ‘multitude’. However, these multiple viewpoints can never be represented as such: as soon as they are voiced in the arena of politics, they are inextricably bound up with sovereignty or the state – confirming Emden’s analysis of the paradox of the public sphere. What prevents a democratic state from becoming resistant to unavoidable social changes and thus non-representative of the people and undemocratic are, in Rebentisch’s view, not only the necessary differences and conflicts between the government and the public, but, crucially, the ‘self-difference’ of the people – their internal division into the multitude and its partial public representations that enable a public to oppose and transform both the government and itself. Whereas Rebentisch regards the freedom of a theatre audience’s aesthetic judgement as exemplary of the freedom of a political judgement, Christoph Menke presents a theory of how aesthetic freedom, understood as a ‘force’ [Kraft], can emerge in modern and postmodern societies, in the first place, in opposition to these societies’ respective bourgeois and

Introduction

9

consumerist ideologies. His essay ‘A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption’ also seeks to correct accounts of contemporary societies as realizations of aesthetic categories developed in eighteenthcentury Europe. According to Menke, the eighteenth-century bourgeois idea of an autonomous subject finds its expression in the social and aesthetic category of taste. In exercising her taste, the bourgeois individual allegedly shows her (paradoxical) ability to judge the objective world freely and subjectively, and to simultaneously recognize things in themselves, as they truly are. For that reason, the ‘subject of aesthetic taste is the epitome of the bourgeois idea of autonomy’ – if only in appearance. In reality, Menke argues, bourgeois taste is acquired through education and discipline and thus is neither subjective nor objective, but a reflection of society’s ideology. In contemporary, post-disciplinary societies, taste seems to have become both more and less free: taste now manifests itself in the ability to constantly adapt to the aesthetics of ever-new consumer products. This adaptation cannot be taught, and everyone can, in theory, participate in it; in reality, it obeys the laws of capitalism. Thus, the postmodern subject is only free to follow the dictates of consumption. Yet, for Menke, this is no reason to despair, as he believes that taste contains the potential for its own subversion and for the realization of true freedom and objectivity: counter-taste, which he understands as a manifestation of the force and passion of aesthetic judgement. In his essay ‘Biopolitical Reflections: Cognitive, Aesthetic and Reflexive Mappings of Global Economies’, Kam Shapiro confirms the reflective and self-critical potential of aesthetic judgement, yet he does not limit aesthetics to judgements of taste about aesthetic objects. Rather, he understands it, drawing on the etymological root of the word, as sensuous perception and affective reaction. Furthermore, while Menke advocates a counter-taste directed against current economic and cultural systems, Shapiro modifies Jameson’s notion of ‘cognitive mapping’, exploring possibilities for reflexive ‘mappings’, of social processes shaping affects and sensibilities. Deviating from Jameson and following Lynch, the author treats mapping as an aesthetic practice that cannot capture the totality of forces shaping economic and cultural systems. The notion – or ‘social metaphor’ (Lüdemann) – of the ‘map’ helps Shapiro to illustrate what he is after: a partially intuitive,

10

Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler

partially reflective and critical grasp of the multifarious global political, economic and social relationships that characterize contemporary societies. His main examples – newspaper articles about the production, distribution and use of mobile phones and about the potential connections between the food industry, diet and voting behaviour – show the complexity and dizzying reflexivity of processes of ‘mapping’: we use our mobile phones or tablets to read about the evils of the communication device industry; or we may gobble popcorn while learning about the influence of fat and corn syrup on our politics. Rather than criticizing these recursive structures, as Shapiro suggests Jameson would, the author emphasizes not only their unavoidability, but (seeking support from Lippmann and Dewey) sees them as a chance: their dizzying effect makes us pause and allows us reflect on the complexity and aesthetic dimension of our social and public, in the sense of shared, imaginaries. How and to what extent newspapers and novels can foster comprehensive and inclusive global public spheres and imaginaries that take into account not only the rational, but also the affective and aesthetic aspects of social discourse and interaction is being discussed in this book’s fourth and last section, ‘Three Case Studies: From Postcolonial to Global Literary Public Spheres’. In contrast to the previous European- and US-Americanfocused and largely theoretical chapters, the case studies explore these and other questions from the decentred perspectives of postcolonial Latin America and post-Zionist Israel, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In the opening essay of this section, ‘National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere in Latin America’, Fernando Unzueta explains the role that literature and the public sphere played in the process of nation-building in the nineteenth century, after Latin American states had gained their independence from colonial rule. Whereas in most European states, literature and the arts gained autonomy from social institutions in the late eighteenth century, in Latin America ‘[b]asically the same group of author-politicians wrote the new countries’ constitutions, laws and histories, along with the patriotic poetry and national novels that would enshrine their heroes and other foundational myths.’ Authors like José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and Blest Gana sought to represent, address

Introduction

11

and mediate between all members of society; advocate important civic and national values; and make their writing widely accessible through their style and distribution in newspapers. Taking Blest Gana’s Martín Rivas (1862) as an example, Unzueta shows how nineteenth-century Latin American novels confirm much of Habermas’ concept of the public sphere, while correcting some of its assumptions by emphasizing the importance of nationbuilding for civic society, the close connection (or even identity) between public writers and politicians, the existence of more than one public sphere beyond the bourgeoisie, and the irrationality present in public discourse. His essay thus sheds a critical light on the status of art and literature with its distance from politics and the public sphere as well as its division into high and popular culture, which developed in eighteenth-century Europe and still prevails in much of the world. Ignacio Corona’s ‘Gendering the Public Sphere: Literary Journalism by Women in Mexico and Brazil’ describes what seems to be a reappearance of the Latin American, politically involved public author in the 1960s and 1970s, when much of the continent was ruled by authoritarian governments. Corona shows how through their literary journalism, the nationally leading authors Rosario Castellanos and Clarice Lispector transformed the Latin American public sphere by using the media for self-conscious modernizing strategies, by raising awareness of women’s issues, and by the mere fact of developing a popular voice in a then still male-dominated medium. While not being politicians themselves, the Mexican Castellanos held several government posts, and Lispector was married to a Brazilian diplomat. These connections and the repressive nature of their home countries’ regimes inspired, but also limited the political nature of their writings. Corona argues that both women implicitly criticized authoritarian regimes by promoting women’s rights as a necessary component of the ongoing modernization and democratization of their societies. At the same time, they challenged the public–private distinction by discussing how women’s general issues arise in their private lives, and by developing their respective and very different unique literary-journalistic writing styles. One might say that Castellanos and Lispector illustrate in a stark way the paradox of the public sphere that Emden elaborates, namely that the voice of the constituent public can only be heard when it adapts itself to the constituted power.

12

Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler

If this is true for democracies, then this was even more the case in Latin America’s authoritarian regimes on a ‘path toward true modernization’. The limits of contemporary literature’s ability to imagine radical social change are explored in this section’s – and the volume’s – closing chapter, ‘Totalizing Imaginaries: Collectivity and Utopia in Modern Hebrew Fiction from Altneuland to Neuland’ by Oded Nir. Nir shares a number of Jameson’s assumptions: 1. that the ability to imagine society as a whole is a prerequisite for its comprehensive, fundamental transformation; 2. that globalization prevents us from fully grasping our social, political and economic circumstances; and 3. that cognitive and aesthetic ‘mapping’ can help remedy this situation. While Shapiro cites examples for such mappings from contemporary media, Nir finds his model in Zionist utopian literature, more precisely in Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel Altneuland [Old New Land], published the same year in Hebrew translation, under the title Tel Aviv [Spring Hill/Heap of Ruins]. Nir contrasts Herzl’s novel with Eshkol Nevo’s novel ‫[ נוילנד‬Neuland] (2011), which he views as an expression of a deplorable loss of utopian imagination. Despite being very explicit about the dangers of exclusion and oppression that he believes are present in both national and utopian imaginaries like Zionism (and confirming Benedict Anderson as well as Lüdemann’s critique of social metaphors and Schiff ’s notion of ontological distortions), Nir asks us to ‘register’ not only the failure of these imaginaries, but also how they come about, as well as their narrative and psychological force. Thus, not unlike Herder (as presented by von Mücke), he suggests that literature is able to – and even should – invoke a public that can imagine a community, while critically reflecting on its boundaries and exclusions. Nir locates this force in the ability of utopian novels like Altneuland to represent as ‘neutralized’ a wide array of historical, social, political, economic and cultural contradictions, while leaving newly emerging conflicts unresolved, as a task for the future. Nevo’s Neuland, by contrast, self-consciously describes a postmodern proliferation of conflicts, neutralizing them only by means of relativization, nostalgia and escapism, rather than by figuring a ‘society to come’.

part i

Historical Perspectives: Real and Imaginary, Inclusive and Exclusive Public Spheres

Dorothea von Mücke

Public Space and the Public: Johann Gottfried Herder’s Approach to Real and Imagined Communities

Young people are indeed in touch with likeminded persons many thousands of miles away. But even if the students of Berkeley, Berlin and Bangalore share a common set of interests, these do not translate into community. Space matters. And politics is a function of space – we vote where we live and our leaders are restricted in their legitimacy and authority to the place where they were elected. Real-time access to likeminded fellows half a world away is no substitute. — tony judt

Most discussions of the emergence of the public sphere during the eighteenth century focus on media and institutions that further open deliberation and support the free dissemination of ideas and information, such as print technology, moral weeklies, coffee houses and the republic of letters. These discussions tend to ignore the role played by such institutions as courts of law, public schools and public hospitals, where the word public has both meanings of the Latin publicus, namely ‘of the state’ as well as ‘of the people’. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, distinguishes a public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) that is part of civil society from the one that is provided by governmental institutions. The latter he sets aside as tainted by state power (vermachtet). And yet, today, half a century after the publication of Habermas’ influential study, we might have a different attitude towards such public institutions, not least since we are witnessing the ever increasing replacement of the public sector by private corporations running hospitals, schools, postal delivery services and means of public transport. Tony Judt,

16

Dorothea von Mücke

in surveying this trend that marks many Western European democracies as well as the United States, makes the point that social media cannot fill the function once served by the local institutions of the public sector. For, according to Judt, it is primarily in the local institutions of the public sector that many diverse segments of the population are brought together, must interact and thus form an image of society at large that extends beyond the limitations of individual interest groups, social class, religious and ethnic backgrounds, as well as income and educational levels.1 In other words, the virtual dimension of such media as the Internet or print does not obviate the importance of real public spaces when it comes to the construction of an imagined community. Two concerns guide my approach to the public in this chapter. The first involves its contours. How does the public gain and maintain a certain shape and self-image? The second bears on the role and function of real space and time in contrast to the virtual dimension. I shall pursue this line of inquiry by engaging with a little known essay by Johann Gottfried Herder, which he published first in 1765 and again in 1795. Although the two versions differ quite considerably, both are presented as answers to the question ‘Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancients?’. The implied epochal distinction between an ancient and a modern public acknowledges the possibility that the ancient model of the public might no longer be viable, that the Greek forum as the central site for public deliberation among all the free citizens might no longer be the adequate venue for constituting an imagined community united in the service of a common good. And indeed, there are multiple reasons for making a sharp distinction between the ancients and the moderns mentioned by Herder, such as different constitutions and forms of governance, more complex governmental institutions requiring more expertise and the availability of print technology. By tying the question about the modern public to an inquiry about the fatherland, Herder quite explicitly relates the question of the public to a distinct identity based on an imagined community that

1

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), 120–35.

Public Space and the Public

17

transcends individual and particular interests but is shaped by the common love of the land or pride in its constitution, a pre-nation state nationalism or patriotism. Indeed, as I shall argue below, Herder’s essay in its first version belongs to a mid-eighteenth century discussion of the nature of the public that acknowledges its historical situation as one that is clearly defined by more or less enlightened versions of absolutism and deals with issues of patriotism in the pre-nation state context of the Seven Years War. My essay is divided into three segments that trace the evolution of Herder’s thinking about the public. I shall first focus on the initial context that shaped Herder’s concept of the public as being both a discursive construct and an imagined community transcending special interest for the sake of a common, higher good. The second and third sections will trace Herder’s more detailed probing of various cultural domains, the role of language and religion as opposed to art in forming a potentially highly unified and conformist or potentially critical public. In a very schematic, exaggerated way I would characterize this evolution as follows. In the first version of his essay, Herder begins by making the case for a public that constitutes itself as an inclusive group of citizens that are entitled to benefits from public institutions. This ideal public of the 1765 essay must be seen in opposition to the imagined community postulated by the populist writer Thomas Abbt who claimed that a willingness to die for the fatherland should provide the common focus. Whereas in this first version the public institutions and their concrete space is crucial for the self-understanding of this public, the second and much later version of the essay provides a sustained and fascinating analysis of the pros and cons of public gatherings in a common space. For the Herder of 1795, disillusioned with the course of events in the aftermath of the French Revolution, had developed a more critical position towards public gatherings: they can produce both conformism and the ability to imagine a public capable of critical thinking. Whether the outcome is one of conformism or critical thinking depends on the relationship to language. Like Tony Judt, Herder believes in the political importance of real public space. In contrast to Judt, however, Herder adds a critical dimension in his reflection on this in the second version of the essay. For according to Herder, it depends on the pragmatics of the speech situation whether the audience members are to be hailed as

18

Dorothea von Mücke

obedient participants or whether they can maintain a mental reservation and can decide on their own on the message they hear.

The Invocation of the Public One of the first texts on the possible meanings and uses of the term public (das Publikum) was published by Friedrich Carl von Moser (1723–98), who spent most of his professional life as a jurist, administrator and diplomat for Hesse Darmstadt. In a short essay about the concept of the ‘public’ published in 1750, he makes the point that the public is primarily a discursive construct by those in power who invoke it in order to hail their audience as their judge in posterity, as an impartial witness, or as supportive partisan or ignorant minor to be chastised or instructed in whatever way comes in handy for them, whenever they feel they need the support and good will of the people.2 In contrast to this rather cynical take on ‘the public’, in 1761, four years into the Seven Years War, the eloquent and ambitious Professor of Mathematics Thomas Abbt (1738–66) published what was to become a very popular pamphlet about ‘Dying for the Fatherland’. Abbt calls for the Prussians to support their monarch, to listen to the voice of their fatherland and to volunteer in the ongoing war. According to Abbt, it is such a common cause that will transcend the divisions between the estates and unite all as citizen soldiers. He quotes at length Pericles’ funeral oration and wonders who in a contemporary situation could issue that call to arms in support of a common cause, suggesting that in lieu of the kind of public forum the ancients had at their disposal, the modern situation 2

In this sense the term ‘das Publikum’ is not at all that different from what Keith Baker traces for France as the emerging relevance of public opinion during the ancien régime, also in England, in the seventeenth century. See Keith Michael Baker, ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 181–211.

Public Space and the Public

19

might need the assistance of preachers to reach out to the larger population in the call to volunteer for the patriotic cause. Though this gesture of enlisting the help of the pulpit in Abbt’s patriotic appeal aroused Friedrich Carl von Moser’s ire and bitter critique – and led him to accuse Abbt of being willing to instigate a civil war with this kind of warmongering that would make use of religious authorities – Moser’s criticism did not diminish Abbt’s popularity and success.3 When in 1766 the then only 28-year-old civilian Abbt suddenly died due to a medical complication he received the funeral honours of a hero, and the young Herder published an essay commemorating Abbt as a great philosopher capable of communicating his ideas to everybody.4 Herder’s essay from 1764 comparing ‘our’ modern public and fatherland to that of the ancients should be considered his response to Abbt’s question as to what kind of venue among the moderns could take up the

3

4

Most important for the study of the Seven Years War as the context for a first debate on models of patriotism is Hans-Martin Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland: Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 179–84. In the main part of his study Blitz investigates three ‘proto-nationalist’ discourses during the Seven Years War (1757–1763) and right after. He analyzes (1) the pamphlets and the official sermons in Berlin churches as well as sermons for the troops initiated by Frederick’s war publicity efforts during the early years of the war, both trying to reach out to the most diverse and wide audiences, (2) the public and prominent pro-Prussian promotion of patriotism by the scholar Thomas Abbt and the pastor Ortmann and their most vehement critic Karl Friedrich von Moser, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the private discussion of the war among scholars, critics and poets, such as the Berlin-based publicist Friedrich Nicolai, the cathedral secretary, canonicus and poet Johan Wilhelm Gleim from Halberstadt, the poet Johann Peter Uz, the poet Karl Friedrich Ramler, the influential Berlin philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the playwright and critic Lessing in their letters to each other, and (3) the actual literary productions by some of these poets and writers, ranging from Ewald von Kleist’s heroic poem Cißides und Pares and Gleim’s patriotic Grenadierlieder to Lessing’s play Philotas, Gleim’s versified version of Philotas and Johann Jakob Bodmer’s parody of Philotas, entitled Polytimet. See Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Über Thomas Abbts Schriften: Der Torso von einem Denkmaal an seinem Grabe errichtet’, in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. II (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 565–608.

20

Dorothea von Mücke

role of the ancient forum and voice the call of the fatherland to public service, to create a public and a community that would transcend social hierarchies and self-interest. Although the young Herder who wrote this essay had just arrived in Riga as the assistant preacher and teacher for the German-speaking Lutheran community of that Baltic city, he does not issue his call for a means to transcend particular interests from the pulpit. Instead, he makes it the occasion of focusing his attention on the public space and institution of Riga’s new courthouse. And although Herder mentions Abbt’s essay and points out that still today one can occasionally find this kind of patriotic zeal, he does not make the willingness to die for one’s fatherland the central uniting force. In fact, in 1764, the then just twenty-year-old Herder had moved from Königsberg to Riga in order to evade the possibility of military service in his native Prussia.5 Whereas for Abbt the different estates of society are brought together under one common cause – the ultimate sacrifice, the willingness to die for the fatherland like in ancient Greece – for Herder the situation in modern times is utterly different. In a relatively autonomous city like Riga, which was a seaport that formed part of the Hanseatic League and belonged to the Russian Empire since the victory of Peter the Great over Sweden, patriotic freedom means, according to Herder, something very different from what it meant for the ancient Greeks. It means the freedom to pursue one’s happiness in private life and to be successful in one’s trade. Moreover, patriotic zeal means less the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s fatherland than an altruistic engagement for the common good. Herder observes this kind of altruism especially in the civic spirit of judges and other officials, but also in that of the enlightened monarch Catherine. To a certain extent the young Herder seems to want to project and include himself among the ranks of those civic-minded officials who serve the common good and appeal to the audience of these public institutions. In that respect he resembles the horizontally mobile functionary of the colonial administration, exactly that kind of figure who, according to Benedict Anderson, was crucial in

5

See Michael Zaremba, Johann Gottfried Herder: Prediger der Humanität. Eine Biographie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 47.

Public Space and the Public

21

defining the kind of imaginary community that was formative for the first phase of nationalism, the Latin American independence movements of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century.6 Though Herder’s essay appeared in print in a small publication celebrating the new building, Herder writes as if his text were the written record of a speech delivered at the ceremonial opening of the new courthouse in Riga. Through the invocation of this festive speech act he turns his readers into witnesses of the inauguration of a whole new understanding of what it means to be a modern public: This temple will be consecrated as the home of what is most sacred, the refuge for the distressed, the sanctuary for prayers and services. This school will be a nursery for wisdom, virtue, and religion, the workshop of the wise and the philanthropists, the armoury for the state. Under this roof of charity meritorious old men will breathe calmly: here even misery shall find joy; here poor and rich shall smile. This court of law shall provide asylum for the oppressed, a refuge for weeping innocence, a seat of justice and an image of the supreme judge. – Who would not feel a sense of awe at the importance of such a mission?7

Herder enumerates an entire series of public institutions, the courthouse being just one of them, which care for the poor, the weak, for youth and old age, i.e. institutions that dispense pastoral care. Through this move the

6 7

See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised and extended edition (New York: Verso, 1991). ‘Dieser Tempel wird zur Wohnung des Allerheiligsten, zum Zufluchtsort der Bekümmerten, zum Heiligtum der Gebete und Gottesdienste eingeweihet. Diese Schule soll ein Pflanzgarten der Weisheit, Tugend, und Religion, die Werkstatt der Weisen und Menschenfreunde, die Rüstkammer für den Staat sein. Unter diesem Dach der Barmherzigkeit sollen verdienstvolle Greise Ruhe in ihrem Alter atmen: hier soll sich das Elend selbst freuen: hier sollen Arme und Reichtum lächeln. Dieser Ort des Gerichts soll eine Freistatt für den Unterdrückten, eine Zuflucht der weinenden Unschuld, ein Sitz der Gerechtigkeit und ein Bild des obersten Richters sein. – Wer fühlet nicht über die Wichtigkeit dieser Anordnungen einen heiligen Schauer.’ Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Haben wir noch jetzt das Publikum und Vaterland der Alten?’, Herder, Werke, vol. I (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 40–55: 40–1. All translations of Herder’s texts are my own.

22

Dorothea von Mücke

young preacher and teacher can fit into the ranks of those who are relevant and active for the public. Historically, the actual courthouse in Riga, apart from its function as courthouse, also served as town or guildhall, a function that Herder does not mention. Thus the German-speaking aldermen, key actors in the self-governance of this Hanseatic city who were recruited primarily from the local patricians, are not considered. A focus on these patricians in charge of the governance of the city would have led Herder to invoke an altogether different concept of the public, the ancient one of those wealthy and free to conduct the affairs of the community.8 Moreover, just as this ancient concept of the public is not taken into consideration, so also a more modern and familiar one, the one associated with the nation state, is not addressed. For in this first version of Herder’s essay we are not dealing with an imagined community based on a shared language. Instead of history, language, culture, or religion, what Herder considers a modern Publikum consists of a population that has the right to make use of institutions of public welfare and institutions ensuring the preservation of the common good. Only after the long panegyric on the institutions of public welfare does Herder come around to address the question about the difference between a modern and an ancient public and their respective types of patriotism. He notes that whereas the ancient public was actively involved in governance, a public of a democracy that met to decide and debate all matters of common relevance in the open, modern monarchies are being governed and administrated by specialists. Herder does not appear nostalgic towards the public of antiquity but points out that, for the ancients, there were plenty of occasions for abuse, of swaying the people with the force of rhetoric and of instrumentalizing the power of religion.

8

In this context see also Seyla Benhabib, ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas’, in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 73–98.

Public Space and the Public

23

The Role of Language and Religion in Shaping the Public It is only in the later essay that Herder pays attention to how language provides an important element in the creation of an imagined community, exactly like Benedict Anderson has claimed to be the case for the second phase of nationalisms, which Anderson associates with an ethnic nationalism. But – and this is what makes the second version of Herder’s essay so interesting – the focus on a common spoken language alone does not suffice. Whereas the ancient/modern distinction in the early essay is the one between ancient more simply administrated and governed democracies and modern more complex monarchies, in the essay from 1795 it becomes a media-technological one. According to Herder, the introduction of print technology means the creation of an altogether new kind of public, a public that will ultimately have free access to information and an end to the powers of censorship, but also a public that will not be manipulated by the force of rhetoric and the power of assembled crowds. It is thanks to print that the individual reader can withdraw and make up her or his own mind. Print culture provides the means to escape the pressure of assembled crowds and the power of rhetoric. This is how Herder characterizes the revolutionary benefits of print technology ushering in a point of no return: We cannot take back what has happened; print technology exists; it is not only a great economic resource for trade and labour, but it also is a trumpet for language, as far as its products can reach. All monarchs of this world, if they united their forces and stood in front of each print shop, would not be able to destroy this poor family in the printer’s letter case, this asylum and telegraph of human thoughts. And besides, who would want to destroy it? For alongside some evil it has also produced so much good. Moreover, due to its innocent but strong nature, it still will be the cause of more good in the future. The orator drowns me out; the writer speaks quietly and gently; I can read him thoughtfully. The orator dazzles me with his figure, his following and his fame; the writer remains invisible, and it is my fault if I am deceived

24

Dorothea von Mücke by his pompous words or if I waste my time with his babble; it is my task to examine him, and it is my prerogative to throw him away.9

Print, according to Herder, is an economically and politically important instrument that trumps the powers of the monarchies of this world; it empowers critical thinking against any kind of censorship. It frees the individual from being overwhelmed by the powers of rhetoric and it challenges the reader’s critical, responsible judgement. Indeed, Herder ultimately concludes his essay with an argument for imaginative print literature as the most effective and desirable resource for shaping the modern public in view of a common commitment to humanist values. And yet this does not sufficiently capture where the intellectual labour and the theoretical benefits of the essay lie. Although Herder conceives of the solitary, private reader in opposition to a gathered crowd, and he highlights the contrast between the reflective reader and revolutionary crowds or manipulated mobs on the side of the moderns and the public of antiquity, settling public affairs under the Greek sky in the forum, we must not reduce the essay to a pre/post print culture opposition. Nor does the essay oppose a culture of writing/reading to one of oral/aural communication. Instead, it deals with different ways in which real live audiences matter in the production of an imagined and projected

9

‘Was geschehen ist können wir nicht zurücknehmen; die Buchdruckerei ist da; nicht nur als Nahrungszweig für Handel und Arbeit, sondern als eine Tuba der Sprache, so weit dies oder jenes Produkt reichet. Alle Monarchen der Welt, wenn sie mit vereinten Kräften für jede Druckerstube träten, könnten die arme Familie dieses Letternkastens, das Asyl und den Telegraph menschlicher Gedanken nicht zerstören. Ja wer wollte es zerstören, da es, nebst einigem Bösen, so unsäglich viel Gutes gestiftet hat, und seiner unschuldigen aber kräftigen Natur nach notwendig noch stiften wird. Der Redner übertäubt mich; der Schriftsteller spricht leise und sanft; ich kann ihn bedächtig lesen. Der Redner blendet mich mit seiner Gestalt, mit seinem Gefolg und Ansehn; der Schriftsteller spricht unsichtbar, und es ist meine Schuld, wenn ich mich von seinem Wortprunk hintergehn, oder mir von seinem Geschwätz die Zeit rauben lasse; ich soll ihn prüfen, ich darf ihn wegwerfen.’ Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Haben wir noch jetzt das Publikum und Vaterland der Alten?’, Werke, vol. VII (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 301–38: 323.

Public Space and the Public

25

collectivity. Indeed, it is most interesting how Herder elaborates his discussion of pre-print culture for the second version of the essay. He differentiates between the culture of the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Romans, all of them ancient cultures that are still relevant for ‘us’ the Barbarians, i.e. Christians today. This is how Herder defines the public: What is a public? This is a very vague concept, which, if one brackets all of its idiosyncratic uses and abuses, appears to denote a common judgement, at least a majority of voices in the circle in which one speaks, writes or acts. There is a real and an ideal public; the former is the one that surrounds us in the present, which even if it doesn’t let us hear its voice at least would be able to do so; the ideal public is sometimes so dispersed, so far away, that no air wave from that distance or from the proximity can bring us the sound of its thoughts. Yet one imagines both kinds of public as a reasonable, moral being, which participates in our thoughts, in our speech, our actions, which can appreciate their worth and worthlessness, which can approve or disapprove, which we may in turn teach and correct, whose taste we may form and transform. We encourage, we warn; it is our friend and child, but also our teacher, critic, witness, plaintiff and judge.10

Herder’s model of a judging public, which can be entrusted with the important power to decide, is obviously influenced by the institution of

10

‘Was ist ein Publikum? Ein sehr unbestimmter Begriff, der, wenn man alle Eigenheiten des einzelnen Gebrauchs und Missbrauchs seiner Benennungen absondert, ein allgemeines Urteil, wenigstens eine Mehrheit der Stimmen in dem Kreise, in welchem man spricht, schreibet oder handelt, zu bezeichnen scheinet. Es gibt ein reales und ideales Publikum; jenes, das gegenwärtig um uns ist, und uns seine Stimme wo nicht zukommen lässt, so doch zukommen lassen kann; das ideale Publikum ist zuweilen so zerstreut, so verbreitet, dass kein Lüftchen uns aus der Entfernung oder aus der Nahwelt den Laut seiner Gedanken zuführen mag. Bei jeder Gattung des Publikums aber denkt man sich ein verständiges, moralisches Wesen, das an unsern Gedanken, an unserm Vortrage, – an unsern Handlungen Teil nimmt, ihrem Wert und Unwert zu schätzen vermag, das billiget oder missbilliget, das wir also auch zu unterrichten, eines bessern zu belehren, in Ansehung seines Geschmacks zu bilden und fortzubilden uns unterfangen dürfen. Wir muntern es auf, wir warnen; es ist uns Freund und Kind, aber auch Lehrer, Zurechtweiser, Zeuge, Kläger und Richter.’ Herder, Werke, vol. VII, 302.

26

Dorothea von Mücke

the court of law. It furthermore becomes clear that he envisages a public that decides by voting when he describes the voice of the public and uses the word Stimme both in the sense of the Latin vox (voice) but also in the sense of votum (vote) in the first part of the essay. For Herder, this kind of public represents a concrete example of a ‘reales Publikum’, a real public capable of speaking and acting. By contrast, Herder imagines the ‘ideales Publikum’ (the ideal public) as those who the speaker or writer anticipates or invokes. With the term ‘ideal’ Herder seems to designate less ‘the best hypothetical’ and more something like ‘virtual’, relating to ideas rather than ideals. The main difference between these two kinds of publics consists in the fact that a real public can actively react or respond although it is always subject to the physical limitations of time and space, whereas an ideal public in principle is unlimited and infinitely large. It is the sum total of all possible addressees, readers or listeners of an utterance. Each utterance hails a potential group of addressees both in the actual formulation (encouragement, warning, prohibition, etc.) and in its actual context-specific effect upon the audience (which then reacts with obedience, criticism, intimidation, etc.). Herder commences his discussion with a focus on the public of the Hebrews, which allows him to introduce the concept of an imagined community prior and anterior to an actual real public gathering and to address the question of how language can become the unifying force of a nation. The Hebrew of the Laws, Psalms and Prayers hails what Herder calls ‘a genetic individual’ beyond all existing borders, even in the diaspora. This is a public that is being admonished, commanded, encouraged, that is the subject of injunctions and promises beyond generational boundaries. For this kind of public the individual is always also the representative of the whole, and vice versa. But this unity of individual and whole is achieved at a great cost. As Herder points out, the religious rites, laws, commands and promises are all endowed with divine authority and the status of sacred scripture. They do not allow for the addressee to distinguish between hearing the message, the command, the promise, and applying, following or believing the message, command or promise. In other words, there is no way to separate the hearing from the obeying of the command and to say with

Public Space and the Public

27

Goethe’s Faust: ‘Die Botschaft hör ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube’ [I hear the message well but lack Faith’s constant trust].11 The contemporaneous German-speaking public, according to Herder, represents the diametrical opposite to the public of the Hebrews in that they use their language very differently. Those from a higher social standing often prefer to speak to each other in Italian or French and would use the vernacular only when addressing their servants. Though Herder introduces the Hebrews in order to criticize the fragmented nature of contemporary German culture, he does so not to suggest they adopt that contrasting model. Instead he introduces in the same paragraph another model, one of a living language in which all actively participate: My voice, as weak as it may be, still moves the waves of the ethereal ocean. Among the millions speaking and reading German, there will be some who can hear and understand me, were it only as many as Perseus claims for his audience, aut duo aut nemo; even those two, whether praising or criticizing, will propagate those waves. In the public of language even the nobody has ears; he learns from or through me, and continues to speak. And this public continues to expand as long as the language lasts, even with all its changes, until it ceases to be understandable.12

In contrast to the fixed language of Holy Scripture, the living, constantly changing vernacular is compared to an ocean that can integrate each individual speaker who can modify this entity and who is modified by this entity.

11

12

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Faust I’, Sämtliche Werke VII.1 (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 9–200: 45 (verse 765); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Parts One and Two, trans. George Madison Priest (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1955), line 765. ‘Meine Stimme, so schwach sie auch sei, bewegt auch Wellen dieses ätherischen Weltmeers. Von den Millionen die Deutsch reden und lesen, werden auch mich einige verstehen und hören, wären es nur so viel als Persius sich anmaßet, aut duo aut nemo; auch diese Zwei, lobend oder tadelnd, erregen ihre Wellen weiter. Im Publikum der Sprache hat sogar der Niemand ein Ohr; er lernt von oder an mir, und spricht weiter. Und dies Publikum breitet sich fort, so lange die Sprache, selbst mit Veränderungen, dauert, bis sie verständlich zu sein aufhöret.’ Herder, Werke, vol. VII, 304.

28

Dorothea von Mücke

Each speaker not only finds an audience or listeners, but also leaves traces in the medium, traces that will be picked up and that will continue to be transformed by others. The contrast between the interactive plasticity of this medium and the mosaic stone tablets could not be stronger. The political thrust of this image is clearly one directed towards the participation of all and everybody in the formation of the unifying unit. However, there is also a problem that becomes obvious with this image for the spoken vernacular as the grounds for a national unity. For if it is such a fluid medium, it lacks contours. And this is exactly what is addressed when Herder turns to the public of the Greeks.

Live and Virtual Publics of Art: The Function of Music and Imaginative Literature Herder’s implicit question when turning from the public of the Hebrews to the public of the Greeks can be made explicit: what are the conditions of the possibility of the imaginary unity if this unity is not to be achieved through the religious commitment to a sacred text? According to Herder, the most important contribution of the Greek model of a public lies in its invention of art as a radical secularizing intervention. However, the Greek public of art needs to be understood not only in contrast to the public of religion, as in the case of the Hebrews, but also in contrast to the public of politics and philosophy. For Herder’s remarks about politics and philosophy make the normative assumptions of his model of the public especially clear. Thus he points out that the political public of the Greeks does not even deserve to be mentioned, for this public is entirely dominated by the power of rhetoric and incapable of critical judgement. And just as detrimental would be a public of philosophy: this would be a philosophical school, an imaginary community marked by the adherence to a common ideology, which would amount to the perversion of the entire philosophical enterprise. Herder reminds his readers that:

Public Space and the Public

29

Still today we more or less agree with the Greek philosophical position with regard to the public; for whoever wants to be and become a philosopher has to do so on his own. The teacher confronts the student with the truth that he has to acquire on his own terms; for wisdom, like virtue and genius cannot be obtained from others. […] As long as there is human reason, there will be a hidden, quiet public of philosophy; but one should not expect to see this on the marketplace or in a school.13

The decisive formulation of this passage lies in the thought that the public of philosophy must not become visible; it must be found neither in a marketplace nor in a school. On the one hand Herder means by this that philosophy must not depend on the demands and tastes of its public. Moreover, through the distinction between a visible and an invisible public of philosophy, Herder makes the point that the practice of philosophy should not become a spectacle and a group enterprise. Apparently he fears that once the practitioners of philosophy identify themselves as part of a common enterprise, independent, critical thought gives way to the pressures of the group and the desire for conformity. Herder’s objection to the formation of philosophical schools provides a helpful foil for understanding his approach to the public of Greek art. For against this background art becomes the only domain that allows for a public that is visible and physically present to itself. The audience of a religious event has the status of participants, and in that sense is entirely different from the audience of a spectacle, of those who listen to a concert or observe the performance of a play. Only in the case of art – and this seems to be the great achievement of art – do we have, on the one hand, the de-pragmatization of a live event, and, on the other hand and as a result of the former, the possibility of an imaginative, playful self-reflexivity, i.e.

13

‘Wo also die Griechen standen, stehen wir in Ansehung des Publikums mehr und minder mit der Philosophie noch jetzt; jeder, der es sein kann und werden will, muss sich selbst zum Philosophen bilden. Der Lehrer hält ihm die Wahrheit vor, damit er sich solche autonomisch zueigne: denn Weisheit lässt sich so wenig, als Tugend und Genie von andern lernen. (…) Solange es Vernunft und Willen im Menschen gibt: so lange wird es ein verborgenes, stilles Publikum für Philosophie geben; nur erwarte man dieses nie sichtbar auf einem Markt, oder in einer Schule.’ Herder, Werke, vol. VII, 314.

30

Dorothea von Mücke

of an imagined community that is conscious of its imaginary component. As we have seen in the section on the public of the Hebrews, the power of religion is grounded in the identity of locution and perlocution as it is transmitted and practiced in the words of Holy Scripture. These two aspects of the speech act can be decoupled if the speech takes place in a situation that is free of any pressures to act and decide. For then the audience has the opportunity to hear a commandment without obeying, a promise without believing, an admonition without heeding the advice. This is the case when the attention of the public is shifted from the content to the form, from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ of the speech or representation. But how should we imagine that this shift of attention was introduced? How should a speech not only be perceived in view of its immediate impact but also enjoyed and criticised in view of its artistic, rhetorical, and technical choices? This is how Herder characterizes the inauguration of the domain of art: Poetry accompanied by music created and formed a Greek public in a more refined language and a more refined manner of thinking. The mythical names of Orpheus, Linus and Musaeus are with regard to their actual impact not mythical names: the form of their divine and human shapes, the melody of their verses and words of wisdom, the rhythmical progression of their sensations and images left an impression in the ear, the memory of the listeners, and went from mouth to mouth, finally even into the writings and habits of a later posterity. […] The Homeric hymns, songs and choral performances of all kinds, music and poetry competitions graced and enhanced each gathering of the people, each public game, each festive transaction of religion or the state. This is how a Greek public for poetry, soon also for prose emerged. […] This is how Greek theatre came into being, which in all of its diverse components presupposed the existence of a public, and which entertained a public.14

14

‘Poesie mit Musik begleitet erschuf und bildete sich ein Griechisches Publikum, in einer feineren Sprache, und einer feineren Gedankenweise. Die Fabelnamen Orpheus, Linus, Musäus sind in Absicht der Wirkung, die sie hinterließen, keine Fabelnamen: die Form ihrer Götter- und Menschengestalten, die Melodie ihrer Weisheitssprüche und Lehren, der rhythmische Gang ihrer Empfindungen und Bilder ward dem Ohr, dem Gedächtnis der Hörenden eingeprägt, und ging von Munde zu Munde, endlich auch in den Schriften und Gebräuchen auf die spätere Nachwelt. […] Die Hymnen der Homeriden, Lieder und Chorgesänge der verschiedensten Art, dichterische und

Public Space and the Public

31

According to Herder the audience of art was formed when music and poetry became part of religious or state ceremonies. The use of music signals a live performance in front of a gathered crowd. Furthermore, with the formulation ‘poetry accompanied by music’ Herder harks back to the typical eighteenth-century account of the development of language and the arts and sciences, such as Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746). According to this account, the deployment of music, dance and pantomime during religious or state ceremonies – meant to make the event more persuasive and more memorable – had the unintended side effect of opening up through this media-specific division of labour a new space for the imagination of the audience, a space that allowed for the focus on the means and techniques of representation and performance, a space that alerted the audience to a realm of a linguistically or artistically produced reality, a fabricated reality that might be counterfactual or merely made up.15 In other words, the use of artistic media during a religious ceremony allowed the gathered audience to imagine themselves also as observers of a virtual reality parallel to their actual reality, especially if one considers the repetitive nature of the live performance of a religious ritual. A critical public of art is created, which knows to appreciate and enjoy the success of the selection and performance of the spectacle with its different sensuous components. The possibility of distinguishing form from content introduces a certain de-pragmatization of the speech and performance situation and thus creates the condition for the emergence of the domain of art. Herder argues that the arts only come to blossom once there is an audience for them, and this he sees happening in Greece. Moreover, he sees the Greek arts, be it epic poetry, lyric poetry or, of course, Greek theatre, as always part of live performance, as part of the active public life of

15

musikalische Wettstreite zierten und kränzten jede Volksversammlung, jedes öffentliche Spiel, jede feierliche Religions- und Staatshandlung. So ward ein Publikum der Griechen für Poesie; bald auch für Prose. […] Auf diesem Weg entstand das Griechische Schauspiel, das allen seinen Teilen nach ein Publikum voraussetzte, und ein Publikum vergnügte.’ Herder, Werke, vol. VII, 307.’ See Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Paris: Ch. Houel, [1746] 1798).

32

Dorothea von Mücke

Greek culture. Yet Herder does not recommend a return to Greek public culture. Instead, he trusts in the possibility of the literary arts to create an ideal, i.e. virtual audience that has both a self-reflexive and a unifying dimension to it. And this possibility exists as soon as the domain of art has been created and given rise to imaginative literature. For different literary genres, according to Herder, have the inherent ability to hail an imagined community. Herder’s words: A hymn according to its genre requires a gathered crowd. The poet who does not see his audience will take heaven and earth, forests and rocks for listeners and witnesses. The voice of a lyric poet hails and creates an audience. The singer, even the historian of great events demands to gather a circle of men, women, youths and children around him, in whose ears and soul his accounts are to resound. They do not only open up to him a stage where he can earn their applause and his glory, but their minds are his arena, the stage, the goal and measure of his effect and reach. Only that scene that the epic poet describes such that it comes to live for the eyes of his listeners, such that even in the soul of the acting characters everything is made visible to their focused interest, is a true epic scene […].16

In this description of how different poetic genres create an imagined audience according to their respective imagined speech situations, more than the rhetorical figure of energeia is at stake. First of all, Herder points out the ability of poetic speech to create an audience where there is no real, actually gathered public. Then he turns to the epic poet who manages to let a verbal representation come to life in the imagination of his audience.

16

‘Ein Hymnus z.B. gehört seiner Natur nach für eine Versammlung. Der Dichter, der diese nicht um sich erblicket, nimmt Himmel und Erde, Wälder und Felsen zu seinen Zuhörern und Zeugen. Die Stimme eines Lyrischen Dichters rufet ein Publikum an und auf. Der Sänger, ja selbst der Geschichtsschreiber großer Begebenheiten fordert einen Kreis von Männern, Weibern, Jünglingen und Kindern um sich her, denen seine Begebenheiten im Ohr und Seele tönen. Sie öffnen ihm nicht etwa nur eine Bühne, auf der er in ihrem Beifall seinen ganzen Ruhm ernte, sondern ihre Gemüter selbst sind seine Arena, der Schauplatz, das Ziel, das Maß seiner Wirkung. Die Szene, die der Epische Dichter nicht also beschreibt, dass sie den Augen des Zuhörers sichtbar wird, also dass auch in der Seele der Handelnden mit gehaltenem Interesse alles vor seinen Augen vorgehet, ist keine Epische Szene […].’ Herder, Werke, vol. VII, 309.

Public Space and the Public

33

It is important that this scenario of an audience created and hailed by the speech of the poet does not invoke an individual listener or audience member but an entire circle of listeners. This audience is not united as a group of connoisseurs, rather they are a unified people/Volk, not in the sense of an ethnic group, but in the sense of a trans-generational group that is not divided by occupation, estate or class barriers, for what unites them is their common humanity, and this humanity becomes graspable in the joint understanding of the power of human language that consists in actively constructing and shaping reality. (‘They do not only open up to him a stage where he can earn their applause and his glory, but their minds are his arena, the stage, the goal and measure of his effect and reach.’)17 In that sense the public of art and literature is a public that never merely stands for just one nation but instead it stands metonymically for humanity at large. We have seen how Herder makes a live performance, the public ceremony accompanied by music, the necessary condition for creating a public of art and for creating and separating off the domain of the different arts. But once the arts have come into existence, he argues, they can also survive without an actual, real, live audience. Then the literary arts, the arts of imaginative literature, live on for an ideal or virtual audience, which only becomes larger once there is print technology. In contrast to the public of the stage, the public of literature is an ‘ideal public’, the community of all thinking human beings. The public of literature is transnational – it is capable of providing a critical counterweight to all possible state constitutions. In contrast to the secret societies of the Enlightenment, it is a public that is in general open to all (and sundry). For Herder the public of literature is a public that is exclusively committed to the ideals of humanity. It is decidedly not tied to one language or one nation. At this point it is possible to summarize the key features of Herder’s concept of a public. First of all, it is striking that all of his considerations 17

For Herder’s philosophy of language see his ‘Über den Ursprung der Sprache’, Werke, vol. I (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 695–810. For the artist’s ability to present his audience with the human capacity of world-making through human language see also Herder’s ‘Shakespear’, Werke, vol. II (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 498–521.

34

Dorothea von Mücke

of a public are gained in view of the real and imagined community created in different kinds of speech situations, be they bound to time and space, or mediated by writing and print and hence possibly independent from the actual presence of the speakers and addressees. What Herder excludes from his discussion is a public that is engaged in an uncensored, potentially polemical deliberation over issues, exactly that kind of public that one would find in Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ essay or also in Lessing’s carefully staged theological debates.18 This kind of public, at least in the eighteenth century, is a public modelled on the practices of the republic of letters. For Herder a critical public is not the one modelled on conflict, debate and deliberation, but one where each member is capable of taking a distance and reflecting on what is being said or shown, as it is also a public that does not use its own crowds to enforce any kind of conformism. But in contrast to much that has been said about Herder’s influence on nineteenth-century nationalisms, Herder’s public is also ultimately – in view of what he envisages for Germany – not exclusively a linguistically based imagined community. One must keep apart his concept of different kinds of publics from his concept of the people or folk (Volk) and from his concept of nation (Nation).19 We have seen how Herder insists on the

18 19

See Dorothea von Mücke, ‘Authority, Authorship, and Audience: Enlightenment Models for a Critical Public’, Representations 111/1 (2010), 60–87. For a recent study of Herder’s concepts of ‘Volk’ and ‘Nation’ with regard to the question of language, territory and law, and Herder’s rejection of multinational units, see Karol Sauerland, ‘Herders Auffassung von Volk und Nation’, in Maja Razbojnikova-Frateva, Hans-Gerd Winter, eds, Interkulturalität und Nationalkultur in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Bamberg: Thelem, 2006), 21–34. For a most thorough and differentiated overview of Herder’s concept of ‘Volk’, including its reception in German philosophy and political thought throughout the nineteenth century see Ulrich Gaier, ‘Herders Volksbegriff und seine Rezeption’, in Tilman Borsche, ed, Herder im Spiegel der Zeiten: Verwerfungen der Rezeptionsgeschichte und Chancen einer Relektüre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 32–57. Gaier shows that whereas Herder uses the singular Volk in a general anthropological fashion in order to denote an ancient, un-spoilt relationship that connects a collectivity to its language and cultural roots, the plural Völker is used in order to denote the different stages this original relationship towards a more natural relationship to

Public Space and the Public

35

decoupling of religion from the state and from language. And there is nowhere the assumption of an ethnic identity as the base of the nation; if anything, he makes it very clear in the passage on the fatherland that it is the pride in the constitution of a nation and the responsibility towards the future that should define this community.20 Although the imagined community of literature and art Herder envisages for Germany is one that needs a more thorough commitment to a unified common vernacular, it will have to trust and build on the shared values of humanity in the public of literature, which will always have to include literature from other times and cultures, i.e. literatures in translation.21 human language and culture will undergo throughout the course of history, which will be reflected in folksongs and folktales. ‘Nation’, by contrast, means always the historically, geographically specific relationship of one collectivity to its linguistic and cultural roots. The task of each nation is to aim at the development of the full human potential for each and all of its members. In conjunction with this article see also Ulrich Gaier’s discussion of Herder’s notion of Humanität in the context of his anthropological assumptions and his philosophy of history: Ulrich Gaier, ‘Humanität als Aufgabe: Physis als Norm bei Johann Gottfried Herder’, in Manfred Beetz, Jörn Garber, and Heinz Thoma, eds, Physis und Norm: Neue Perspektiven der Anthropologie im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 13–28. According to Gaier, Herder emphasizes in his philosophy of history, on the one hand, the decrease and decline of a primal, natural relationship of man to nature, and on the other hand, man’s increasing capacity for progress and world making, which compensates for the loss of natural, primal bonds to nature. Finally, there is also each individual’s capacity for self-perfection grounded in the physical, concrete circumstances and the human being’s defining capacity to transcend these by working with them as a concrete, embodied, sensing and feeling creature. 20 Herder is, however, opposed to multinational units. See Sauerland, ‘Herders Auffassung von Volk und Nation’. Herder is also opposed to any unifying teleological concept of progress. For a study of Herder as the critic of the traditional notion of ‘translatio imperii’ as well as later teleological concepts, and instead as an advocate of the diversity of individual cultures see Aleida Assmannn, ‘Herder zwischen Nationalkulturen und Menschheitsgedächtnis’, Saeculum 52/I (2001), 41–54. 21 In this context see also the essay by Helmut Schneider, which examines Herder’s appeal to the ‘invisible church’ as it takes off from Lessing’s freemason dialogues ‘Ernst und Falk’, in contrast to Friedrich Schlegel’s reception of the same text by Lessing. Schneider analyzes the various concepts and practices of sociability implied

36

Dorothea von Mücke

Finally, it is important to note that the post-French Revolution Herder of the 1795 version of the essay does not advocate a vague universalism.22 He points out that while we might think we can speak as representatives of humanity at large, all speakers are limited by how they can concretely imagine their audiences. An all-too generalizing claim will reveal the very limited parochial knowledge of the speaker: Based on the experiences of one’s own country and city one commonly speaks for all of Christianity, Europe, the World, posterity, imagining those entities always as a mystical person or gathering, an enlightened or to be enlightened collectivity. In order to escape from all the misunderstandings that arise from this confusion, it is necessary to determine exactly the horizon, and to distinguish between different times and different peoples with regard to any question that might be asked about a public.23

The reminder of how imagined communities are always also extrapolations of real communities brings us back to the earlier version of Herder’s essay. It is in the context of commemorating the inauguration of the new courthouse of Riga that Herder insists on the power of public institutions

22

23

by Lessing and then Friedrich Schlegel and Herder, and points out the degree to which Herder in his 57th Humanitätsbrief (where he explicitly refers to the Lessing text), distances himself from all kinds of live communities exclusively in favour of the imagined community of the readers of print: Helmut Schneider, ‘Die un­sichtbare Kirche der Schriftsteller: Geselligkeit und Bildung zwischen Aufklärung und Frühromantik (Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel, Herder)’, in Anja Ernst and Paul Geyer, eds, Die Romantik: Ein Gründungsmythos der Europäischen Moderne (Göttingen: Bonn University Press, 2010), 145–65. For an essay comparing Kant’s and Herder’s concepts of ‘Humanität’ in view of today’s debate about universality in the context of anti-colonialism see Bernd Fischer, ‘Von der Moral zur Kultur: Kant und Herder’, Acta Germanica: German Studies in Africa, 37 (2009), 107–17. ‘Aus Erfahrung seiner Landes- und Stadtwelt spricht man gemeiniglich für die Christenheit, für Europa, für Welt und Nachwelt, an denen man sich immer eine mystische Person oder Versammlung, eine aufgeklärte oder aufzuklärende Gemeinheit denket. Um allen aus dieser Verwirrung entspringenden Mißverständnissen zu entweichen, wird’s also nötig sein, jedesmal den Gesichtskreis zu bestimmen, und in Absicht jeder Frage, die an ein Publikum gelangt, Zeiten und Völker zu unter­ scheiden.’ Herder, Werke, vol. VII, 303.

Public Space and the Public

37

to bring together a very mixed group of people in one concrete physical public space. We would have the public of all the people entitled to the benefits of public institutions – a notion of the public that I introduced with regard to Tony Judt’s insistence on the importance of the local institutions of the public sector. In the second version of the essay the concern with a common, uniting interest is shifted to a focus on the contours and shape of different publics, on their identity and self-understanding, since publics are constituted differently, be it through the total subjection to a divine authority in the case of religion, or through ideological conformism in the case of dominant philosophical schools, and finally through the public of print, of schools and universities, and of literature and art. Concrete space in which a live audience can gather matters for Herder’s second essay as to what kind of stage it provides for the audience to generate an image of itself, be it one of a homogenized or heterogeneous group of people, one of mere unreflecting participants or critical listeners and observers. The way in which Herder draws attention to both the importance of real time and space and virtual reality when it comes to the political dimension of the construction of imagined communities is probably more relevant to a reader of the twenty first century than to the reader of the mid-twentieth century when Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere made its first appearance.24 The Arab Spring depended on the interrelationship of social media and the gathering of real people in real spaces. It offers an important recent example of why the political implications of modern media technologies – be they those of print or electronic media in the age of the Internet – cannot be derived from the essentialist approach of a technological determinism. The pragmatics of distinct cultural domains such as religion or the arts must be considered as well, especially (if we agree with Herder’s analysis) because they provide a basis for analysing different media and understanding the real and virtual dimensions of a public’s self-image.

24 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

38

Dorothea von Mücke

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, rev. and ext. edn (New York: Verso, 1991). Assmann, Aleida, ‘Herder zwischen Nationalkulturen und Menschheitsgedächtnis’ [Herder between National Cultures and the Memory of Humanity], Saeculum 52/I (2001), 41–54. Baker, Keith Michael, ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 181–211. Benhabib, Seyla, ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 73–98. Blitz, Hans-Martin, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland. Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert [Out of Love for the Fatherland. The German Nation in the 18th Century] (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 179–84. Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines [Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge] (Paris: Ch. Houel [1746] 1798). Fischer, Bernd, ‘Von der Moral zur Kultur: Kant und Herder’ [From Morality to Culture: Kant and Herder], in Acta Germanica. German Studies in Africa, Vol. XXXVII (2009), 107–17. Gaier, Ulrich, ‘Herders Volksbegriff und seine Rezeption’ [Herder’s Concept of ‘Volk’ and its Reception], in Tilman Borsche, ed., Herder im Spiegel der Zeiten. Verwerfungen der Rezeptionsgeschichte und Chancen einer Relektüre (Munich: Fink Verlag, 2006), 32–57. , ‘Humanität als Aufgabe. Physis als Norm bei Johann Gottfried Herder’ [Humanity as a Task. Physis as a Norm in Johann Gottfried Herder], in Manfred Beetz, Jörn Garber and Heinz Thoma, eds, Physis und Norm. Neue Perspektiven der Anthropologie im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2007), 13–28. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Sämtliche Werke 7.1 (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994). , Faust I & II: Goethe’s Collected Works, trans. Stuart Atkins, intro. David Wellbery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Herder, Johann Gottfried, Werke (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000).

Public Space and the Public

39

Judt, Tony, Ill Fares the Land (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010). Mücke, Dorothea von, ‘Authority, Authorship, and Audience: Enlightenment Models for a Critical Public’, Representations 111/1 (2010), 60–87. Sauerland, Karol, ‘Herders Auffassung von Volk und Nation’ [Herder’s Understanding of ‘Volk’ and Nation], in Maja Razbojnikova-Frateva and Hans-Gerd Winter, eds, Interkulturalität und Nationalkultur in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Bamberg: Thelem, 2006), 21–34. Schneider, Helmut, ‘Die unsichtbare Kirche der Schriftsteller: Geselligkeit und Bildung zwischen Aufklärung und Frühromantik (Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel, Herder)’ [The Authors’ Invisible Church: Sociability and Education between Enlightenment and Early Romanticism (Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel, Herder)], in Anja Ernst and Paul Geyer, eds, Die Romantik: Ein Gründungsmythos der Europäischen Moderne (Göttingen: Bonn University Press, 2010), 145–65. Zaremba, Michael, Johann Gottfried Herder. Prediger der Humanität. Eine Biographie [ Johann Gottfried Herder. Preacher of Humanity. A Biography] (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2002).

Susanne Lüdemann

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

The considerations I am going to put forward take their starting point from the significance of the social imaginary for the constitution and stabilization of political bodies.1 In particular, political bodies need fundamental narratives, social metaphors and self-dramatizations in which they represent themselves. Naturally, to talk of a political body is already in itself fundamentally metaphorical, whether it is called the corpus rei publicae, the body politic, the corps collectif or referred to by any of the other designations that have been applied in the course of European history. It is metaphorical insofar as these expressions are supposed to represent the social whole – the unity of a national or communal entity – as the unity of a natural body. The representative in which the social whole became visible and sensibly manifest was, for long stretches of Western history and in the Christian sphere, the body of the king – the sovereign’s body.2 This situation changes radically during the French Revolution, and especially after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. How does a society which both executed its king and did away with the principle of monarchical representation as such – how does such a society represent its unity to itself? Which methods does it employ to find alternative ways to embody sovereignty? The history of fraternity (or brotherhood) as a social metaphor began long before the French Revolution. At the latest, it begins with the New

1 2

For the larger context, see Susanne Lüdemann, Albrecht Koschorke, Thomas Frank and Ethel Matala de Mazza, Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2006). Cf. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) and the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.

42

Susanne Lüdemann

Testament, in which Christian fellow believers are referred to as brothers, or adelphoi, and the Christian community is called philadelphia. It takes us well beyond the French Revolution as well, and into the present day. If, in what follows, I limit myself to (post)revolutionary fraternity in France, I have two reasons for doing so. First, I want to deal here with a manageable amount of material. Second, brotherhood – fraternité – was treated by the French Revolution for the first time as an explicitly political model. Fraternity as a political model means that it is a model for the whole. It is not a model limited to the church, but acts as a model for the state – and not just any state, but a state which attempts to represent itself as a community of the free and the equal as it renounces the patriarchal system of the Ancien Régime. The following, then, takes the form of a historical case study out of which I hope to gain, despite its particularity, a systematic perspective of ‘fraternity’ as a structural model of the political in modernity. In order to understand what is at stake, it is important firstly to reemphasize the moment of renunciation of the Ancien Régime and the body of the king. The destruction of the old society was accompanied by the process of a dis(in)corporation (or de-incarnation) and desymbolization of the social. As Claude Lefort describes it, with reference to Kantorowicz: The society of the Ancien Régime represented its unity and its identity to itself as that of a body – a body which found its figuration in the body of the king, or rather which identified itself with the king’s body, while at the same time it attached itself to it as its head. […] The democratic revolution, for so long subterranean, burst out when the body of the king was destroyed, when the body politic was decapitated and when, at the same time, the corporeality of the social was dissolved. There then occurred what I would call a ‘disincorporation’ of individuals.3

With the execution of the king, the corporative model of integration characteristic of Old Europe, which had found its unifying principle in the person of the king, becomes obsolete. In its place, new collective actors 3

Claude Lefort, ‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism’, in John B. Thompson, ed., The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 292–306: 302–3.

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

43

begin to establish themselves, following, as it were, a logic of negative embodiment. (This is something that Marcel Gauchet, also with reference to Kantorowicz, has demonstrated.) One can refer to what happens as a logic of negative embodiment because these new actors occupy the seat of power only insofar as they remove the original occupant, the king, and set up a precarious form of placeholdership in its stead. They do nothing other than ‘to represent a power which is itself vacant, a blank mirror of a society unable to recognize itself in its own mirror image precisely because this image does not reveal a human face’.4 What once could be located in the tension between the two bodies of the king, the natural and the symbolic, the visible and the invisible ones, became, at the end of the monarchical epoch, the ‘decisive threshold between a power possessed by a person and a power which is, by its very nature, impersonal.’ This latter is a power ‘resistant to occupation by any individual, figurable as if in role-play, but even this only in a makeshift way’.5 Through the abolition of the monarchy and the beheading of the king during the French Revolution, there emerged a vacuum of power and, at the same time, an imaginary vacuum as well, an imageless space which caused the potential republic to appear abstract and lifeless. No one understood this better than Edmund Burke, who, with a clear-sightedness inspired by his hostility toward the French Revolution, described the deficit in the imaginary of the republic in the following words: All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be weeded out as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

4 5

Marcel Gauchet, ‘Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps: Christianisme et politique’, Le débat 14 (1981), 133–57, and 15 (1981), 147–68: 147–8. Ibid., 148.

44

Susanne Lüdemann On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place. These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of poems is equally true as to states: – Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto [It is not enough for poems to be beautiful; they must also be sweet, and divert the mind of the listener]. There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-informed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.6

When Burke complains of the loss of ‘pleasing illusions’ and ‘super-added ideas’ which had made the fatherland ‘lovely’ and through this had attached the individual to the commonwealth by way of devotion, he is not only speaking as a representative of many of his contemporaries. He articulates a problem of representation which is associated with the democratic form to this day. Since democracy must leave the seat of authority empty, it is simply and baldly true that democratic ‘institutions can never be embodied in persons’ without undermining their own essential principles. If before, in the old order, it was by way of the body of the king (or the royal ‘family scene’) that the individual could identify with the social whole, transferring ‘the sentiments which beautify and soften private life’ to the state, the question arises as to whether and how the new order can replace the old model of embodiment. How can it win the social love (the ‘affection’, as Burke says) of its citizens, which even a democratic commonwealth cannot do without? It was a goal of the French revolutionaries from the very beginning, then, to fill the imaginary vacuum created by the dissolution of the monarchy. The politics of revolution is always also a politics of images which

6 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 66–7.

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

45

has the goal of giving the republic a visibly impressive form. Because of this, it becomes clear very quickly, at the level of the imaginary, that an absolute ‘fresh start’ is impossible in politics. What Alexis de Tocqueville established for public administration – that the continuity of administrative practices continues through the apparent rupture caused by the Revolution and allows the new state to appear as a continuation of the old7 – appears to be true at least to a certain degree also of its self-portrayal in political narratives, by way of historical costumes, and in ceremonies and festivals. Although (or precisely because) the body of the king remains the abject of the new political order – the abject in the sense of the ‘included excluded’ –, the ‘pleasant illusions’ and ‘super-added ideas’ of the republic do not detach themselves form the sphere of the corporeal and the familial as the (imaginary) foundations of society. The body of the king is superseded, admittedly, by the body of the nation; the ‘fatherliness’ of the monarch in relation to his subjects is replaced by the ‘brotherliness’ of man to his fellows. However, fraternity, like descent, points beyond the real political sphere of the republic to a pre-political imaginary sphere which, as it was in the Ancien Regime, remains characterized by the values of common descent and biological relation. Even if the republic’s political foundational narrative is the story of the social contract, and thus the basic model of the new society is the conclusion of contract by an undetermined number of single, independent, self-empowered individuals, this model remains ethnocentrically and androcentrically limited through the primary values of descent and fraternity – which, as a consequence, also become increasingly affectively laden. In the end, both foreigners and women remain excluded from the republic’s band of brothers. On the day on which the monarchy was abolished (September 21, 1792), Interior Minister Roland declared to the public authorities that ‘republic’ and ‘brotherhood’ were one and the same (Veuillez, Messieurs,

7

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. John Bonner (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), Book II, ch. II, 50 ff.

46

Susanne Lüdemann

proclamer la République, proclamez donc la fraternité, ce n’est qu’une même chose).8 Just like liberty and equality, fraternity (brotherhood) belongs to the synonyms of the republic, but, in contrast to the former, fraternity has never been institutionalized. While liberty or freedom (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to own property, etc.) and equality (equality before the law) belong to the constitutionally guaranteed basic rights of the individual in his relationship to the state, fraternity refers to the social practice, the relationship of citizens, one to the other, in which these rights should be maintained. The liberty and equality of all is to be recognized, represented, in brief, embodied, in this social practice. One can thus say that fraternity interprets the other two concepts, that it is fraternity which indicates the direction in which liberty and equality are to be implemented: ‘In the triad of‚ liberty, equality and fraternity, fraternity was the pace setter. The political freedom and equality of the “citoyens” was to be realized by virtue of fraternity’s unifying power.’9 It would be premature, therefore, to conclude that the absence of fraternity in the legal texts decreases its importance in the republic’s political imaginary. Outside official communiqués, fraternity is present everywhere as a political model. It is the name for the social affection which is meant to bind the citizens of the Marianne Republique to one another and to their commonwealth; it is the central term of a civil religion which is supposed to turn the social bond into ‘more’ than just a contract – a ‘super-added idea’ (Burke) and a ‘non-juridical scene of law’ (Peter Goodrich) at the same time.10

See the entry ‘Brüderlichkeit’, written by Wolfgang Schieder, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe I, ed. Reinhard Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), 552–81: 565. 9 Ibid. 10 Burke’s definition of ‘super-added ideas which overtake the heart and of which even the understanding approves, since it needs them in order to cover over our naked, fragile nature and to elevate man in his own estimation’, matches republican brotherhood almost exactly. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 66. It is brotherhood which makes the citizens see more than ‘just a man’ in their fellow man (if they are 8

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

47

In this sense, the constitution of 1791 only mentions fraternity in order to assign it an extra-legal status, which, however, links it to the festival and to the project of national education at the same time: ‘Il sera établi des fêtes nationales pour conserver le souvenir de la Révolution française, entretenir la fraternité entre les citoyens, et les attacher à la Constitution, à la Patrie et aux lois.’11 Fraternity is not simply a gift of nature, the natural intimacy, familiarity and propinquity of equals within a community recently freed from sovereign rule. It is something which must be ‘maintained’ or ‘kept upright’ (entretenu): in the new order, collective rituals of remembrance and national ceremonies are also necessary so that ‘the sensibilities which beautify and soften private life’ can ‘be transferred to political relations in the new, enlightened commonwealth’ (Burke). If ‘the anthropological schema of the family is doing all the work here’,12 if it is the values of common ancestry and an allegedly ‘natural’ affection which are invoked in the name of fraternity, consciousness remains of the fact that fraternity beyond the family is an elected (and therefore rescindable) connection which must be demonstrated and authenticated in order to exist. There is no natural sign which establishes others as brothers in relation to myself (frater semper incertus est, as one could say in a slight modification of the Roman principle pater semper incertus est). That name and affect are not constrained to converge in the case of the brother applies even in the case of the physical or biological brother: ‘The relation to the brother engages from the start with the order of the oath, of credit, of belief and of faith. The brother is never a fact.’13

11

12 13

at the same time opposed to seeing ‘more than a man’ in the figure of the king). In their fellowman they see a ‘blood brother’, a relative, a friend. ‘National festivals shall be instituted to preserve the memory of the French Revolution, to maintain fraternity among the citizens, and to bind them to the Constitution, the Patrie, and the laws.’ ‘La Constitution de 1791’, Titre premier: ‘Dispositions fondamentales garanties par la Constitution’, in Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970), 1–106: 37. Trans. LSG. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), 263. Ibid., 159.

48

Susanne Lüdemann

Brotherhood as a political model thus doubles or repeats the paradoxes which already distinguish the concept of ‘nation’. The ‘nation’ must be politically constructed, authenticated through signs and ‘upheld’ through public ceremonies. It achieves this only, however, insofar as it is imagined at the same time as the pre-political ground of the political. Also in the case of brotherhood, then, the question of affiliation arises. When one doesn’t simply become a brother qua social contract, one had to have been a brother already, on the one hand (even without knowing it or ‘remembering’ it), and, on the other hand, an active form of fraternization is necessary to make the latent brotherhood manifest and to differentiate the brother from the non-brother. To the extent that brotherhood becomes the regulative idea of the political, it moves between the poles of universal inclusion (‘All men become brothers’, as Beethoven’s famous Ode to Joy has it) and the particularity of an ancestral or ‘spiritual’ community. This polarity between universal brotherhood, on the one hand, and an exclusive, self-contained brotherhood, on the other, had already been a mark of the Christian term of brotherhood. The French Revolution also passes through both extremes, whereby it is precisely the claim to universality in the Revolution which ultimately leads to the exclusion of increasingly large segments of the population from the ‘general’ fraternization. The dream of the ‘borderless state Philadelphia’, in which all men form a single family, is paradoxically accompanied by the gradual elimination of those who do not want to or cannot comply with this universal concord. The king is removed first, the aristocrats follow, and they are joined, in the end, by a colourful array of ‘traitors’ who do not share the ideals of the Revolution. The ritual which separates the wheat from the chaff, the original scene which binds brotherhood to a source and, simultaneously, locates its promise in the mist of an uncertain future, is the citizens’ oath. As the brothers’ anagnorisis and, at the same time, a secular sacrament, the citizens’ oath forms the climax of all revolutionary celebrations. It is the act of fraternization as such. It creates ‘the indissoluble bond between which

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

49

men contracted with one another and which they would make the starting point of a new alliance.’14 All those who resist or remove themselves from this publicly staged self-dedication are consigned to oblivion or condemned to death. Insofar as the oath serves ‘to create a connection between power and the individual conscience’ and thereby to close ‘the gap between the state and the private sphere, between politics and morals’,15 it clearly differs from the social contract as juridical origin of the republic. While the social contract grounds the freedom of the individual especially as religious freedom and freedom of conscience within the scope of law, the citizens’ oath, as initiation into the mystical body of the republic, restricts this freedom again. The citizens’ oath is concerned with a ‘sacralization of politics, the emergence of a state which found, in the mystical-patriotic initiation, the possibility to unite individual conscience and power in the Jacobin spirit of the new democracy.’16 Jean-Paul Sartre recognized the ‘terrorist’ aspect of revolutionary brotherhood in the individual’s unconditional surrender to the collective through the oath.17 If the origin of the oath is, as he says, an anxiety that the group will dissolve, the oath must create the fraternal community of equals by acting on each individual as a violent power: ‘To swear is to say, as a common individual: you must kill me if I secede.’18 As soon as the danger of secession from the common cause threatens (and in the wake of the oath, in reality that means: always), ‘every third 14 15 16 17

18

Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virgina, 1982), 101. Paolo Prodi, Das Sakrament der Herrschaft: Der politische Eid in der Verfassungsgeschichte des Okzidents (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1997), 393; trans. LSG. Ibid., 396; trans. LSG. In order to emphasize the simultaneous origin of brotherhood and terror, Sartre makes use of the term ‘Fraternité-Terreur’, an expression difficult to render in English, but which might be translated as ‘brotherhood of terror’. Since the French word terreur means at once the active to terrorize and the passive to be terrified, Sartre’s expression paints each brother as perpetrator and victim of brotherhood at the same time. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (New York: Verso, 1976), 431.

50

Susanne Lüdemann

party produces himself for everyone else as the one who passes sentence in the name of the group and who then carries out the sentence (or, conversely, as the one on whom the sentence will be executed by everyone else).’19 The republican band of brothers also becomes, in this way, ‘more’ than the mere sum of its parts: it constitutes itself as a social third (the big Other), which each member represents in relation to the others and in relation to himself (as the little other). In the absence of a transcendental reinsurance of the social bond (in God or the king), the oath creates a type of transcendence immanent to society: ‘transcendence is present in the pledged group as the absolute right of all over every individual. […] Thus, God or the Cross [to which one still sometimes refers] do not add anything to this character which is, so to speak, for the first time in history, the positing of man as the absolute power of man over man (in reciprocity).’20 Since, however, the oath first establishes this reciprocity, it creates or produces the very same brotherhood (as ‘family likeness’) which, at the same time, it pretends merely to ensure. It is only the presence of the social third in ‘each of us’ which allows me to recognize my brother in the other: We are the same (les mêmes) because we emerged from the clay at the same date, through each other and through all the others, and so we are, as it were, an individual species, which has emerged at a particular moment through a sudden mutation; but our specific nature unites us in so far as it is freedom. In other words, our common being (être commun) is not an identical nature in everyone. On the contrary, it is a mediated reciprocity of conditionings: in approaching a third party, I do not recognise my inert essence as manifested in some other instance; instead I recognise my necessary accomplice in the act which removes us from the soil: my brother, whose existence is not other than mine approaches me as my existence and yet depends on mine as mine depends on his (through everyone) in the irreversibility of free agreement. […] He and I are brothers. And this fraternity is not based, as is sometimes stupidly supposed, on physical resemblance expressing some deep identity of nature. If it were, why should not a pea in a can be described as the brother of another pea in the same can? We are brothers insofar as, following the creative act of the pledge, we are our own sons, our common creation.21 19 Ibid., 432. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 436–7.

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

51

With unsurpassed precision, this phenomenological analysis of brotherhood (which at the same time participates in its pathology) expresses the phantasm of a homosocial autopoiesis which constitutes, perhaps, an ‘immutable essence’ of brotherhood. Autopoietic, because the brothers act as each other’s midwives and, through the creative act of the oath, become their own sons; homosocial, because they are brothers (not sisters, daughters, women or simply ‘anybody’), who together wrest themselves from the motherly ‘clay’ of their ‘native soil’. The entity that emerges is, admittedly, unstable: first because it must itself act as its own social third and is thus barred from embodying itself in an ‘exceptional’ person or group of persons; second because it forbids internal differentiation, and thus cannot recognize any gradation between subjugation and betrayal, love and hate, symbiosis and civil war. The ‘obsessive fixation on the oath’ (Mona Ozouf ) during the French Revolution is thus also due to the need to create that visual and affective evidence for the fraternal body of the republic which alone can guarantee its continuity.22 As political ritual, the oath stands in this respect in direct opposition to the vote. Where the free and secret vote threatens to dissolve the social body into a multiplicity of individual ‘voices’ / ‘votes’ each time,23 the oath gathers all voices into a single speech act. This speech act is meant to connect the individual irrevocably to the community.

22 23

Mona Ozouf, ‘Fraternity’, in Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 694–703. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the idea that the ‘individuals might become entities that would have to be counted in universal suffrage’ appeared ‘absurd, even monstrous, not only to conservatives, but to many liberals.’ According to Claude Lefort, ‘the relentless struggle to combat the idea of universal suffrage is not only the indication of a class struggle. The inability to conceive of this suffrage as anything other than a dissolution of the social is extremely instructive. The danger of numbers is greater than the danger of an intervention by the masses on the political scene; the idea of number as such is opposed to the idea of the substance of society. Number breaks down unity, destroys identity.’ Lefort, ‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism’, 303.

52

Susanne Lüdemann

The citizens’ oath was taken for the first time during the General Federation on 14 July 1790. Those gathered on the Champ de Mars swore solemnly to consider themselves as one, united as ‘French’ from that point on, connected by the indissoluble bond of brotherhood (de demeurer unis à tous les Français par les liens indissolubles de la fraternité). The oath ensures not only the unity of all members of the nation, but it strives for the abolition of privileges and class differences as well. The brotherhood of social equals is meant to take the place of the ‘sonship’ each subject experienced in relation to the nation’s ‘father’. The horizontal form of association through mutually-pledged vows of solidarity should replace the vertical model of aristocratic clientele. The constitution of 1791 stipulates that each ‘active citizen’ is bound to swear the citizens’ oath. In order to be an active citizen, it is necessary – To have been born, or to become, a Frenchman; – To be fully twenty-five years of age; – To be domiciled in the city or canton for the period determined by law; – To pay, in any part of the kingdom whatsoever, a direct tax equal at least to the value of three days’ labour, and to present the receipt therefor; – Not to be in a position of domesticity, that is to say, a servant for wages; – To be inscribed upon the roll of the National Guard in the municipality of his domicile; – To have taken the civic oath.24 According to the conditions under which the citizens’ oath establishes the band of brothers, the principle of brotherhood is already severely prescribed. Those excluded from the bond are: all women (in 1791 this is still, or again, so self-evident that it doesn’t need to be singled out), all wage earners who are not self-employed, all wage earners who are self-employed but do not meet a certain tax bracket, all those unfit for military service, and, finally, all those who are not French. This last constraint is, however, somewhat

24 ‘La Constitution de 1791’, title III, section II, art. 2; trans. LSG.

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

53

flexible, since the same constitution specifies that ‘the law-giving power […] can, under exceptional circumstances, grant citizenship to a foreigner without any other condition except that he takes up residence in France and swears the citizens’ oath.’25 Brotherhood is here, then, not (yet) bound to a common ancestry. It is, however, dependent upon sex, property, fitness for military service, and particular disposition. Exceptions to the principle of economic independence are, since 1795, also possible if a Frenchman had ‘participated in one or more military campaigns in the foundation of the republic.’ The band of brothers figures itself as a like-minded community of arms-bearing males who, at the same time, are heads of household and, as a rule, family patriarchs. After 1793, the citizens’ oath disappears from the constitution, but not from the practices and selected images of revolutionary celebrations. As a serment patriotique, it figures in various guises as the climax of various ceremonies and spontaneous demonstrations: ‘Marriages were often celebrated before the altar to the Patrie, thus combining the loyalties of the spouse and of the citizen. And every flag, with its legend, “Liberty or Death”, was a reminder of an oath.’26 The ideal paradigm of all patriotic oaths, the pathos-laden formula of fraternization as such, is provided by Jacques Louis David in the Oath of the Horatians, painted in 1784/85 (see Plate 1). With this image, David revives the well-known narrative from Roman history which Pierre Corneille (Horace) had dramatized already in 1640 and which locates brotherhood as a political model precisely in the transference of private sensibilities to the state. The scene is set in Rome at the beginning of the republic. The Romans and Albanians are trapped in an undecidable war. They decide to settle the dispute by proxy, for which purpose they invite the Horatians (for Rome) and the Curatians (for Albany) to face off against each other. As the myth has it, these were two pairs of triplet brothers who were from the best

25 ‘La Constitution de 1791’, title II, art. 4; trans. LSG. 26 Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, 102.

54

Susanne Lüdemann

of families and were ‘not ill-matched either in age or in physical prowess’.27 Moreover, some of them were engaged to the sisters of their opponents. David’s painting records the moment in which the three Horatians swear, in the presence of their father, to defend the fatherland. At the centre of the image we find old Horatius’ fist gripping the three swords, which is also the point to which the father and sons direct their gaze as they raise their hands in an oath. In the right-hand half of the painting, clearly separated from the group of combatants and caught in poses of impotent grief, the women and children of the house are represented. The painting refreshes the classical legend of sacrifice for the fatherland and joins it to the motif of a band of brothers, which, here, is familially as well as politically coded. Precisely in the motif ’s bio-political overdetermination, however, it is made clear that family ties are to cede priority to the obligation to the fatherland. Through their oath, the biological brothers become brothers in arms who henceforth place victory for the fatherland ahead of their private and familial interests. At the same time, homosocial fraternization supersedes the dynastic alliance dispositive as the principle behind the commonwealth. This disempowerment of the heterosocial and exogamous alliance, represented by David in the group of mourning women, is reinforced in Livy when, after the battle has ceased, the single surviving Horatian brother stabs his sister to death because she openly mourns the death of her fiancé (one of the Curiatians): ‘“Take your girl’s love”, he shouted, “and give it to your lover in hell. What is Rome to such as you, or your brothers, living or dead? So perish all Roman women who mourn for an enemy!”’28 If the family still remains the foundation of the nation, the subtext of the image implies, then only insofar as it delivers up to it sons who are fit to bear arms, and who, in the transference of their private sentiments to the fatherland, become brothers. The oath is the threshold ritual of the 27 Livy, History of Rome I, 24, trans. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann Ltd, 1919). 28 Livius, Ab urbe condita I, 26, 4; Livy, The Early History of Rome: Books I–V of the History of Rome from Its Foundation I 26,4, trans. Aubrey De Sélincourt (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1960), 61.

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

55

affective transition from the body of the family to the body of the republic, the act of initiation is a (homo)social second birth – similar to the way the Christian baptism, as inclusion in the body of Christ, is understood as a rebirth (a birth ‘of the father’). The Christian connotations of brotherhood are not far away and, regardless as to whether the commonalities or the differences of Christianity and the Revolution are emphasized, they have played a role in the interpretation of the slogan ‘freedom’. In the oaths of the patriotic priests, the kinship between the Christian message and the Revolution is clearly expressed: the Gospel itself aimed to ‘spread over the face of the earth the holy fire of universal fraternity.’29 The General Federation’s ceremonies also amalgamate Christian and worldly ritual. One thinks of the deputies’ communion, the masses read on the altar of the fatherland, and the citizens’ oath itself, which is also sworn on the fatherland’s altar. The most striking difference between the republican band of brothers and Christian brotherhood is undoubtedly the role the father plays in each. While the Christian brotherhood is created through God and his ‘only begotten Son’, the republican band of brothers forms itself precisely in the battle against the patriarchal principle, figuring itself as a conspiracy of sons against the sovereignty of the earthly and heavenly father at once. In the ‘family romance of the French Revolution’ (Lynn Hunt), it is not ‘being born of the father’ which is the pivotal event, but rather the father’s disempowerment. Correspondingly, the brothers’ self-commitment in their oath supersedes their extrinsic commitment in baptism. David’s Oath of the Horatians, painted under the rule of Louis XVI, anticipates this state of affairs and masks it under the guise of the conventional subject. The painter allows the pater familias to retain the central role of the vicarious agent who concentrates the loyalties of the sons around him, but at the same time he demotes him to a kind of gobetween who transfers the pledge received from his sons from his person to the state. In this sense, David’s painting represents the epochal ideal of

29 Ozouf, ‘Fraternity’, 696.

56

Susanne Lüdemann

the father who abdicates,30 who cedes his patria potestas to the fatherland and becomes, as he does so, a ‘brother among brothers’ himself. The painting can be understood as an appeal to the king to model his reign after the example of the Roman scene. After 1793, this scene was in reality merely a backwards-looking utopia: the king had not abdicated voluntarily, but instead had been removed, and put to death, by his oath-swearing sons. These sons were subsequently constrained to ensure their own brotherly loyalty. If Oath of the Horatians (and not Tennis Court Oath of 1791, which would have been more appropriate to the republican scenario31) remains the iconographic example of the patriotic oath, that is at least partly due to its powers of deception: David’s painting allows the viewer to ‘forget’ that the solidarity of the revolutionary brothers is based not least on the memory of collectively committed patricide. In the political imaginary of the Revolution after 1793, the old Horatio is a sort of placeholder or substitute for the decapitated king. David’s image, with its reminiscence of the Roman story, works as a cultural ‘cover-up’ behind which the recent trauma of the king’s murder can be hidden. The deepest ambivalence precipitated by the political model of brotherhood is thus to be found in this (camouflaged) dependence on a violent original scene. If Christian brotherhood (according to Freud) followed from the murder of a god, republican brotherhood cannot exist without a similar foundational sacrifice. In this sense, Jean-Luc Nancy is also convinced that fraternity […] is not the relation of those who unify a common family, but the relation of those whose Parent, or common substance, has disappeared, delivering them

30 See Lynn Hunt, The Rise and the Fall of the Good Father, in Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 31 According to Paolo Prodi, it is possible ‘to represent the development of the Jacobin ideology from the oath as a contract that is guaranteed by God to the oath as the nullification of the individual in the collective will in a series of paintings’: from Johann Heinrich Füssli’s ‘Ruetli Oath’ (about 1780) to David’s ‘Oath of the Horatians’ (1784/85) to the ‘Tennis Court Oath’ (1791), which ‘embodies Rousseau’s initiation oath from the Constitution pour la Corse in a highly symbolic manner.’ Prodi, Das Sakrament der Herrschaft, 399–400; trans. SL.

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

57

to their freedom and equality. Such are, in Freud, the sons of the inhuman Father of the horde: becoming brothers in sharing of his dismembered body. Fraternity is equality in the sharing of the incommensurable.32

The violence of this foundational act haunts the band of brothers after 1793 in the form of its reduction to an ever smaller number of associates. If in 1789 it was ‘all men’ who were to take part in the project of a universal fraternization, regardless of sex, property or nationality, in 1794 it is only the small club of radical Jacobins who – in the common memory of the founding act – hold themselves to be capable of true brotherhood. ‘During the revolution’, writes Bertrand Barère, ‘brotherhood must stay limited to the patriots united through a common interest’.33 If this constraint still hopes for a future in which it too will become superfluous, this outlook is adjusted just a little while later. ‘Within a free people’, proclaim the Sansculottes (section des marchés), ‘there exist only brothers or foes’.34 The number of foes continues to increase. To sum up, I understand ‘fraternity’ in revolutionary France as the attempt to refit the society which had been dis-incorporated through the abolition of the monarchy with an (imaginary) body. The family continues to provide the model for the state; brotherhood as ideological concept is the republic’s ‘super-added idea’ through which ‘the sentiments which beautify and soften the private sphere’, should be transferred to the new enlightened state. The metaphor works as an affective ‘switch track’ between the family and the state, with at least David’s Oath of the Horatians making clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that the affection which is transferred to the state must at the same time be removed from the family. There is, then, no affective surplus in this transaction, but simply a redistribution of psychic energy.

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 72. 33 Bertrand Barère, report du 28 messidor, quoted in Marcel David, Fraternité et Revolution Française (Paris: Aubier, 1987), 125. 34 Ibid., 145. 32

58

Susanne Lüdemann

In contrast to the ‘paternal’ monarch against whom brotherhood must assert itself, the new model is a horizontal association of the free and the equal. It replaces the body of the king and the estates-based corporations which functioned as his ‘organs’ with a male institutional body which consists of a multiplicity of equal individuals. Since the brother in a community of the free and equal is, however, ‘always uncertain’ (that is, he is not identified by birth or social rank), a need for special rituals develops to invest the brothers in their social bond. The oath functions as the threshold ritual of a homosocial autopoiesis in which the brothers mutually bring each other into being ‘as brothers’. At the same time, they cast their bond as a social ‘third’ which exists over and against each individual member. In the absence of any transcendental reinsurance of the social bond (in God or in the king), the oath creates a kind of transcendence immanent to society. At the same time, rituals of fraternization put a logic of exclusion into motion which establishes perhaps the deepest ambivalence of brotherhood as a political model. The dialectic of brotherly intimacy and suspicion leads to the self-destruction of the band of brothers from within, which ultimately excludes any but the dead brother from appearing as the ‘good brother’. Translated from the German by Leigh Ann Smith-Gary

Bibliography Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). ‘La Constitution de 1791’, Titre premier: ‘Dispositions fondamentales garanties par la Constitution’, in Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789, comp. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970), 1–106. David, Marcel, Fraternité et Revolution Française (Paris: Aubier, 1987). Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997).

Fraternity as a Social Metaphor

59

Gauchet, Marcel, ‘Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps. Christianisme et politique’, Le débat 14 (1981), 133–57, and 15 (1981), 147–68. Hunt, Lynn, ‘The Rise and the Fall of the Good Father’, in Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King‘s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Lefort, Claude, ‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism’, in John B. Thompson, ed., The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1986), 292–306. Lüdemann, Susanne, Albrecht Koschorke, Thomas Frank and Ethel Matala de Mazza, Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas [The Fictive State: Constructions of the Political Body in the History of Europe] (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2006). Livy, History of Rome I, 24, trans. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann Ltd, 1919). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Ozouf, Mona, ‘Fraternity’, in Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, A critical dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 694–703. Prodi, Paolo, Das Sakrament der Herrschaft. Der politische Eid in der Verfassungsgeschichte des Okzidents (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1997). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (New York: Verso, 1976). Schieder, Wolfgang, ‘Brüderlichkeit’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe I, ed. Reinhard Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), 552–81. Starobinski, Jean, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University Press of Virgina, 1982). Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. John Bonner (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856).

Plate 1:  Jacques Louis David (1748–1825), The Oath of the Horatii, ca. 1784. Oil on canvas, 330 × 425 cm. Inv.: 3692. Photo: Gérard Blot/Christian Jean. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

part ii

Cultural and Theoretical Transformations I: The Limits of Public Representation

Jade Larissa Schiff

Repressive Democracy: Pathological and Ontological Distortion in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action

In an increasingly globalized world, communication – among individuals, among groups, across cultural, religious and economic divides – is especially urgent. Many students of democratic theory and world politics have appropriated and developed Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action to describe, criticize and suggest revisions of communicative and anti-communicative practices in local and global public spheres. Habermas’ theory of communicative action is notoriously guided by an ideal of transparent, undistorted and rational communication, in which all parties strive to reach a consensus. What Habermas calls ‘systematically distorted communication’, then, emerges as a fundamental barrier to communicative action.1 Distortion is unlike the other significant barrier to communicative action mentioned by Habermas: strategic communication, which is motivated by the desire to secure some private advantage. As we will see, distorted communication is not intentional but, to a troubling extent, inevitable. Given the threat posed by distorted communication to communicative action, it is surprising that Habermas’ interlocutors have not investigated this problem in much depth. Indeed, even more surprising is that, aside from two essays and a lecture, Habermas never discusses the problem systematically – not even in Theory of Communicative Action.2 This suggests much work is left 1 2

See Jürgen Habermas, ‘On Systematically Distorted Communication’ and ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’, both in Inquiry 13 (1970), 205–18 and 360–75. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).

64

Jade Larissa Schiff

to be done, both to highlight the significance of communicative distortion and to examine critically Habermas’ conception of it. In this chapter I argue that Habermas’ view of distorted communication as a barrier to communicative action that needs to be overcome is misleading and incomplete, and that this has significant implications for how we understand and undertake communicative practices. I argue that we ought to distinguish between pathological and ontological distortions and suggest that while pathological distortions represent significant barriers to communication, ontological distortions are structurally necessary – but also problematic – for communicative action. This distinction remains implicit and untheorized in Habermas’ work; he does not see that distortion is a more complicated problem than he suggests. Habermas’ account of communicative distortion grew out of Sigmund Freud’s work on neurotic repression,3 and I understand both kinds of distortion in that light. Pathological distortions are those reciprocal misunderstandings that frustrate transparent, rational communication in the public sphere. They are manifestations of the repression by participants in the communication of meanings whose admission would be confusing, disorienting and unpleasant, and might provoke uncertainty, even fear. Ontological distortions are reciprocal misunderstandings, not of meanings, but of lifeworlds, of whole conceptions of how the world is and ought to be. Competing lifeworlds are even less admissible in a Habermasian framework than are competing significations, since the former undermine the very possibility of communication, while the latter only complicate its practice. Like pathological distortion, then, ontological distortion also entails repression. Because neither Habermas nor his interlocutors make this distinction, they can only view distortions as a pathological problem to overcome and thus risk attempting to undo an important ontological condition of the very activity they want to preserve and enrich. At the same time, because ontological distortion excludes from consideration entire ways of being in the world, it can also reinforce the kinds of exclusions that communicative action seeks

3

See Jürgen Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), and Erkenntnis und Interesse (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/M., 1968).

Repressive Democracy

65

to avoid. I trace this neglect most immediately to Habermas’ incomplete appropriation of Freudian psychoanalysis. In Habermas’ presentation, Freud viewed every distortion as evidence of neurotic repression or some other pathology, and the purpose of psychoanalysis for him was to identify and overcome those distortions. But Freud distinguished between basic and surplus repression – forms of what I call ontological and pathological distortion – and understood the former as inevitable, even necessary for collective existence, a possibility taken up and elaborated by such postMarxist thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and (via Lacan) Pierre Bourdieu. In Habermas’ transposition of Freud from psychoanalytic to social-theoretic thinking, he bypasses Freud’s own social theory and loses this distinction. He thus fails to see how ontological communicative distortion is a necessary and problematic condition of communicative action. To illustrate the distinction between ontological and pathological distortion, and to demonstrate the significance of the former for communication in the public sphere, I turn to Iris Marion Young’s influential treatment of deliberative democracy. In spite of being much more explicitly attentive to the nature, sources and mechanisms of distortion than was Habermas himself, Young likewise misses the ontological distortions necessary for activity in the public sphere, and so continues to view deliberation as a mechanism for overcoming distortion and not as a practice that is problematically dependent upon it.

Pathologically Distorted Communication and Communicative Competence The story of Habermas’ concern with systematically distorted communication does not begin with his theory of communicative action, but with his earlier analysis of positivism that constituted part of its foundation. In the preface to Knowledge and Human Interests (1972) [Erkenntnis und Interesse (1968)], Habermas states his intention to explore the connections

66

Jade Larissa Schiff

between human interests and knowledge in the form of a barely-veiled critique of positivism: in this exploration, he says, ‘one will make one’s way over abandoned stages of reflection. Retreading this path […] may help to recover the forgotten experience of reflection’.4 This characterization of the abandonment and forgetting occasioned by positivism and the implied significance of recovering stages of reflection expresses the most general form of his critique, but it does not quite capture its force. Habermas describes the question of the possibility of reliable knowledge as being definitive of philosophical discussion in modernity.5 Modern physics, which for Habermas epitomized rationalism and empiricism, held itself up as the model for such knowledge. ‘Yet’, he says, ‘no matter how much modern physics […] was the model for clear and distinct knowledge […] modern science did not coincide with knowledge as such. […] [S]cience was accorded its legitimate place only by unequivocally philosophical knowledge’.6 Science did not stand on its own. It depended on philosophy. For scientists to take science on its own terms as a model for knowledge – and for that model to be accepted – they had to repress its philosophical foundations. Repression thus underlies the abandonment and forgetting of reflection, and overcoming such repression is necessary to recover it. The unstated but implied centrality of repression here evokes the work of psychoanalysis, especially – as we shall see – that of Freud. So while Habermas only notes that in his recovery of reflection ‘psychoanalysis occupies an important place as an example’ of this recovery7 – as a site at which it takes place – it might be more accurate to say that the recovery of reflection is in important ways a recovery of psychoanalysis against positivism, and that reconstructing the connection between knowledge and human interests means undoing the work of repression. From this perspective, Habermas’ account of the relationship between knowledge and human interests contains an early insight that would animate his theory of

4 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, vii. 5 Ibid., 3. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., viii.

Repressive Democracy

67

communicative action: just as he sought a return to reflection undistorted by repression, the theory of communicative action is guided by an ideal of communication free from repressive distortion. This is especially important for democratic communication, which relies on transparency to others and to ourselves about our values, interests and objectives; robust democracy similarly depends upon undoing repression. Systematically distorted communication thus poses a very significant barrier to deliberative democracy, both to its ideal and its reality. Since Freud, like Habermas, was interested in the sources and consequences of distorted communication – in the form of neuroses and their interpersonal and civilizational effects – it is unsurprising that Habermas would have been drawn to him as an interlocutor. We see the first stirrings of Habermas’ engagement with Freud in his discussion, in Knowledge and Human Interests, of Freud’s treatment of self-reflection distorted by selfdeception. Indeed, Habermas prefigures the language of communicative action there when he says that ‘the starting point for psychoanalytic theory is the experience of resistance, that is the blocking force that stands in the way of the free and public communication of repressed contents.’8 Contrasting philological and psychoanalytic analysis, Habermas says of the latter that ‘the flaws eliminated by its critical labor are not accidental. The omissions and distortions that it rectifies have a systematic role and function’.9 Freud uses a ‘depth hermeneutics’ to address ‘texts’ (dreams and behaviours) that indicate ‘self-deceptions of the author’, thereby distinguishing their manifest (evident, observable) content from their latent content that has, through resistance and repression, become inaccessible to their authors.10 As Habermas elaborates, the ongoing text of our everyday language games […] is disturbed by apparently contingent mistakes: by omissions and distortions that can be discounted as accidents and ignored, as long as they fall within the conventional limits of tolerance […] These

8 9 10

Ibid., 229; emphasis added. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 218.

68

Jade Larissa Schiff parapraxes (errors) [‘forgetting, slips of the tongue and of the pen, misreading’, and more] […] indicate that the faulty text both expresses and conceals self-deceptions.11

If, however, ‘the mistakes are more obtrusive and situated in the pathological realm, we speak of symptoms. They can neither be ignored nor understood.’12 They can, however, be revealed and interpreted as they appear in dreams, which for Freud were the ‘normal model[s] of pathological conditions’.13 According to Habermas, Freud ‘transfers’ these traits to ‘waking life’14 in order to analyse pathological communication stemming from repression. He uses the model of the dream to account for pathologies in interpersonal communication of the kinds that – as we will see – threaten democratic deliberation as well. If Habermas finds much to appreciate in Freud’s account of pathological repression, he becomes critical at the point where Freud developed a ‘structural model’ of the unconscious, consisting of the ego, id and superego.15 The Freudian conscious, according to Habermas, is a scene of ‘linguistic communication and action’ and so ‘satisfies the condition of publicness, which means communicability’.16 The unconscious, in contrast, ‘is removed from public communication.’17 This makes the unconscious and its repressive distortions a serious problem for communicative action. Yet while for Freud, according to Habermas, this repression involved a flight from linguistic representation of the repressed event, Habermas insists that the ego’s flight ‘is carried out in and with language.’ Otherwise, it could not be reversed through linguistic analysis.18 Habermas thus rejects Freud’s ‘distinction between word-presentations and asymbolic ideas’ and therewith his ‘assumption of a non-linguistic substratum’. Because he denies the capacity for reflection to the fleeing/repressed ego, Habermas suggests, Freud 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 219. 13 Ibid., 220. 14 Ibid., 226. 15 Ibid., 237. 16 Ibid., 238. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 241.

Repressive Democracy

69

‘denies the origins’ of the unconscious ‘in a process of enlightenment’.19 Rather than a dimension of the psyche that simply is, Habermas insists on the unconscious as an emergent feature of the psyche, whose formation depends upon linguistic representation. Habermas’ interpretation of Freud should make us reflect briefly on Habermas’ own repressed anxieties about the future of enlightenment in general, and about reason in particular, because they play a role in his misappropriation of Freud for his account of communicative distortion. Habermas is a thoughtful champion of enlightenment, and of the Enlightenment. Keenly aware of the limits of the modern project, and especially its idolatry of reason, Habermas still rejected Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s view that ‘Enlightenment is totalitarian’20 as well as the view – expressed more recently by Giorgio Agamben and the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman21 – that the Holocaust and totalitarianism were emblematic of modernity. Given Habermas’ qualified faith in rationality, it is easy to see why he might so insistently reject Freud’s denial of the ‘enlightened’ roots of the unconscious, for such roots seem to be a necessary condition for the possibility of undoing repression. Were the unconscious simply a given, as Freud would have it, and not an emergent dimension of consciousness through the mediation of language, undoing unconscious repression would be essentially impossible. The route to undoing repression, for Habermas, passes through enlightened reason and not just the therapeutic undoing of neuroses. That distortion is among Habermas’ chief concerns is apparent in a series of papers and lectures from the 1970s on the problem of systematically distorted communication and the significance of communicative competence, in which Freud’s influence is predictably profound: the whole architecture of Habermas’ account of distorted communication is 19 Ibid., 245. 20 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 4. 21 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), and Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

70

Jade Larissa Schiff

built upon Freud’s discussion of neurotic symptoms. In his seminal article, ‘On Systematically Distorted Communication’,22 Habermas distinguishes between two kinds of incomprehension: that which is ‘the result of cultural, temporal, or social distance’; and that which arises from ‘systematically distorted communication.’ In the first case of incomprehension, he says, ‘we can say in principle what further information we would need in order to achieve [mutual] understanding.’ We can ‘recognize […] what it is that we do not – yet – know’: the alphabet, the lexicon, the grammar, the ‘context-specific rules of application’ and so on. This does not work, however, for systematically distorted communication, the incomprehensibility of which ‘results from a faulty organization of speech itself ’.23 Systematically distorted communication itself comes in two forms: the ‘obvious’ form, like the pathological speech of ‘psychotics’; and the more important form assumed by speech ‘which is not conspicuously pathological’.24 Habermas calls this ‘pseudo-communication’ which ‘produces a system of reciprocal misunderstandings that, due to the false assumption of consensus, are not recognized as such.’25 Pseudo-communication is not necessarily motivated by strategic considerations that might encourage deception. It can also entail a failure of communication between parties who want to achieve mutual understanding. If in the face of ordinary incomprehension we know what we do not yet know, with pseudo-communication, not only do we not know what we do not know; we do not even know that there is something we do not know. Only a ‘neutral observer’ outside the context of communication can see that a misunderstanding is occurring. But, Habermas concedes, ‘as long as we communicate in a natural language there is a sense in which we can never be neutral observers, simply because we are always participants. […] [t]he critical vantage-point can never be better than that of a partner in the communication.’ Consequently, he concludes, ‘we have

22 See footnote 1. 23 Ibid., 205. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.

Repressive Democracy

71

no valid criterion at our disposal for determining in general whether we are labouring under the mistaken conviction of normal understanding.’26 Nevertheless, Habermas curiously relies on the psychoanalytic ‘preconception’ of undistorted communication as a valid criterion against which distortion can be measured. This psychoanalytic conception underlies his account of rational, transparent communication: in undistorted communication, language, action and gesture are complementary and supplementary, not contradictory; communication is public and conforms to accepted rules; speakers are aware of distinctions between subject/object, private/ public, being/appearance, sign/object; and they develop and maintain mutual understanding.27 In distorted communication, these conditions break down: language, action and gesture contradict one another; as a result, the meaning of communication becomes nonconformist and thus private; the above-mentioned distinctions collapse, and with them, mutual understanding. As I indicated earlier, Habermas’ account of distorted communication begins with Freud’s discussion of neuroses; and, more generally, with Freud’s efforts to ‘define the scope of specifically incomprehensible utterances’ generated by those pathologies. Freud, says Habermas, identified three criteria for doing that, at the levels of language, behaviour and the system of language, as well as actions and gestures as a whole. With respect to language, distorted (neurotic) communication manifests as deviation from the rules of normal language usage. With respect to behaviour, communicative distortion manifests as ‘rigidity and compulsive repetition’.28 With respect to the system of language, in distorted communication ‘the usual congruency between linguistic symbols, actions, and accompanying gestures has disintegrated’, relegating the associated communication to the private realm.29 As these distortions become systematic, they produce pseudo-communication that is not recognized as such. Habermas is never explicit about how or why

26 27 28 29

Ibid., 206. Ibid., 210–12. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 206–7.

72

Jade Larissa Schiff

the reciprocal misunderstandings that are characteristic of systematically distorted communication, or pseudo-communication, persist: how is it that we do not recognize that reciprocal misunderstanding is taking place? If we take seriously the origins of systematically distorted communication in Freud’s account of neurotic repression, we might interpret the persistence of systematically distorted communication as a repression of any evidence of misunderstanding. Such evidence might call into question not only the substance of what we communicate, but also our very ability to communicate competently, which is a critical feature of communicative action. This threat of exposure – of our uncertainty about our own claims, and about our very ability to communicate them – might encourage the repression that sustains systematically distorted communication. Uncertainty and the ability to communicate are vital not only to have our needs met, but (in a democratic context) to articulate values that are of fundamental importance to us. The exposure of uncertainty, of the contingency of value claims that must be defended, introduces anxiety about our sense of ourselves and our world coming undone. As we saw him do earlier, Habermas again defends the choice of psychoanalysis ‘as [his] example’,30 but now in order to distinguish between two interpretive modes (hermeneutics and causal explanation) and two communicative forms (normal and distorted communication). ‘The analyst’s understanding owes its explanatory power’ – of neurotic symptoms – ‘to the fact that the clarification of a systematically inaccessible meaning succeeds only to the extent to which the origin of the faulty or misleading meaning is explained.’ Analysis ‘leads to an understanding of the meaning of a deformed language-game and simultaneously explains the origin of the deformation itself ’.31 Both causal and hermeneutic interpretation are critical to the analytic enterprise. The point of all this, for Habermas as for Freud, is that if we understand the meaning and origin of a deformed communication – for Freud, a symptom of neurosis, for Habermas a symptom of communicative distortion – we can undo the deformation or distortion

30 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, viii. 31 Ibid., 217.

Repressive Democracy

73

and move toward ‘communicative competence’, which is presupposed by any attempt to address distorted communication: ‘the special type of semantic analysis which deals with manifestations of a systematically distorted communication and affords an explanatory understanding, presupposes a theory of communicative competence.’ We require, he claims, ‘an at least implicit hypothesis concerning the nature and acquisition of communicative competence’ in order to analyse and address distorted communication in the public sphere, and specifically in a democratic one, where the consequences of communicative distortion are especially acute because they undermine our abilities to articulate collectively the terms upon which we share a common world.32 In a subsequent essay and a lecture,33 Habermas developed this hypothesis explicitly through a critique of the linguist Noam Chomsky that parallels his critique of Freud in an important respect: just as Habermas found that Freud’s model of the unconscious neglected the linguistic, intersubjective dimensions of the unconscious in general, and of unconscious repression in particular, he likewise criticized Chomsky for neglecting intersubjective communication in his semantic theory of language acquisition. According to Chomsky, language acquisition begins from knowledge of ‘an abstract linguistic system which consists of “generative rules”’ that is innate, not socially acquired, and that contains in itself the seeds of ‘all potential natural languages’.34 Any linguistic utterances are thus ‘surface structures which result from the transformation of deep structures’, or of the ‘generative grammar’ that provides the framework for all language.35 Mastery of that framework is necessary for any linguistic construction, and so for Chomsky communication depends on the acquisition of ‘linguistic competence’.36 32 Ibid. 33 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’. 34 Ibid., 361. See also Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). 35 Habermas, ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’, 361. 36 Ibid. See also Habermas’ discussion of Chomsky in Habermas, ‘Reflections on a Theory of Communicative Competence’, in On The Pragmatics of Social Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 67–84.

74

Jade Larissa Schiff

Habermas identifies and attacks three presumptions implicit in Chomsky’s theory: monologism (the building blocks of meaning belong first to the ‘solitary […] speaking subject’), a priorism (meaning precedes experience) and elementarism (the semantic content of any and all languages ‘consists of combinations of a finite number of meaning components’).37 Against these, Habermas argues that while some ‘semantic universals’ may precede socialization, others (that depend on cultural institutions) may not.38 These latter universals are not innate, but intersubjectively constituted in a shared sociocultural context that is the site of continually transforming, and so transformable, meanings. Put most simply, against a relatively static monological theory of language acquisition and use, Habermas posits a theory of language as dynamic and intersubjective. Habermas proposes to replace Chomsky’s notion of linguistic competence with one of ‘communicative competence’.39 This shift, I think, is meant to mark the difference between monological (whether one can speak competently or not) and dialogical (whether two or more people can understand each other) conceptions of language. ‘The general competence of a native speaker’, Habermas suggests, ‘does not extend merely to the mastery of an abstract system of linguistic rules’ that can be applied to a given communication. Rather, ‘producing a situation of potential ordinarylanguage communication is itself part of the general competence of the ideal speaker.’ The possibility of speech itself depends upon linguistic intersubjectivity, which requires not just linguistic competence, but a capacity for symbolic interaction. This is communicative competence, and it entails not the mastery of generative grammar rules, but of ‘an ideal speech situation’ of ‘pure intersubjectivity’.40 That condition is met ‘only when there is complete symmetry in the distribution of assertion and dispute, revelation and concealment, prescription and conformity, among the partners of communication;’ that is, when assertion, revelation and prescription are not

37 38 39 40

Habermas, ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’, 363. Ibid., 363–5. Ibid., 367. Ibid., 371.

Repressive Democracy

75

swallowed up, are not dominated by dispute, concealment or conformity, but also do not dominate or swallow up the latter. ‘As long as these symmetries exist, communication will not be hindered by constraints arising from its own structure’.41 Habermas’ passing reference to revelation and concealment might suggest his awareness that concealment always haunts communication, and not necessarily only in a pathological way but as a condition of its practice. While Habermas concedes that this is an ‘idealization’, he also insists that communicative competence does not require having the means to bring it about. Rather, ‘the design’, the potential, ‘of an ideal speech situation is necessarily implied in the structure of potential speech, since all speech, even of intentional deception, is oriented towards the idea of truth’.42 In a democratic context, ‘communicative competence’ entails the existence of a dynamic, intersubjectively shared language world that enables mutual understanding in order for rational argument and collective decision-making to emerge. We will see what this looks like more concretely in the final section of this chapter. For our purposes, the most important conclusion Habermas draws from his theory of communicative competence is its hypothetical utility for ‘social analysis’. Despite the intersubjective, public character of communication, he understands very well that ‘social action is not only – and perhaps not even primarily – controlled by motives which coincide with the intentions of the actor-speaker, but rather by motives excluded from public communication and fixed to a pre-linguistic symbol organization’.43 Habermas hypothesizes that ‘the greater the share of pre-linguistically fixed motivations which cannot be freely converted in public communication, the greater the deviance from the model of pure communicative action.’ While he certainly does not deny the prevalence of all different kinds of communication – strategic, affective, ironic, and so on – this is why his focus remains on rational, transparent and public communication. This hypothesis leads to two others that are central to understanding systematically distorted communication: first, that

41 Habermas, ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’, 371; my emphasis. 42 Ibid., 372. 43 Ibid., 373.

76

Jade Larissa Schiff

‘these deviations increase in proportion to the degree of repression which characterizes the institutional system within a given society’ – and this includes democratic societies – and second, ‘that the degree of repression depends in turn on the developmental stage of the productive forces and on the organization of authority, that is of the institutionalization of political and economic power’,44 including democratically organized political and economic power. By tying the decline of communicative competence to repressive organizations of political and economic power, Habermas implies a link between the repressions characteristic of communicative distortion and institutionalized social repression – which is something like psychological repression made public and collective. That link, I will now argue, limits his view of systematically distorted communication in a significant way that has special relevance in democratic contexts.

Ontological Distortion and the Possibility of Communication: Habermas’ Freudian Slip? Despite the strong parallels that Habermas draws between pathological neurotic symptoms and distorted communication, and between the repressions characteristic of communicative distortion and social repression, he provides several hints that systematically distorted communication is not, or not only, pathological, but also necessary. In particular, it is necessary for the intersubjective creation and maintenance of a social world – a lifeworld – whose taken-for-granted character makes communication (democratic or otherwise) possible.45 At the same time, however, ontological distortion is problematic because it represses other possible ways of being, other possible lifeworlds. Habermas is apparently unaware of this foundational role that such repression plays in his theory, and uncovering it highlights both how 44 Ibid., 374. 45 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II, 130.

Repressive Democracy

77

the lifeworld remains stable, and how its stability may be won at the price of being able to imagine different, and perhaps less exclusionary, worlds. The lifeworld, says Habermas, ‘always remains in the background’,46 and is not subject to the vicissitudes of communicative action. It is ‘given in a mode of taken-for-grantedness that can maintain itself only this side of the threshold to basically criticizable convictions.’47 The lifeworld is thus ‘[immunized] against total revision’.48 In a democratic context, the lifeworld is comprised in part by the norms, assumptions, and habits of political engagement. For Habermas and deliberative democrats, these include publicity, transparency, and rationality. Such norms, assumptions and habits are not incidental to democratic life; they are fundamental to it. The implication of the lifeworld in communicative action surreptitiously introduces another form of communicative distortion that I call ‘ontological’ distortion. This form of distortion is illuminated by an implicit disjuncture in Habermas’ account of incomprehension that he does not acknowledge – between incomprehension (and thus comprehension) as an intellectual matter and as a practical one. We can in principle acquire the knowledge we need to overcome incomprehension. Potential objects of incomprehension about which we might become knowledgeable include the ‘context-specific rules of application’ of a given term to an object or state of affairs in the world. In order to identify and apply rules in specific contexts, those rules and contexts must remain relatively stable. As long as they do, we can find out about them: What do we mean by democracy? What do we think democratic engagement ought to look like? What are its rules and procedures? What do we expect of participants in democratic conversations? As a practical matter, though, in order to move through a world we share with others we must be able to take our comprehension of contexts and rules more or less for granted so that they need not be subject to constant attention. They must, as Habermas says, remain in the background. Regular adherence to context-specific rules depends upon

46 Ibid., 131. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 132.

78

Jade Larissa Schiff

and reinforces a certain level of what Anthony Giddens calls ‘ontological security or attitude of “trust” towards the continuity of the world and of self implicated in the durée of day-to-day life’,49 which is maintained by ‘the very predictability of routine’.50 The threat of disruption represented by the existence of other possibilities, other ‘competing possibles’,51 is a grave one that must be neutralized lest it provoke the kinds of anxieties and insecurities I described earlier. We must, in general, have some basic, tacit agreement about democratic life so that all is not constantly at risk of being thrown into question. One way to neutralize this threat is to organize and maintain the repression of alternative contexts and rules, alternative ways of organizing democratic life. The practical framework of a lifeworld accomplishes this feat. That accomplishment constitutes what I call ‘ontological distortion’ insofar as it distorts the character of social life by naturalizing one particular constitution of it. A second hint at the limits of pathological distortion as a complete framework for understanding communicative distortion can be found in Habermas’ depiction of communicative competence. Again, contra Chomsky’s understanding of linguistic competence as mastery of a system of rules, Habermas posits communicative competence as a capacity to produce ‘a situation of potential ordinary-language communication’.52 It is not language, but the speaker, who is generative here; and what she generates, in concert with other competent speakers, is a speech situation. Just as the contexts and rules of communication that are potential objects of comprehension rely on ontological distortion for their stability, the communicative competence that resolves pathological distortions of meaning depends upon a stable context as a condition of its possibility. In order to produce a situation of potential ordinary-language communication facilitated by communicative competence, the terms of that communication 49 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 66. 50 Ibid., 50. See also ibid., 64 and 87. 51 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 169. 52 Habermas, ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’, 367.

Repressive Democracy

79

must be established and maintained in practice by competent speakers of a language, and that requires that certain terms and frames of references – the terms of democratic deliberation and action, for example – be tacitly accepted while others are excluded. The establishment of conditions for ordinary-language communication thus depends upon meta-stability at the level of communicative competence. Boundaries must be drawn between communicative competence and incompetence, between what is intelligible in a given political context and what is unintelligible; and, as in the case of contexts and rules, these meta-contexts and meta-rules depend for their stability upon the repression of other ontological possibilities. Again, the repression of those possibilities constitutes ontological distortion. As we will soon see, this boundary drawing between communicative competence and incompetence makes ontological distortion not only necessary, but also problematic as a site of systematic exclusions of some perspectives, identities and ways of being from democratic conversations. Repression, and so systematically distorted communication, thus functions in Habermas’ theory not only as pathologies to be ‘cured’, but as ontological conditions of communicative action and of democratic life. But Habermas seems not to see this. Why? Habermas’ neglect of this distinction, I think, stems from his selective appropriation of Freud’s work on repression. In his work on neurotics and dream analysis, Freud focused on instances of sexual repression that were clearly pathological in that they made it difficult for people to function in their personal lives; but in his more social-theoretic work, especially Civilization and its Discontents (1930),53 Freud analysed repression as a problematic but necessary condition of collective, ‘civilized’ existence. This account of repression comes close to what I call ontological distortion. He suggested that human life is guided by the ‘pleasure principle’, by the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain, which ‘is at loggerheads with the whole world’ and so tends to be moderated by ‘the reality principle’.54 That principle guides our efforts to ‘master the internal sources of our needs’, thereby avoiding the suffering to

53 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961). 54 Ibid., 25–6.

80

Jade Larissa Schiff

which following instinct alone can lead.55 Accordingly, Freud says, when it comes to ‘the social source of suffering’, we fail to see how our own efforts at social regulation could produce unhappiness, and yet they do. Why does civilization – ‘the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors’ in order to ‘protect [us] against nature’ and ‘to adjust [our] mutual relations’ – seem to be ‘largely responsible for our misery’?56 Freud notes that the civilizational ideal is characterized by beauty, cleanliness and order,57 the realization or approximation of which require ‘a renunciation of instinct’ toward the ugly, the dirty, the disorderly. The attainment of civilization thus requires the (external) suppression and (internalized) repression of sexual and aggressive instincts58 in the face of guilt about instincts induced by our conscience.59 For Freud, the suppression and repression of our instincts is necessary to the creation of a stable civilization, with its normative framework that guides our relationships to one another. What Freud describes here, I think, is a version of ontological distortion: the world of instinct must be repressed in order for the civilized world to survive. Freud’s conception of necessary repression was taken up in different ways by Marxist thinkers, some of whom – like Habermas – are associated with the Frankfurt School. Most directly, in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (1955), Herbert Marcuse articulates a distinction between ‘basic’ and ‘surplus’ repression that draws on Freud’s own distinction, but with the important difference that for Marcuse (as for Habermas) such ‘psychological categories’ as repression have become ‘political categories’ under capitalism.60 If, for Freud, the development of civilization (with its necessary repressions) brought about unhappiness, for Marcuse ‘the truth is that [the] freedom and satisfaction’ that accompany civilization ‘are transforming the earth into hell.’ In conditions of ‘mass 55 56 57 58 59 60

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 42, 37–8. Ibid., 46–8. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 90. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), xxvii.

Repressive Democracy

81

democracy’, the people ‘choose their own masters and […] participate […] in the government’, while ‘the masters […] disappear behind the technological veil of the productive and destructive apparatus which they control, and it conceals the human (and material) costs of the benefits and comforts’ of participants. The increasing demands of production and consumption require a people ‘efficiently manipulated and organized […]; ignorance and impotence […] is the price of their freedom.’61 Modern capitalist ‘freedom’ breeds new forms of misery and enslavement as the instincts, as eros, are repressed in the name of productive/destructive ‘civilization’. In addition to historicizing and radicalizing Freud’s analysis of repressive civilization, Marcuse takes it one step further. Like Freud, he thought that the preservation of civilization as such required a level of repression that he called ‘basic’. Basic repression refers to ‘the “modifications” of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization’. Also like Freud, Marcuse identified a pathological form of repression, but at the level of civilization and not at the level of individual psychopathology. What he called ‘surplus repression’ refers to ‘the [socio-historical, political and instinctual] restrictions necessitated by domination’,62 especially capitalist domination. If basic repression is aligned with ontological distortion, surplus repression might produce something like pathological distortion—it distorts communication by undermining both equality (because of a gap between capitalists and workers) and transparency (because communication is always tainted by economic inequality and domination). This distinction between ontological and pathological repression takes a similar form for Pierre Bourdieu who, while not identified with the Frankfurt School, shares its Marxist roots, as well as Marcuse’s investments in the psychodynamics of human life in late capitalism – though he turns for the latter to Jacques Lacan rather than to Freud. Like Freud and Marcuse, Bourdieu attends to the repressive dimensions of social and political life, and he draws a distinction between pathological and ontological distortion. And, like Freud and Marcuse, he is much more explicit

61 ibid., xiv–xv. 62 Ibid., 35.

82

Jade Larissa Schiff

than Habermas about the need for basic forms of distortion in social life alongside pathological ones. But unlike all of these thinkers, Bourdieu is clearer and more specific about the source and function of ontological distortion, which he finds in ordinary and ideological misrecognition. For Bourdieu, the repressions characteristic of social life assume the form of misrecognition, a disposition that takes the world as natural and taken-for-granted and represses its historical and contingent character. Misrecognition secures a practical context that makes our world meaningful to us and enables us to make our way in it. The concept thus helps to account for the coming-into-being of a lifeworld. Like Habermas’ account of distortion, Bourdieu’s account of misrecognition comes from psychoanalysis: he inherited the concept from Lacan.63 Lacan developed his conception of misrecognition through his analysis of the mirror stage, in which children develop a coherent sense of themselves through a confrontation with their idealized reflection, with a version of themselves that is also another. Against the dependence on others symbolized by that reflection, misrecognition emerges as a defensive operation of the ego, its struggle to repress its dependence and assert itself as the ultimate source of its own meaning.64 Bourdieu’s account of misrecognition likewise begins in childhood: at first, children internalize and take for granted appropriate modes of being by mimicking their parents. As it did for Lacan, for Bourdieu misrecognition protects us from the frustrations that threaten the sense of practical mastery gained initially through mimicry (his analogue of Habermas’ ‘communicative competence’) by repressing them. Bourdieu’s analysis of gift exchange illustrates the repressive (in the basic sense) role of misrecognition in social life. Although gift-giving is objectively reversible, the immediate return of a gift is insulting. Delay must be introduced ‘because the operation of gift exchange presupposes (individual and collective) misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the reality of the objective

63

George Steinmetz, ‘Bourdieu’s Disavowal of Lacan: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Concepts of “Habitus” and “Symbolic Capital”’, Constellations 13/4 (2006), 445–64. 64 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 75–81.

Repressive Democracy

83

“mechanism” of the exchange, a reality which an immediate response brutally exposes.’65 The delay hides the, in principle, immediate reversibility of the gift behind an experience of irreversibility and delay that avoids insult. The success of gift exchange depends upon this concealment. As it did for Lacan, for Bourdieu misrecognition protects us from the experience of fragility that attends all of social life. If the mirror-image is Lacan’s ideal ego, then Bourdieu’s practical virtuoso (Habermas’ competent speaker) represents his ideal, whose realization both depends upon and is threatened by the unpredictable responses of communicative partners. If the ideal ego is constantly threatened with shattering, as the mirror metaphor suggests, the ideal of practical mastery in our relationships with others is constantly threatened by the exposure of the arbitrariness and contingency (and thus the potential, unexpected disruption) of ordinary life. Habermas gives little explicit attention to these crucial features of intersubjective communication. By concealing the arbitrariness and contingency that might otherwise perpetually haunt us, misrecognition enables the unconscious operations that give social and political life the air of a second nature, of a lifeworld. But misrecognition also works in another way, as ideology – as a pathological form of repression. In this pathological form it masks the uneven and unjust distribution of the burdens of vulnerability, of threats to practical mastery. ‘Every established order’, Bourdieu insists, ‘tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.’66 It does so through the reproduction of systems of classification – such as sex, gender, age class and race – that ‘[reproduce] […] the power relations of which they are the product, by securing the misrecognition, and hence the recognition, of the arbitrariness upon which they are based.’ Thus misrecognized, ‘the natural and social world appears as self-evident’67 – an experience that Bourdieu calls doxa. Misrecognition naturalizes existing social and political orders so that we tend to take them for granted rather than to question them. Because it

65 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 5–6. 66 Ibid., 164. 67 Ibid., 164–5.

84

Jade Larissa Schiff

conceals those conditions, misrecognition emerges on Bourdieu’s account as both necessary and deeply problematic, as basic and surplus forms of repression, as a disposition rooted in ontological and pathological distortions. To the extent that democratic practices – that all political practices – depend upon a stable lifeworld underwritten by misrecognition, they conceal the arbitrariness and contingency of the social orders in which they are embedded. They conceal the real conditions of political life – of inequality, oppression and domination. Ontological and pathological distortion together thus threaten the conditions of rationality, transparency and publicity upon which deliberative democracy depends.68 There is, then, a considerable history behind the implicit distinction in Habermas’ account of the context of communicative action between pathological and ontological repression, a history that begins with Freud. Since Habermas turns explicitly to Freud, why does he appear to ignore it? It might be fruitful to think of his inattention as itself a form of repression: Habermas represses the basic necessity of repression out of a commitment to the transparency of reasonable communication that communicative action requires. His desire to rescue the Enlightenment from its most vociferous critics forces him to repress something that threatens this mission. But, true to the nature of the repressed, the necessity of distortion emerges anyhow, buried in the interstices of his theory, and sometimes in plain sight. The half-buried, emergent conception of ontological distortion that underlies Habermas’ theory of communicative action ironically represents his own Freudian slip.69 In uncovering it I mean not to point out a fatal weakness in Habermas’ theory or in the deliberative democratic theory that grows out of his work, but to highlight a necessary, deeply problematic, and unacknowledged condition of democratic deliberation.

68 This discussion of misrecognition is adapted from and builds upon Jade Larissa Schiff, Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 69 Sigmund Freud, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (London: Penguin, 1981).

Repressive Democracy

85

Communicative Distortion and Deliberative Democracy In the remainder of this chapter I want to spell out briefly some implications of this account of systematically distorted communication by investigating one influential approach to deliberative democracy developed by Iris Marion Young. Young’s work on deliberative democracy grows out of her work on the problem of structural injustice. In Justice and the Politics of Difference, she criticizes accounts of justice broadly inspired by John Rawls’ notion of justice-as-fairness for their abstraction and for the particular ways in which they emphasize distributive questions.70 From a feminist and critical-theoretical perspective, Young argues that these theories are blind to difference – to particular, historically situated sources of injustice; and that they neglect domination, oppression and the suppression of human capabilities as species of injustice that should command our attention.71 In Habermasian terms, Young suggests that these accounts of justice depend upon a lifeworld that conceals the exclusions upon which it depends. Her turn to deliberative democracy extends and deepens this work.72 Young articulates a model of deliberative democratic practices that takes on board the normative burdens of domination and oppression – which she calls ‘structural inequality’ – that tend to exclude marginalized groups from participation in democratic processes. Accordingly, inclusion takes centre stage as a means of eliminating, or at least mitigating, domination and oppression. Young’s sensibility is in this respect Habermasian: while guided by an ideal of conditions of non-domination and the absence of oppression, she is attentive to the limitations of ideal theory that more abstract accounts of justice tend to downplay.73 70 Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and John Rawls, Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, [1971] 1999). 71 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 72 Young, Inclusion and Democracy. 73 Ibid., 17.

86

Jade Larissa Schiff

Young begins from a picture of deliberative democracy guided by norms of inclusion, equality, reasonableness and publicity. The norm of inclusion means that ‘a democratic decision is normatively legitimate only if all those affected by it are included in the process of discussion and decisionmaking’.74 Inclusion entails political equality, which means that all affected parties have ‘an equal right and effective opportunity to express their interests and concerns.’75 Equality entails reasonableness, which involves the ‘willingness to listen to others who want to explain […] why their ideas are incorrect or inappropriate.’76 Finally, all of these require publicity, the existence of a site of engagement in which deliberators can be held accountable. A public ‘consists of a plurality of different individual and collective experiences, histories, commitments, ideals, interests and goals that face one another to discuss collective problems under a common set of procedures.’ This publicity creates some constraints that enable deliberation: participants are held accountable for their arguments. Sharing points of view makes people ‘careful about expressing themselves’ in ways that others can understand and that appeal to publicly acceptable reasons.77 Young endorses this model,78 but also criticizes and amends it in several crucial ways. In particular, she identifies several ‘forms or aspects of communication with unique important functions in furthering democratic deliberation’ that are neglected, even excluded, by democratic theorists whose conceptions of appropriate and inappropriate modes of communication are, in her judgement, too constricted.79 The norm of appropriateness threatens to exclude from deliberative processes those people who, for a variety of reasons, cannot engage in styles of communication that are deemed appropriate by those who set the terms of deliberation. Accordingly, Young expands the range of communicative modes: ‘Greeting or public address’ involves the acknowledgment of the presence and perspectives of 74 Ibid., 23. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 24. 77 Ibid., 25. 78 Ibid., 26. 79 Ibid., 7.

Repressive Democracy

87

diverse others. ‘Rhetoric’ refers to how we situate ourselves in deliberation in different ways by presenting claims and reasons, including affective dimensions, figurative dimensions and the diversity of expressive media. Finally, ‘narratives’ can ‘supply steps in arguments’, and can help to ‘explain meanings and experiences when groups do not share premises sufficiently to proceed with an argument.’80 Although Young does not spend much time explicitly on failures of communication, or on what Habermas would call pathological distortions in communication, we can infer what they might look like. Deliberations that are not inclusive, where participants are not on equal terms, where willingness to listen is weak or absent, and where there is a lack of public accountability – if any or all of these conditions are met, communication is pathological. Likewise, if we fail to ‘greet’ others, or if ours are only pseudo-greetings, grudging acknowledgments of presences, gestures that dismiss the other even as they acknowledge her; if our rhetoric (of reason-giving and claim-making) is such that it undermines conditions like inclusion, equality and reasonableness, our communication would count as pathological. Indeed, what Freud says, and Habermas adopts, about neurotics applies here too: if our rhetoric undermines these conditions sufficiently it may be akin to a private language structured by private meanings of the sort to which neurotics are beholden. This would violate the condition of publicity. Lastly, if the narratives we share create distance rather than shrink it, obscure rather than reveal, this, too, would contribute to pathologically distorted communication. Like Habermas, Young wants to overcome these pathological distortions. But what she helps to make more concrete is that this seems to require forms of ontological distortion. The norms of deliberation depend for their authority upon legitimating acts by participants. Insofar as all deliberations take place in particular cultural, historical and institutional contexts, there can be no transcendent or otherwise universal ground for them—other than, perhaps, the relatively thin ground of a desire to be understood and a belief in the value of being understood by others; though these, too, undoubtedly mean different things in different contexts. But as I argued 80 Ibid.

88

Jade Larissa Schiff

earlier, deliberative democracy demands a relatively stable normative and practical context for deliberation. It requires that that context be largely taken-for-granted. This requires ontological distortion insofar as it demands that we repress the possibility of other worlds, other contexts. That this is so is highlighted by the fact that the norms guiding deliberation themselves only become subject to deliberation when they are unexpectedly violated. Otherwise, they fade into the background. This is a form of repression because, as I suggested earlier, it is a defensive response to the anxiety that attends having one’s most deeply cherished beliefs called into question. One virtue of Young’s approach in highlighting the work of ontological distortion – though she herself does not acknowledge it as such – is that she directs our attention to a specific mechanism that may account for it: narrative. Narratives, Young claims, can provide steps in arguments and can clarify experiences and meanings, but they do so in a very particular way. Meanings and experiences, like the deliberations they inform, always take shape in a context, or in multiple overlapping contexts. Those contexts comprise a common world for those who participate in deliberations. But worlds are not simply given. They are always created by the intersubjective activities of human beings. They are created and reinforced by what we say and do, by how we are with each other. And they are also created and reinforced by the stories that we tell about them. Narratives create worlds through their mimetic character.81 The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has highlighted this point by identifying three dimensions of mimesis. Mimesis1 encompasses the realm of our ‘pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character.’ 82 This pre-understanding involves mimesis insofar as it is in this mode that we represent the world to ourselves, that we represent our experience through the conceptual resources that we bring to bear upon it. It includes the conceptual vocabularies, the conceptual structures

81 82

Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 4.

Repressive Democracy

89

or frameworks through which we make sense of and move in the world. Discussing ‘frameworks’ in a scientific context, Charles Taylor notes that they ‘claim to delimit the area in which scientific enquiry will be fruitful.’ Frameworks ‘tell us what needs to be explained, and roughly by what kinds of factors.’ ‘For instance’, Taylor continues, ‘if we accept the principle of inertia, certain ways of conceiving bodies and therefore certain questions are beyond the pale. To pursue them is fruitless’.83 But I would go further than this: at the limit, when a conceptual structure becomes the takenfor-granted framework that organizes our experience of the world – when it becomes misrecognized and naturalized – other structures, and other world pictures, do not arise as possibilities in the first place. Everything that could be ruled out is already ruled out in advance. This addresses one dimension of deliberative democracy: the norms of inclusion, equality, reasonableness and publicity need to be taken for granted because anything that undermines them threatens democracy as such. In mimesis these conceptual structures are elaborated into narrative plots. In the case of deliberative democracy, it is a story of collective decision-making structured by the norms implied in the conception of democracy in the realm of mimesis In mimesis we move back and forth between the world of the narrative and our own world – or, better, between different narratives. A thought like this must be what animates Young’s claims about the sharing of experiences through narrative as a way of enriching deliberation. As we move between the more ‘closed’ realms of our particular experiences into the more ‘open’ and widely shared one of democratic deliberation, we can carry those experiences between them. As we are introduced to new worlds, to new stories, our own experiences may be enlarged, and that openness may facilitate more inclusion and so deepen democracy.84

83 Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers: Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 63. 84 This discussion of narrative adapts and extends my discussion in Schiff, Burdens of Political Responsibility, 2014.

90

Jade Larissa Schiff

Receptivity to other experiences, other stories, is an important index of the robustness of democracy on Young’s account. Such openness may also indicate a relative absence of pathological distortion. If we are able to listen to, to really hear others’ stories, if we are open to the possibility of being transformed by them, we may come closer to Habermas’ communicative ideal, even if Habermas himself might reject narrative as a mode of communicative action. But the conditions of possibility of doing that – a communicative situation constituted by norms of inclusion, equality, reasonableness and publicity – require the ontological distortion that Habermas and Young neglect, distortion that may well engender its own exclusions. Deliberation requires taking for granted a world that has space for deliberation, that has a sphere in which those norms hold. We can see this because it is in moments where such a world is threatened that we feel compelled to articulate those norms explicitly. Freedom, for example, is everywhere in American political discourse, from the constitutional documents to the national anthem, to the media, and on and on. The idea of freedom is woven into the very fabric of American society. But never does it become subject to as much explicit and vigorous discussion as when it is perceived to be under threat, as was the case after 9/11. Then civil liberties, academic freedom and other democratic values came under renewed scrutiny. Another world, a scary, insecure one, a world from a different story, had intruded. When democracy is threatened, when its contingency is revealed, the ontological distortion that helps us take it for granted and that we reinforce in our everyday democratic practices is laid bare and the repression that underwrites it becomes unsustainable.

Conclusion Many theorists of deliberative democracy and global public spheres understand communicative distortion, implicitly or explicitly, as a threat to democratic deliberation. This view is incomplete. In this chapter I have

Repressive Democracy

91

argued that while pathological distortion is indeed a threat to deliberation, ontological distortion is a necessary condition of democratic practice. It is necessary because it creates a stable world with a shared normative framework oriented toward democracy. At the same time, ontological distortion also threatens deliberative democracy because it demands the repression of other competing, possible worlds, it relies upon its own exclusions of difference. By failing to make this distinction and treating all distortion as pathological, theorists of deliberative democracy risk undoing a crucial condition of democratic deliberation itself, while simultaneously failing to recognize a powerful threat to that most fundamental activity.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Chomsky, Noam, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1961). , The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (London: Penguin Classics, 1981). , The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Habermas, Jürgen, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/M., 1968). , The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). , ‘On Systematically Distorted Communication’, in Inquiry 13 (1970), 205–18. , ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’, in Inquiry 13 (1970), 360–75. , Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).

92

Jade Larissa Schiff

, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). , ‘Reflections on a Theory of Communicative Competence, in On The Pragmatics of Social Interaction (Boston: MIT Press, 2001), 67–84. Halliwell, Stephen, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006). Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Rawls, John, Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, [1971] 1999). Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Schiff, Jade Larissa, Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Steinmetz, George, ‘Bourdieu’s Disavowal of Lacan: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Concepts of “Habitus” and “Symbolic Capital”’, in Constellations 13/4 (2006), 445–64. Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Papers: Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). , Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Edgar Landgraf

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

In his Essays in the Public Philosophy, published in 1955, Walter Lippmann, reflecting on the causes of two World Wars and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, explains the ‘Decline of the West’ as the consequence of ‘a functional derangement of the relationship between the mass of the people and the government. The people have acquired power which they are incapable of exercising, and the governments they elect have lost powers which they must recover if they are to govern.’1 The power the people cannot exercise comes in the form of public opinion, or more precisely, of Western democratic governments orienting their decisions increasingly toward public opinion. According to Lippmann, the first half of the twentieth century has proven this tendency to be detrimental since ‘the prevailing public opinion has been destructively wrong’ at crucial points in time.2 He mentions in particular the political failures leading up to World War II, which, he argues, were caused by decisions made in response to public opinion, but which failed to represent the public interest. Lippmann locates the problem less with the public itself or with shortcomings in the public’s level of education or information; more important are structural issues inherent to the representational claims attributed to public opinion. Statistically, public opinion as expressed in votes represents only a fraction of the ‘corporate public’, that is, of the people (present and future) whose interests ought to be represented. Furthermore, he finds the nexus between the public and government problematic. The public can answer complex issues ‘with the 1 2

Walter Lippmann, Essays in The Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), 14. Ibid., 20.

94

Edgar Landgraf

only words that a great mass qua mass can speak – with a Yes or a No.’ At ‘critical junctures, when the stakes are highest, the prevailing mass opinion will impose what amounts to a veto upon changing the course on which the government is at the time proceeding.’3 Lippmann’s remedy for the decline of Western democracy consists of two steps. He suggests abandoning what he identifies as Jacobinean revolutionary tendencies in which a false reliance on human nature – Lippmann sees their origins in the particular humanist and educational tradition associated with Rousseau and Pestalozzi – has led to ideologies that justify ‘inhuman means […] by the superhuman end.’4 He calls instead for the restoration of a ‘public philosophy’, a return to the eighteenth-century ‘tradition of civility in which the good society, the liberal, democratic way of life at its best, originated and developed.’5 Such a return would help to decouple the political decision-making process from public opinion and even from the elected representatives who are bound to respond to public opinion. The resolute line Lippmann draws between the public and government is quite astonishing. He states explicitly that the voter’s ‘duty is to fill the office and not to direct the office holder’,6 and he suggests that the elected officials ‘owe their primary allegiance not to the opinions of the voters but to the law, to the criteria of their professions, to the integrity of the arts and sciences in which they work, to their own conscientious and responsible convictions of their duty within the rules and the frame of reference they have sworn to respect.’7 Advocating governmental autonomy, Lippmann, a self-avowed liberal,8 appears to recommend less democracy to strengthen 3 4 5 6 7 8

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 90. Lippmann worked as a speechwriter and advisor for the democratic presidents Wilson and Johnson and conceived himself as a defender of liberal democracy. His conservative image as an elitist derives from John Dewey’s critique of Lippmann ( John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems [New York: Holt, 1927]) and the reception of Dewey’s critique in the 1980s and 1990s. Michael Schudson argues that Lippmann’s reputation as a conservative thinker as forged by contemporary media and

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

95

democracy, a more authoritative rule to protect the public from the public, or at least, to protect the public from the rule of public opinion. Lippmann thus challenges what might be called a primary axiom of liberal hope, the notion, as Jürgen Habermas put it only a few years after the publication of Lippmann’s text, that an enlightened ‘political public through public opinion communicates the needs of society to the state’ [Die politische Öffentlichkeit (…) vermittelt durch öffentliche Meinung den Staat mit Bedürfnissen der Gesellschaft].9 The return to the Enlightenment’s tradition of civility that Lippmann advocates does not put the public in charge of directing the state; rather, the public enters the regard of the state by virtue of a philosophy shared by those who govern.10

9

10

communication studies is largely based on a mischaracterization of Lippmann’s work. Michael Schudson, ‘The “Lippmann-Dewey Debate” and the Invention of Walter Lippmann as an Anti-Democrat 1986–1996’, International Journal of Communication 2 (2008), 1031–42. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations of German texts are mine. In later years, Jürgen Habermas comes to embrace a more intricate view of the relationship between state and society that seems to adopt concepts from systems theory – for example, when in the preface to the second edition of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit from 1990 he writes ‘that the power of the state dissolves into the medium for the self-organization of society’ [dass sich die Staatsgewalt zum Medium einer Selbstorganisation der Gesellschaft verflüssigt]. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Mit einem Vorwort zur Neuauflage 1990 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), 22. Yet, he continues to define public opinion as detrimental for the legitimacy of the state and for the articulation of common interests in a pluralistic society. Habermas warns that a shadow will be cast on his book’s contribution toward a contemporary theory of democracy should the unmediated pluralism of competing interests make it doubtful that a common interest could ever emerge in a way that could serve as a measuring stick for public opinion. See Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 33. Nicholas Boyle notes that the literate public Habermas envisioned as a critical resource that informed and helped direct the state in England as much as in German lands was primarily made up by ‘executives of the state power that employed them.’ Nicholas Boyle, ‘Private, Public, and Structural Change’, in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds, Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), 85. Boyle concludes: ‘The German reading public of the Enlightenment talks

96

Edgar Landgraf

I chose Lippmann’s later work as a starting point for this inquiry because of the word of caution it contains about the ever popular call that politics rely more on the public and its opinions; and because it raises three problems concerning the conception of the public and its relation to politics which find a more comprehensive treatment in the works of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann shares twentieth-century doubts about the maturity [Mündigkeit] of citizens,11 but his theory entails a more fundamental questioning of Enlightenment notions of rationality, one that harbours no hopes for a resurrection of eighteenth-century ideals of civil public life (as it was imagined by Lippmann or Habermas).12 Luhmann’s systems theory also seeks alternative descriptions of the relationship between politics and the public whose interests politics claims to represent, challenging in particular the idea of any linear causalities that render the public sphere in a privileged position from which one could best determine the direction of politics or of society as a whole. Luhmann and Lippmann share the reputation of being conservative thinkers, in large part because both insist on the autonomy of government, or what Luhmann calls the political system. As a consequence, they view the public not as a resource for political change, or as its agent, but the public merely constitutes an addressee and audience. In the following, I will focus on the contentious

11

12

to itself as the lower order of an authoritarian hierarchy, perhaps, but as members of that hierarchy, as instruments, not opponents, of the state power.’ Ibid., 86. Niklas Luhmann sees doubts about the reasonability of the citizen emerge as a result of the attempt to include all of the population into the political decision-making process. Niklas Luhmann, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat, (Munich, Vienna: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1981), 31. In his later work, Habermas responds to such doubts by moving expectations of reasonability away from the minds and intentions of individuals and toward the definition of procedural parameters that would allow for rational exchanges and decisions in the context of diverging interests. Luhmann concedes that the refashioning of the term public opinion along systemstheoretical lines forces one to the ‘painful abnegation of expectations of rationality and hopes for a revitalization of civil-republican life.’ Niklas Luhmann, ‘Gesellschaftliche Komplexität und öffentliche Meinung’, in Soziologische Aufklärung, vol. 5: Konstruktivistische Perspektiven, 2nd edn (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993), 182.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

97

concept of political autonomy and its implications for the conception of the public as mirror and audience;13 and I will reflect briefly on some of the political implications of Luhmann’s analysis. While Luhmann is unapologetic about wanting to offer more appropriate descriptions of the complex workings of politics in modern society, rather than remedies or calls for action, his account nevertheless carries a set of political implications that deserve attention.

The Public as Communication Filter Lippmann’s observation about the impossibility of representing a heterogeneous public and its diverse interests in a unified manner is not new. Hegel and Marx recognized the public already as an ideological construct, as the bourgeois minority claiming to speak for humanity as a whole.14 As a 13

Harold Mah, ‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians’, Journal of Modern History 72 (2000), 153–82: 154–5. After an initial wave of rather dismissive reactions, an increasing number of studies have started to paint a subtler picture of Luhmann’s writings on politics. On its relation to the law, see esp. Michael King and Chris Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004), deals with the critical perspective Luhmann offers on the dominant liberal and neo-Marxist traditions. Hans-Joerg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), examines how sweeping a departure from tradition Luhmann’s writings on politics mark. Edwin Czerwick, Systemtheorie der Demokratie: Begriffe und Strukturen im Werk Luhmanns (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), provides a comprehensive review of the concepts and structures that inform Luhmann’s understanding of democracy. 14 See Joachim Whaley on the critique of the concept of the public sphere in Hegel and Marx: ‘Hegel exposed [public opinion] as mere ideology, an anarchic amalgam of individual opinions or at best common sense that only became operational through the state itself and could have no independent existence or function.’ Joachim Whaley, ‘A Public Sphere Before Kant? Habermas and the Historians of Early Modern

98

Edgar Landgraf

representational problem, the issue has been addressed more recently again within the poststructuralist discussion of the public sphere. Harold Mah, for example, stresses how the public sphere insinuates ‘a collective subject’ which is ‘always belied by the reality of disagreeing social groups.’15 While Lippmann draws on unavoidable statistical shortcomings, following Mah we can define the issue more abstractly and note a basic problem inherent to any claims about political representation. The word ‘public’ has no referent in the empirical world; it reduces a multitude of individual people with a multiplicity of conflicting interests and opinions into a single referent. There is no such thing as a public that would precede the unity insinuated by the concept, yet such a schematization is necessary for the purpose of communication. While the spatial metaphor of the English word ‘public sphere’ (German Öffentlichkeit) retains the perception of multiplicity, it nevertheless draws boundaries and gathers within one (metaphorical) space what then can be construed as tendencies, interests and (majority) opinions or consent. The conceptually problematic status of the public sphere, of course, does not interfere with its usefulness. In fact, already a cursory historical reflection suggests that schematization, while ‘belied by reality’, as Mah put it, is precisely the function the noun ‘public’ serves socially. The nominalized form of the adjective, which has been in use only since the eighteenth century, appears at a time when more and more people were thought to participate in the political process and, through books and newspapers, or in coffee houses, found more and more venues to express themselves,

15

Germany’, in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds, Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 18. Habermas cites this critique, but does not see it as a representational problem, but rather as foreboding ‘the structural transformation of the public sphere and ultimately its disintegration into a mass of passive consumers of culture and opinion’ (ibid.). Mah, ‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere’, p. 154. For a concise overview of the reception of the concept of the public sphere since Habermas, including a review of what he calls the ‘postmodern take’ on the public sphere, see John Zammito, ‘The Second Life of the “Public Sphere”: On Charisma and Routinization in the History of a Concept’, in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds, Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 90–119: 108–10.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

99

constituting an audience for (diverging) political opinions and interests. Whereas in older societies, political decisions could be made through the interaction of relatively few individuals who rarely had to justify their decisions vis-à-vis the subjects they governed (though they might have been bound by honour codes or the threat of social upheaval), the formation of modern nation-states and increasing demands for political representation by the governed and their interests (initially by reference to the commonweal) made it necessary to develop concepts which would provide unity and make addressable the multiplicity of individual interests, thoughts and opinions that coexisted within the increasing number of people who were deemed politically relevant. To function politically, then, the concept of the public has to produce an order of simplicity that is distinct from the multiplicity of persons it claims to represent. In doing so, it both creates and hides a basic discontinuity between individuals and the social sphere within which politics operates, attributing agency to individuals while helping to ignore those individuals individually. Luhmann discusses such limits of representation specifically with regard to public opinion. While a long tradition going back to antiquity, and to the distinction between epistéme and dóxa, assumed that opinions form inside the heads of individuals, this seems no longer plausible in the twentieth century when individual opinions appear feeble and intransparent, since their formation is situational.16 Luhmann also points toward a temporal problem: the impossibility to imagine that a particular opinion is actualized by a large number of people at a particular point of time.17 To avoid these empirical problems, he proposes that we dispense with the

16

17

See Luhmann, ‘Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System’, 78. As has often been noted, primarily the mass media provide text and context for the formation of individual opinions; and the mass media accordingly have been criticized for making public opinion invisible as one only gets to hear what the people read in the journal of the same morning. See Rudolf Stichweh, ‘The Genesis of a Global Public Sphere’, Development 46 (March 2003), 7. Luhmann also envisions the chaos that would result if public opinion referred to what actual people actually thought, perceived, considered, or remembered in ‘Gesellschaftliche Komplexität’, 172.

100

Edgar Landgraf

psychological talk about opinions altogether. Since any actualization of public opinion, as the opinion of many, requires communication, he suggests that we instead approach public opinion as a purely communicative phenomenon. In very general terms, then, Luhmann defines public opinion as ‘the result of (public) communication, which at the same time forms the premise for further (public) communication.’18 The change from psychological to social reference circumvents the empirical problem of a unified multiplicity, not by denying but by accepting schematization as the basis for all communication. Luhmann suggests looking at public opinions as social constructs rather than as emanating from individual minds. They function socially not only despite, but because of the term’s inability to represent appropriately the totality of different and ever-changing opinions that form in individual minds. Luhmann’s systems theory invites us to look at how the public functions as a communication device in different social settings (including, but not exclusively for the political system), rather than to ask whether the term references more or less accurately the actual opinions and wishes of real people. From this viewpoint, the representational shortcomings of the term ‘public’ are less important than its function. Luhmann finds evidence for the latter in the semantic changes that the concept of the public underwent in the eighteenth century, when ‘the old distinctions between res publica / res privata and between public / secret contract to one new distinction between public and private.’19 What matters is less what the term purports to represent than what its use excludes, namely that which is considered

18

Ibid. See also Niklas Luhmann, ‘Meinungsfreiheit, öffentliche Meinung, Demokratie’, in Ernst-Joachim Lampe, ed., Meinungsfreiheit als Menschenrecht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998), 101. 19 Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), 279. Luhmann points to Lucian Hölscher, Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Öffentlichkeit in der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), when he refers to the history of these semantic changes. In a nutshell, Hölscher shows how the legal distinction between res publica and res privata merges with the political distinction between public and secret affairs in the course of the eighteenth century.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

101

private. Luhmann suggests we conceive the concept of the public as a communication filter. As the eighteenth century fundamentally challenged the stratified social order of Europe, invoking the public helped filter out private interests and role-specific concerns from communication. Like individuality, freedom, equality and similar ‘neutralization concepts’, the function of the public was to undermine (i.e. help neutralize) the old stratified social order and old dependencies on religion and traditional patronage/ cliental relations.20 It is in this historical context that the public replaces the monarch as the meta-normative ground; public opinion becomes ‘the Holy Spirit of the political system’.21

The Political System Luhmann reads the liberalization of politics in the context of the functional differentiation of society, that is, as the result of a long historical process that culminated in the eighteenth century and included the differentiation of an autonomous political system. The formation of social systems means that communications organize themselves around particular codes (in politics, the code between government and the governed, which in democracies is further differentiated into the distinction between government and opposition), and come to be dedicated to fulfil a particular function (for politics, the making of collectively binding decisions) in a particular, symbolically generalized medium (power for politics). Accordingly, the political system is not a monolithic, centralized agent that could be pinpointed geographically or identified with specific institutions (the legislature, the executive) or specific characters; rather, we are dealing with a highly complex and dynamic entity that is constituted reiteratively by a wide variety of communications that take place in a wide variety of institutional and 20 See Luhmann, ‘Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System’, 78–9. 21 Luhmann, Politik der Gesellschaft, 286.

102

Edgar Landgraf

non-institutional settings and revolve around the aforementioned code, function, and take place in said medium. Accordingly, Luhmann identifies three components that constitute the political system, namely politics, administration and what he calls Publikum, that is, the public conceived as an audience. Luhmann considers as most important administrative institutions. Historically, he points toward the establishment of public office [öffentliche Ämter] as an important evolutionary accomplishment in the differentiation of political power. They made it possible to distinguish the political use of power from other forms of exerting social pressure or extending secret favours. Luhmann can correlate the formation of public offices with the end of periods of increased conflict, arguing that they responded to the desire for protection and peace by supporting the stable, recursively usable and reusable codification of power. Public offices provide spaces that make political power visible (through office buildings, officers, forms one has to fill out, etc.) without constantly having to deploy the instruments of power.22 Administration is primarily concerned with the articulation and implementation of political decisions in the form of rules, regulations and laws (and sometimes with keeping issues from becoming part of the political debate). It is here, so to speak, at the periphery of the political system, that the system regulates access to the public, namely in the form of asking, or allowing, individuals, interest groups and corporations to cohere with rules and regulations, to file grievances, demand exceptions, or even help write regulations and legislation. With regard to the latter, Luhmann adopts a corporatist perspective that sees the highly selective granting of access to special interests as unavoidable;23 but Luhmann also notes the political risks that these interactions entail when they become public, that is, when politics comes to question the dovetailing of special (corporate or individual) with public interests. 22 23

See Luhmann, Politik der Gesellschaft, 91–2. Michael King and Chris Thornhill note how Luhmann sees ‘corporate organizations of civil interest […] contribute in important ways to communications at the juncture between the administration and the public.’ King and Thornhill, Theory of Politics and Law, 124.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

103

Before turning to politics, where the public figures most prominently, including in communications about the difference between public and special interests, I want to briefly address the third part of the political system, what Luhmann calls Publikum. The latter refers to voters, an audience that lacks organization or institutional parameters in itself, but is an important component for the administration of elections.24 While elections help stabilize the political system by keeping it flexible, their Yes or No provides little in terms of substantive input regarding the content and direction of political programs, themes and decisions. Like the audience of a play, it will merely indicate the popularity of suggested programs or political nominees, and reflect approval or disapproval of past decisions, leaving it up to the imagination (or research efforts) of politicians to figure out reasons and responses for their success or failure at the ballot box. In the political system, discussions, election successes or failures are part of the subsystem ‘politics’, which Luhmann understands as ‘every communication that serves the function to prepare collectively binding decisions by testing and condensing their chances for consensus.’25 With respect to politics in this narrower sense, the public serves first and foremost as a means for the legitimization of political decisions and of the political system in general. For Luhmann, this does not mean, however, that the actual individuals that we think make up the public would have the final power of legitimization; rather the political system constructs and employs the public and public opinion as communication devices for its self-legitimization.26 That the public, since the eighteenth century, has

24 Luhmann elaborates the differentiation of the political system along these lines in Die Politik der Gesellschaft, 253–73. Edwin Czerwick offers a concise analysis of the function the ‘Publikum’ – a late discovery in Luhmann’s work – and ‘public opinion’ play for the political system. See esp. Czerwick, System Theorie und Demokratie, 85–8 and 100–104. 25 Luhmann, Politik der Gesellschaft, 254. 26 For an in-depth analysis of Luhmann’s idea of political self-legitimization see Michael King and Chris Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law, esp. 72–6; and see 166–81 on politics’ complex relationship to the law and why Luhmann finds that power trumps legislation in modern society.

104

Edgar Landgraf

served as the meta-normative ground for the political system, then, is not indicative of its reliance on actual people and their opinions, but it suggests that the political system (made up by politics, administration, and audience) has a need for self-legitimization and thus has gained autonomy. Luhmann considers the idea of the people being the final arbiters over the affairs of the government a mere myth that does not correspond to the structure and place of the political system in modern society. In modern society, only the political system can make political decisions and only the political system can legitimize itself and its decisions. What role, then, does the public, which takes a central place in political communications, play in modern politics? What is its filter function? And isn’t there a contradiction in Luhmann’s argument when he links political autonomy, together with the suggestion of independence from the private interests and opinions of actual people, to a legitimization process that ties political decisions closely to invocations of the public and its interests and opinions? Edwin Czerwick tries to resolve this apparent contradiction, arguing that the myth of the people governing themselves, while not an accurate description of the reality of political domination, is nevertheless indispensable on an ideological basis, providing democracies with acceptance and plausibility.27 But distinguishing between actual structure and ideology merely displaces the paradox: how can one speak of structural autonomy when political autonomy for its legitimization remains fundamentally tied to the idea of the sovereignty of the people?

The Theatre of Autonomy To bring into better focus the complex mechanisms with which politics simultaneously includes the public in its decision-making process and excludes the public from this process, we need to take a closer look at how 27

See Czerwick, Systemtheorie der Demokratie, 46.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

105

contemporary systems theory defines autonomy. Unlike older iterations of systems theory, Luhmann insists that systems always and exclusively operate in an environment that is specific to each system. Autonomy here means that the system constructs (operationally) what it recognizes as its environment and how it reacts to what it recognizes as its environment. Thus, a financial crisis will affect not only the economic system, but many different social systems, such as art, education, law, medicine, politics and so on, but it will do so differently and only in as much as system operations indeed are tied to economic factors, that is, in most cases in a highly mediated way – considering, for instance, that the effects of economic changes on art or the law are difficult to predict. Systems theory’s concept of autonomy does not deny interactions between a system and its environment or dependencies between systems,28 but systems theory aims for alternative descriptions of such interactions. In particular, it wants to avoid linear causal attributions, including dialectically framed theories of domination (be they political, economic, material, or otherwise). In a functionally differentiated society, multiple systems produce turbulent environments for each other, enabling and constantly restricting each other’s operational choices. The understanding of autonomy along the system/environment distinction carries two important consequences with regard to the conception of the public. First, it suggests that what politics observes as ‘the public’ – i.e. how the public is used in its communications – is specific to the political system and can be quite different from what another system might observe as its public. The education and health systems, for example, tend to view the public as inherently deficient, perpetually in need of education or medical treatment, and not as a resource of rationality and ultimate arbiter of its decisions. The same is true for how systems view public opinion. As each social subsystem creates the public in its own image, the operational history and institutional parameters of the system will decide what are 28

In fact, under the conditions of functional differentiation, the autonomy of individual systems is intricately linked to the existence of other autonomous systems without which no system could maintain the integrity of its operations (think of the modern political system’s necessary reliance on the law, for example, or its reliance on the mass media).

106

Edgar Landgraf

recognized as relevant issues, as evidence, as impossible to ignore, and so on, as well as how the system can and will respond to such issues. A protest, for example, might be ignored by one party, highlighted by another (forcing the other party / parties to respond), it might be represented as a justified and peaceful expression of legitimate public concerns, or it might highlight any incidents of unruliness to discredit the legitimacy of the protest. Modern political systems tend to be responsive to (large enough) protests; how they will react to a protest, however, will be determined not by the wishes and desires of the protesters but by politics. Subsequently, a protest might help to advance or hinder a particular political agenda that might be in line with, or run counter to, the causes the protesters hoped to support. Much of the supposed ‘meaning’ of the protest will be defined by the mass media, of course, and their tendency to focus on what makes for more interesting news. Politics in turn will decide how much it wants to dis/credit the media’s representation of the event, how, if at all, it will react to it, try to influence its reporting, etc. Second, the idea of autonomy deprives the public of its privileged position of reasonability, which it has held in liberal thought from the Enlightenment to Habermas and beyond. Luhmann’s social theory suggests that each system follows its own reasoning and develops (and is indebted to) its own system-specific rationality. This does not contest reason but the idea of a universal reason that would emanate from individual minds rather than be the product of a process of continued social formation. With regard to politics, this seems especially apparent. One merely needs to consider how denying evolution or climate change, while scientifically utter nonsense, can become politically reasonable positions to hold in pursuit of a (conservative) political agenda. The media (and through the media individual observers) are prone to note discrepancies between science and politics (or science and religion), and where such discrepancies are noted they will likely amplify feelings of communality and common sense violation; however, how such feelings will, in turn, affect the political debate is again defined by politics and will play out quite differently in rural Kentucky than in New York City. Varying expectations of reasonability apply to academic observations of the political system such as Luhmann’s, too, of course. If uttered or read in a political context, they will, intended

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

107

or not, imply a certain political bias, and, one suspects, will be of rather limited use in the pursuit of a particular political agenda. In this regard, it is surely not wrong to accuse Luhmann or Lippmann of a conservative political bias; it merely misses the point that there is no immediate translation of academic reasoning into political reasoning or action.

The Public as Mirror and Audience Based on these conceptual considerations, the question is how politics specifically constructs its public and to what ends. And how does an externalized public with its diverse interests and opinions nevertheless come to affect indirectly the political decision-making process? How is the public not only excluded from the political process by virtue of its inclusion (as a communication device that helps to ignore the individual voices who make up the mass of the people), but how are these voices also included by virtue of this exclusion, namely as the meta-normative ground toward which the communications are geared that make up the political system? To put it metaphorically, what passes through the communication filter and how? Luhmann draws on an old metaphor, one used also by Lippmann, and compares the public’s function to that of a mirror. While Lippmann, however, laments how politicians use the public to observe themselves and, in the process, neglect to observe the realities outside their window,29 Luhmann gives the metaphor a more positive spin. He agrees that this mirror is a symbol of opacity, but he understands self-observation not as an expression of vanity, or as taking place at the expense of recognizing of reality (reality in Luhmann is always a system-specific construct, nothing that could be observed outside the window, one might say); rather, drawing on basic cybernetic principles (W. Ross Ashby), self-observation is acknowledged as the way systems condition themselves. Observing the public allows the 29 Lippmann, Walter, Essays in The Public Philosophy, 49.

108

Edgar Landgraf

political system to reflect on and adjust its decisions.30 This does not mean that politics recognizes what real people really think at a particular point of time; the politicians merely ‘see themselves and other politicians, allowing them to coordinate expectations’.31 What politicians see, then, is how at a particular time they construct the public, and what they think and insinuate the public wants, needs, and expects of them. Needless to say, as with any system of communication, what the mirror reveals is constantly changing as communication about the public and about the public’s needs and opinions constantly change. As resolutely as the mirror metaphor draws a line between the political system and what is traditionally perceived as an independent public sphere, it makes it difficult to account for the apparent sensibilities that the modern political system has developed toward communications that it finds in its environment. For better or worse, the modern political system constantly wants to manipulate and attune itself to what it perceives as public interest 30

31

Niklas Luhmann uses the mirror metaphor on a number of occasions (see Politik der Gesellschaft, 286; ‘Politische Steuerungsfähigkeit eines Gemeinwesens’, in Reinhard Göhner, ed., Die Gesellschaft für morgen (Munich: Piper, 1993), 58; ‘Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System: Zur Theorie der öffentlichen Meinung’, in Jürgen Wilke, ed., Öffentliche Meinung – Theorie, Methoden, Befunde: Beiträge zu Ehren von Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (Freiburg: Alber, 1992), 84; ‘Gesellschaftliche Komplexität’, 181). Dirk Baecker expands on the metaphor. He describes the public as a border that can be observed from both sides. On the outside, a system can observe how it is observed; on the inside, the system can observe how it reacts to how it perceives itself to be observed. Baecker suggests that it is only in confronting itself in its interaction with the mirror provided by the public that the system can develop internally the ability for variation and selection that allow it to react indifferently as well as sensitively to what is going on in the public sphere (see ‘Oszillierende Öffentlichkeit’, in Wozu Gesellschaft? (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), 89). Luhmann, ‘Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System’, 84. Luhmann specifies one year later, ‘they do not see themselves, but merely the face they put on and turn toward this mirror’ (‘Gesellschaftliche Komplexität’, 181). In a similar vein, Rudo, following Harrison White, describes the public as a ‘second-order mirror’ in which one cannot see oneself, but incessantly sees others who observe oneself, from which the observer derives information about oneself (see Stichweh, ‘The Genesis of a Global Public Sphere’, 5).

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

109

or opinion. Clearly, the political system seems able to adapt to changes in what outside observers (the media, demographers, intellectuals, the legal system, etc.) can recognize as changes in public opinion (think gay marriage). To account for the sensibility of the political system, I want to return to a different metaphor that emerged in the eighteenth century, namely the understanding of the public as an audience (German Publikum), and expand its use beyond Luhmann’s definition of this term. I want to suggest that we think of politics not merely as a narcissistic act, but as an improvisational play that recognizes its audience in two ways. First, it may recognize the theatre audience in front of it as a source for new themes, characters and changes in the story line. In such a play it might seem as if the audience directed the doings on stage, but in reality it is up to the performers to decide which, when and how much they react to the audience’s input and what to do with this input. The performance, in other words, is not bound by the intentions of the audience members; it is bound, however, by its own codes: to be innovative, entertaining, to construct a social commentary, and so on. Second, as audience, the public also figures in terms of guiding success expectations. In this case, the potential audience is as important as the actual audience inside the theatre in leading the performers to reflect on the success of their performance and adjust programs, especially if the audience fails to show up. As with politics, improvisation requires specific skills, has its own history (that will decide what can and what cannot be presented as innovative, for example), its own institutions and its own procedures, which it will review and adjust if the audience decides to withdraw its support. Querying the audience itself might be incorporated into this process, but this, too, is part of the show as it is left up to performers or political experts to select topics, decide on how to address them, and whether/when to make programmatic changes. The point here is that the performers can rely on indicators (audience participation, interruptions, ticket sales, or surveys, the media, action groups, elections) that serve as orientation points for adjustments of the performance. These adjustments are not immediate expressions of the will of the individuals who are queried or merely imagined (what the voter presumably wants or needs); nevertheless, their presence helps the actors to attune their actions to audience expectations – which in turn can be expected to change in response to

110

Edgar Landgraf

the performance, starting a dynamic process of constant readjustments. The openness-from-closure model allows us to appreciate the internal pressures that guide political action and the highly mediated fashion in which modern politics selects and engages what it observes as its public well beyond the Yes or No it might receive from elections, without reducing such interactions to linear causal relationships.32 Luhmann links the fact that public opinion has become a constant focal point for politics also to another problem specific to modernity, namely the basic disorientation of the modern political system. Public opinion replaces what in older societies was the purpose of tradition. It offers reference points, which politics can rely on in ways that protect it from reproaches.33 Opinions help determine ‘premises for personnel and factual decisions, which in the form of office holders and party programs can be made part of the government organization, without knowing the future’.34 The unpredictability of the future is neither the consequence of a lack of steering attempts, nor is it a result of matters left to pure chance. Rather, precisely because ‘all social systems permanently manipulate differences, they are no longer in a position to project and approximate future states of the system. For that reason, the result can be determined only through evolution’.35 This does not mean that government would be unable to project a budget, or more precisely, that it would be unable to project that budget projections will have to be revised. It cannot project, however, its future political manœuvrability, what it will want, and what it will be able to do one, two or three years from now.

32

For Luhmann, political action rests on the illusion of being able to produce causal effects. The perception of causality is a (reductive) explanatory principle that can be applied only after the effect, for ‘only when the structural coupling succeeds, causes become causes and effects’ (see Politik der Gesellschaft, 24). 33 See Luhmann, ‘Gesellschaftliche Komplexität’, 181. 34 Luhmann, ‘Meinungsfreiheit, öffentliche Meinung, Demokratie’, 109. 35 Luhmann, ‘Politische Steuerungsfähigkeit eines Gemeinwesens’, 60.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

111

Political Apathy? The apparent conservatism of Luhmann’s theory, an issue that has marred the early reception of his work in the United States, has received a more refined treatment in recent years.36 Luhmann himself points out that conservatism is a paradoxical and hopeless endeavour, as in a constantly evolving society one ‘would have to advocate fundamental change to preserve anything’.37 In the following, I want to address a more narrow question about the political implications of Luhmann’s analysis, one that concerns one of the most radical and perhaps least pleasant aspects of his theory, what Hans-Georg Moeller recently called ‘the fourth insult to human vanity’38: the claim that modern society neither follows a particular trajectory nor can be made to follow one. It is what keeps Luhmann from offering any narrative of redemption, suggesting remedies for social ills, or otherwise uttering calls for action that could fuel hopes for the betterment of the human condition, the disappearance of violence, or for other forms of human progress. Even for the modern welfare state, the wellbeing of its members is not at the centre of the political subsystem or of society as a whole, Luhmann claims;39 the primary purpose of a system, if one wants 36 King and Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law, Czerwick, Systemtheorie der Demokratie, Christian Borch, Niklas Luhmann (New York: Routledge, 2011), and Moeller, The Radical Luhmann, all dedicate chapters to the question of Luhmann’s conservatism, trying to negotiate the highly radical consequences of Luhmann’s anti-foundational theory with some of the apparently conservative conclusions he draws (e.g. his critique of the welfare state, his call for limited government, let alone his work for Germany’s conservative party, the CDU). 37 Peter Gente, Heidi Paris and Martin Weinmann, eds, Niklas Luhmann. Short Cuts 1 (Frankfurt/M.: Zweitausendeins, 2000), 36. 38 Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 19. 39 Luhmann defines the welfare state as a realized form of political inclusion. Its trajectory, however, is not so much the continued increase of everyone’s standard of living, but an increase in the discovery of ever new problems as public obligations, mentioning boat piers for Sunday sailors and hand dryers in public toilets as examples

112

Edgar Landgraf

to define one, would be to maintain itself by continuing with its systemspecific operations. While Luhmann’s ‘deconstruction of politics’40 makes it difficult to connect him to any overtly liberal political agenda, the more pressing question is whether his theory is anything more than an invitation to apathy. In conclusion, I want to point toward three areas where Luhmann’s theoretical stance has something to offer for the more pragmatically inclined (liberal?) mind, despite his writing’s lack of any actionist rhetoric and his refusal to charge his analysis with fear and moral imperatives.41 After all, Luhmann claims that system theory presents a more appropriate form to address the ‘urgent questions posed by contemporary society’42 than do action theories in the vein of the Frankfurt School. As King and Thornhill43 point out, the autonomy of the political system is clearly viewed as an asset (at least for a functionally differentiated society), and Luhmann identifies threats to this system and derives possible courses of action that might be better suited to maintain the institutional parameters that allow the political system to retain its autonomy. In fact, quite in line with Lippmann, many of Luhmann’s seemingly conservative positions derive from his concern for maintaining the autonomy and stability of the political system by limiting its social reach (which the welfare state in his assessment seems to threaten).

(see Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat, 27). It is the latter that seems problematic to him as it might lead to social de-differentiation (on the problem of dedifferentiation, see King and Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law, 81). 40 Moeller, The Radical Luhmann, 88. 41 While Luhmann, addressing the ecological dangers modern society faces, concedes that theoretical analyses are in a difficult position vis-à-vis communications that use fear to charge themselves morally, he argues that the rhetoric of fear pays for its proximity to action with its distance to the underlying social realities, leading it to ignore in an irresponsible manner social interdependencies and mediations of effects. See esp. chapter 19 ‘Anxiety, Morality, and Theory’ in Niklas Luhmann, Ecological Communication, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 127–32. 42 Luhmann, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat, 18. 43 See King and Thornhill, Theory of Politics and Law.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

113

A first, rather simple lesson one might draw from Luhmann’s sociological reflections is the recognition that the role and flexibility of politics should not be overestimated in modern society. Even the most heartfelt promises of change will only produce limited change. Politics is as much constrained by its own structures and operational history as it is by its interactions with other social subsystems. This is not to say that the failings of the political system could not have catastrophic consequences (producing wars, increasing social inequalities, exacerbating ecological crises, destroying wealth, and so on), but the operations of other systems might have similar results and can equally affect individual lives or groups of people. In this regard, Luhmann’s short book Ecological Communication serves as a model with which he investigates how different social subsystems – the economy, law, science, politics, religion, education, and the media as well as social movements and even ethics – are able and simultaneously limited in how they can address looming ecological dangers. Interestingly, Luhmann appears to identify the education system as most important for society’s attempt to confront ecological dangers, as the education system offers perhaps the best chances for an extension of intensified ecological communication – under the condition that two thresholds of resonance are overcome: that of the education system itself and that of all other function systems of society in which new attitudes, evaluations and sensibilities to problems are introduced through education.44

In this vein, recognizing the autonomy of the political system carries another rather simple lesson: while it is not only politics which deals with the pressing issues of the day, in order to affect politics, one might consider getting involved politically (rather than hope that academic discussion or art or religion will drive political action). This can take many forms, from protest to participation in consensus-seeking communications to subjecting oneself to the pressures and dynamics of actual political institutions, for instance, by running for public office. We might suspect that the latter will offer the most influence, but it will also be faced with the most practical constraints. 44 Luhmann, Ecological Communication, 104.

114

Edgar Landgraf

Luhmann furthermore envisions a possible change in political rhetoric that would attune politics better to the unpredictability inherent to modern society. In the short essay on the ‘Political Ability to Steer a Commonwealth’, one of his last essays and one of the few places where Luhmann comes close to offering pragmatic advice and even the vision of a possible future, he suggests that a ‘cognitive openness’ should replace the normative and emotional bonds which politics tends to emphasize. This would allow for a more realistic assessment of the state of affairs and offer new possibilities of ‘communicative behaviour’. Luhmann even wonders about the possibility of a ‘culture of provisional accommodation’ [‘eine Kultur der provisorischen Verständigung’],45 which would ‘accept uncertainty as common ground and try to make determinations that can be modified should new circumstances or new insights arise’.46 As a consequence, the aspect of time would become more important for politics. Change would have to be expected, and priorities and values would have to be constantly adapted relative to such change. We might view such cognitive openness, anticipatory behaviour and the acceptance of the provisional status of one’s own doings again as calling for improvisational behaviour – improvisation, then, not only in the way in which politics engages the public, but also in how it engages with its own activities. Politics modelled after improvisational behaviour would be asked to remain cognitively open and seek innovative choices over the repetition of set plans, unyielding values, rigid rules and the continuation of existing hierarchies. Such a culture would be in a better position to react more quickly to the predictable unpredictability created by the conditions of modernity, an era Luhmann understands as defined by constant change. Luhmann’s position is hardly conservative, but is it realistic? Luhmann himself is sceptical whether political rhetoric will change in this direction.47 He is well aware that politics cannot do without fixed programs, plans and visions of the future – and it is doubtful,

45 Luhmann, ‘Politische Steuerungsfähigkeit eines Gemeinwesens’, 61. 46 Ibid. 47 Luhmann, ‘Politische Steuerungsfähigkeit eines Gemeinwesens’, 62.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

115

one might add, that improvisation, while indispensable practically, could become a party-political program or otherwise a declared goal of politics. Finally, Luhmann’s theory also implies a strong Nietzschean tendency regarding the possibility to negate or overcome assertions of power and violence. The political system is about power, and hence only functions if there is a credible threat of violence. Luhmann compares this ‘threat of violence’ to the function money plays in the economic system: it is a precondition for the differentiation of a separate political system.48 Violence does not disappear in modern society, but it is bound as threat and consolidated through the differentiation of the political system.49 Luhmann agrees with Lippmann that, more dangerous than the latent violence that continues to sustain the political system, are challenges to this system based on ideologies which hope to avoid violence altogether. Likewise, demands for consensus and solidarity in political discourse do not escape the contentious structure of the political. No matter how sincere their intentions, such demands constitute but another form of exerting political power – a form that in its attempt to suppress opposition (or dissent) runs counter to the democratic structure it often purports to support. This aligns Luhmann’s thought with a long tradition of scepticism in political thought that has accepted, to use Chantal Muffle’s distinction, if not antagonism, then agonism, as the indispensable basis of the political.50 48 See Luhmann, Politik der Gesellschaft, 52. 49 Ibid., 54. 50 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005) adapts a point most prominently raised by Carl Schmitt who warned against the danger of universal humanistic ideals being politically (ab)used to justify inhumane means. On the democratic virtues of antagonistic rather than consensual political models, see also Juliane Rebentisch, Die Kunst der Freiheit: Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz. Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2012). Thomas Wirtz, ‘Entscheidung. Niklas Luhmann und Carl Schmitt’, in Albrecht Koschorke and Cornelia Vismann, eds, Widerstände der Systemtheorie: Kulturhistorische Analysen zum Werk von Niklas Luhmann (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 175–97, William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents, and Michael King and Chris Thorndale, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law also address parallels and differences between Schmitt’s political theory and Luhmann’s social theory.

116

Edgar Landgraf

Luhmann’s view of democracy is tied to this tradition. He understands the formation of modern democracies as an evolutionary step that helped stabilize the political system and its autonomy, not because it endorses consensus and shared values, but because it has institutionalized an antagonistic structure in ways that help protect the political system. In democracies, the distinction between government and opposition allows the system to accommodate better political challenges and failures. Rather than having to alter the system itself, democracies merely replace the government with the opposition and thus are able to continue their operations with minimal interruption. They provide a successful ‘balance of stability and variety’.51 Luhmann’s theory entails no guarantees that this balance will persist, nor that it is suited to solve the major challenges that modern society faces (economic sustainability, environmental changes, nuclear threats, medical epidemics); it merely suggests that in a highly complex society this is the most effective way to address such challenges – and in this respect, his theory entails a care for political autonomy and the continued differentiation of political from other social concerns. In this regard, Luhmann’s theory does not imply apathy, but pragmatism, the continued and openminded involvement that addresses particular problems within the possibilities and limits granted by the political and other social subsystems. While this neither is an ideal state of affairs, nor promises to become one, Luhmann’s theory gives us no reason to assume that the current situation is hopeless, considering the resonances that have developed between the political system and what it constructs as its public.

51 Moeller, The Radical Luhmann, 88. Moeller compares the stability democracies gain from their flexibility to that of airplane wings. See ibid., 91.

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

117

Bibliography Baecker, Dirk, ‘Oszillierende Öffentlichkeit’ [The Oscillating Public Sphere], in Wozu Gesellschaft? (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007), 80–101. Borch, Christian, Niklas Luhmann (Oxon: Routledge, 2011). Boyle, Nicholas, ‘Private, Public, and Structural Change’, in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds, Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 75–89. Czerwick, Edwin, Systemtheorie der Demokratie. Begriffe und Strukturen im Werk Luhmanns [Systems Theory and Democracy. Concepts and Structures in Luhmann’s Work] (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008). Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927). Habermas, Jürgen, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Mit einem Vorwort zur Neuauflage 1990 [The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. With a Preface to the New Edition 1990] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1990). Hölscher, Lucian, Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine begriffgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Öffentlichkeit in der frühen Neuzeit [The Public Sphere and the Secret: A Conceptual-Historical Investigation of the Emergence of the Public Sphere in the Early Modern Period] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979). King, Michael, and Chris Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Lippmann, Walter, Essays in The Public Philosophy (Boston; Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1955). Luhmann, Niklas, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat [Political Theory in the Welfare State] (Munich: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1981). , Ecological Communication. Translated by John Bednarz, Jr. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989). , ‘Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System: Zur Theorie der öffentlichen Meinung’ [Observation of the Observers in the Political System: On the Theory of Public Opinion], in Jürgen Wilke, ed., Öffentliche Meinung – Theorie, Methoden, Befunde: Beiträge zu Ehren von Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (Freiburg: Alber, 1992), 77–86. , ‘Gesellschaftliche Komplexität und öffentliche Meinung’ [Societal Complexity and Public Opinion], in Soziologische Aufklärung Vol. 5. Konstruktivistische Perspektiven, 2nd edn (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993), 170–82.

118

Edgar Landgraf

, ‘Politische Steuerungsfähigkeit eines Gemeinwesens’ [The Possibility of Steering a Commwealth], in Reinhard Göhner, ed., Die Gesellschaft für morgen (Munich: Piper, 1993), 50–65. , ‘Meinungsfreiheit, öffentliche Meinung, Demokratie’ [Freedom of Opinion, Public Opinion, Democracy], in Ernst-Joachim Lampe, ed., Meinungsfreiheit als Menschenrecht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998), 99–110. , ‘Biographie, Attitüden, Zettelkasten. Interview’, in Peter Gente, Heidi Paris and Martin Weinmann, eds, Niklas Luhmann. Short Cuts 1 (Frankfurt/M.: Zweitausendeins, 2000), 99–112. (Reprint of Archimedes und wir [Berlin: Merve 1987], 125–55). , Die Politik der Gesellschaft [The Politics of Society] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2000). Mah, Harold, ‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians’, Journal of Modern History 72 (2000), 153–82. Moeller, Hans-Georg, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political (London; New York: Routledge, 2005). Rasch, William, Sovereignty and Its Discontents. On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004). Rebentisch, Juliane, Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz [The Art of Freedom. On the Dialectic of Democratic Existence] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2012). Schmitt, Carl, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und 3 Corollarien [The Concept of the Political], reprint of the 1963 edition (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1987). Schudson, Michael, ‘The “Lippmann-Dewey Debate” and the Invention of Walter Lippmann as an Anti-Democrat 1986–1996’, International Journal of Communication 2 (2008), 1031–42. Stichweh, Rudolf, ‘The Genesis of a Global Public Sphere’, Development 46 (March 2003), 26–9. accessed 5 June 2012. Whaley, Joachim, ‘A Public Sphere Before Kant? Habermas and the Historians of Early Modern Germany’, in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds, Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 15–34. Wirtz, Thomas, ‘Entscheidung. Niklas Luhmann und Carl Schmitt’ [Decision. Niklas Luhmann and Carl Schmitt], in Albrecht Koschorke and Cornelia Vismann,

Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann

119

eds, Widerstände der Systemtheorie. Kulturhistorische Analysen zum Werk von Niklas Luhmann (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 175–97. Zammito, John, ‘The Second Life of the “Public Sphere”. On Charisma and Routinization in the History of a Concept’, in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds, Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 90–119.

Christian J. Emden

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere? Habermas and the Modern State

The central claim of this chapter is as straightforward as it might be contentious: Jürgen Habermas’ account of the liberal public sphere, as it developed from his early, more historical work to his later writings on constitutionalism and democracy, dissolves the public sphere into the constituted powers and norms that shape the administrative procedures of the modern state, thus underestimating the constituent power of publics. Although it is certainly the case that Habermas’ liberal public sphere represents an ideal type, it nevertheless has to refer to really existing publics; otherwise, it would lack political relevance. The primary concern of this chapter, however, is not really with existing publics, but with the way in which Habermas envisions these publics along the lines of an ideal-type liberal public sphere. As a consequence of an almost exclusive emphasis on norms over political practices, Habermas’ account of the liberal public sphere also tends to underestimate the way in which ‘real politics’, to adopt Raymond Geuss’ term, is shaped only partially by norms and perhaps rather more so by concrete interests, emotional attachments and power.1 For Habermas, substantive interests and issues might be questioned by a public, but the underlying procedures and norms that allow for such criticism cannot be open to debate and contestation, and this downplays that such norms are in fact often contested. In a very specific sense, then, the liberal public sphere, as an ideal type of political communication in modern civil society, is a victim of its own success. The irony of Habermas’ account is that the normative, emancipatory demands that drive the emergence of the public 1

See Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

122

Christian J. Emden

sphere can only gain normatively binding force once they have been constitutionalized. Such constitutionalization tends to undercut the pluralism of democratic polities, since it allows for only those publics to be recognized whose claims already fit existing constitutional norms: if ‘[r]ights of political participation refer to the legal institutionalization of a public opinion- and will-formation terminating in decisions about policies and laws’, then publics that contest a given legal institutionalization should not have a right to political participation.2 Habermas’ position implies that the model of a liberal public sphere cannot account for constitutional change or long-term political transformations as being driven by groups or institutions other than those of the modern administrative state. If democracy is supposed to hold water as the practical organization of pluralist polities, political change, if at all, cannot simply come from government. Moreover, the universalist claims that stand behind Habermas’ vision of the normative Rechtsstaat, as they are grounded in a Kantian discourse ethics of law and democracy, cannot fully take into account how substantive political claims are often context-specific and historically variable. Since both publics and the state are characterized by an inherent historicity, their relationship is marked by what I am going to describe as the paradox of constitutionalism: the constituent power of publics always stands in a precarious relationship to the constituted powers of the state and its normative procedures, which are legitimated by an appeal to the very constituent power they necessarily have to limit. The dynamics of constitutions depends on this paradoxical relationship, which prevents the institutions of the modern state as much as emotionally charged public opinion from gaining final normative authority. To put it more sharply, the paradoxical relationship between the constituent power of publics and the constituted powers of the state safeguards democratic life in pluralist polities. This also introduces a requirement into democratic life that is not fully compatible with Habermas’ vision of the liberal public sphere: democracies need to be able to endure that politics is to a considerable extent marked

2

Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 151.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

123

by agonistic relationships that cannot fully be resolved on the grounds of a consensus-oriented discourse ethics of law and democracy.3

1. ‘The bourgeois public sphere’, Habermas famously noted, ‘may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public.’4 As a historically specific development, the emergence of a liberal public sphere in the course of the early eighteenth century was not without precedent, but what set the eighteenth-century public sphere apart was that private people conceived themselves as a counterbalance to the arcana imperii of the state. Lawyers, merchants, physicians, university professors and civil servants increasingly turned the public sphere ‘against the public authorities themselves to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.’5 The public sphere was mobilized by the direct interventions of the state into the private lives of a relatively small, albeit educated and often financially fairly secure, segment of eighteenthcentury society. What is at stake in the eighteenth-century public sphere is questions over taxation and trade, but since taxation, and thus the control of capital flows, in particular was a central interest of government, the emergence of the public sphere seemingly gave rise to the authority of civil society in opposition to the public authority of the eighteenth-century state. The need to provide justification for the state’s actions undermined See, for instance, Mark Wenman, Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013). 4 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 27. 5 Ibid. 3

124

Christian J. Emden

the principle of the arcana imperii, which was accelerated by the increasing discussion – in private clubs and salons, in coffee houses and taverns – of matters pertaining to the state.6 At first sight, then, the public sphere appears to be directed against the state, or at least it gains form as a counterbalance to the state’s policy interests that, even after the Peace Treaty of Westphalia and the establishment of territorial nation states, were often marked by dynastic concerns and imperial desires. Wherever the emergence of a public sphere was embedded in an already existing parliamentary tradition that practically imposed limits on the ruler’s actions, for instance, because of its budgetary authority, as in the case of England, the public sphere largely served as a counterbalance to the raison d’État. Absolutist forms of government with limited or powerless parliamentary structures, as in the case of eighteenthcentury France, invited the emergence of a more radical public sphere that stood in direct opposition to the interests of government.7 This situation becomes more complex as soon as we recognize that – for instance, in the German-speaking lands – some of the driving forces behind the increasing importance of the public sphere were representatives of the state, mainly civil servants, themselves trained and educated by university professors who, in turn, had much contact with those active in the publicly relevant private economy.8 The boundaries between state and public sphere, thus, have always been more fluid and less certain than generally assumed.

6 7 8

See Ernst Manheim, Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung: Studien zur Soziologie der Öffentlichkeit (Brno: Rohrer, 1933), and Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14–30. See James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public Sphere in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17–78. See Nicholas Boyle, ‘Private, Public, and Structural Change: The German Problem’, in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds, Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 75–89; Ian F. McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 13–127; and Richard van Dülmen, Die Gesellschaft der Aufklärer: Zur bürgerlichen Empanzipation und aufklärerischen Kultur in Deutschland (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986).

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

125

Since political life is always public life, and since any polity entails some form of pluralism, the public sphere continues to be crucially relevant as a site for both the practices and the legitimation of democracy. As an aggregate of different interests embodied by different publics that sometimes overlap and sometimes lack common ground, the public sphere raises the problem of how we can ‘envisage a form of commonality strong enough to institute a “demos” but nonetheless compatible with certain forms of pluralism’, since the shared interests of people who act politically are, in reality, often self-contradictory and also undergo change over time.9 On the one hand, pluralism describes the normativity of the factual as it pertains to publics and the public sphere, but so do the tensions and struggles that come along with such pluralism. On the other hand, the constituent power of the demos invariably implies the power over others and, therefore, it implies government and governance. The res publica, in other words, is always already bound up with the question of imperium. As a consequence, it is reasonable to ask whether the attempt to constitutionalize the public sphere, as in the case of political liberalism along Kantian lines, undercuts the pluralism of democratic life. Too little imperium is as dangerous for pluralism as is too much imperium, even when the latter receives legitimacy through constitutional norms.

2. Publics that are politically relevant have normative demands, or rather, demands that they wish to become normative. If such normative demands could only be realized through those norms and procedures allowed by the state, democracy itself would not be necessary anymore. As I have noted above, democratic constitutionalism in a pluralist polity, as unpredictable as it undoubtedly is, requires that constituent power and constituted power 9

Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 55.

126

Christian J. Emden

hang in a precarious balance. Publics, whatever their emancipatory ideals and concrete interests, are politically relevant only because they seek to alter, or renegotiate, the normative order and thus, the political constitution of any given society. As such, publics ascribe themselves constituent power on the grounds of an appeal to their autonomy and to popular sovereignty. Whether any given public really has such constituent power, however, can only be judged retrospectively, that is, when its emancipatory ideals and concrete interests have been realized through normatively binding constituted powers, which factually limit the constituent power that legitimates them. In a certain sense, constituent power creates constitutional norms that themselves create what is supposed to justify them, namely constituent power. It is necessary to assume that those constitutional norms are already present in constituent power and, at the same time, it is necessary to assume that they are only created through constituent power: the constituent power of a public to establish constitutional forms ‘can only be exercised through constitutional forms already established or in the process of being established.’10 The paradox of constitutionalism is not merely of a logical kind, but it is characterized by a temporality based on backward causation. What seems problematic from a logical perspective, however, makes a contribution to democratic life, since it provides a reflexive relationship between the constituent power of publics and the constituted powers of government.11

10

11

Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker, ‘Introduction’, in Loughlin and Walker, eds, The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–8: 1. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 96–109, shows how this paradox also appears in the Hannah Arendt’s and Jacques Derrida’s discussions of the constitutional founding moment. The difference to my own acount is, however, that this paradox cannot be limited to the constitutional founding moment but is a central structural feature of democratic constitutionalism. See Hans Lindhal’s ‘Constituent Power and Reflexive Identity: Towards a Ontology of Collective Selfhood’, in Loughlin and Walker, eds, The Paradox of Constitutionalism, 9–24, and ‘The Paradox of Constituent Power: The Ambiguous Self-Constitution of the European Union’, Ratio Juris, 20 (2007), 485–505.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

127

Of course, one could simply argue that constituted powers can continue to exist without the need to refer back to constituent powers. This would imply, however, that constituted powers do not really require legitimation, which undercuts basic assumptions about democratic political life. The irony of Habermas’ account is that the legitimation of a constitutional order through a normative structure that has to be seen as shared both by publics and by the state, since this normative structure is supposed to be universal, means that constituted powers could always see themselves as already legitimate whatever their interests might be. At the heart of a universalist understanding of normativity stands the assumption that ‘[f ]or a norm to be valid, the consequences and side effects that its general observance can be expected to have for the satisfaction of the particular interests of each person affected must be such that all affected can accept them freely.’12 One could imagine, however, a norm diametrically opposed to democratic principles which nevertheless is fully valid on these grounds and therefore logically consistent – say, women should not have the right to vote – as long as each and all can live with the consequences of this norm, including, in my example, the women who are excluded from the political process. Logical consistency and coherence do not always tally very well with the political realities of power and the needs of pluralist polities. More worryingly, it is unclear how democracy could be defended at all on the basis of such universalist claims that can only be universal because they are merely formal. This is one of the reasons why, in the constitutional debates of the Weimar Republic, Hermann Heller criticized Hans Kelsen’s attempt to exclude social power relationships from constitutional theory which is based on the assumption that a basic norm would be sufficient to guard constitutionalism against its enemies.13

12

13

Jürgen Habermas, ‘Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action’, in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, intro. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 116–94: 120. See Hermann Heller, ‘Die Krisis der Staatslehre’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 55/2 (1926), 289–315. For a fuller discussion, see David Dyzenhaus,

128

Christian J. Emden

The purely formal structure of normativity that seems central to Habermas’ account, and which bypasses the need to show how normativity comes into existence in the first place, can allow for practical political positions to be seen as legitimate even if they do not correspond to what is generally regarded as democratic life. This is one of the reasons why, in Between Facts and Norms (1998) [Faktizität und Geltung (1992)], Habermas admits that the universalist ‘discourse principle’ does not suffice to ground ‘any right’.14 As a consequence, he seeks to integrate the problem of political power and positive lawmaking into a discourse theoretical account, which continues, however, to be rooted in the assumption of ‘rational political will-formation’ and therefore does not fully overcome the limitations of discourse ethics’ universalist normative claims.15 Dissolving the paradox of constitutionalism, and thus also the public sphere’s paradoxical relationship to the state and to governance, undercuts the very possibility of democracy. Once we accept that, in pluralist polities, as Chantal Mouffe points out, ‘the domain of politics is not and cannot be the domain of the unconditional because it requires making decisions in an undecidable terrain’, we also have to admit that normatively binding kinds of order cannot be universal in the sense of Habermas’ discourse ethics: normative order is of an inherently political kind and, as such, it is ‘contestable’.16 It might be nice and comforting to simply assume that democracy can be based on the universal principles of discourse ethics that are shared both by publics and government, but it does not allow us to recognize how contestable democracy really is, and once we fail to recognize the latter we will not be in a position to defend the pluralism we should hold dear. Although Habermas’ discourse theory of law and democracy does not intend to dissolve constituent power entirely into the constituted powers of administrative organization that pertain to the European welfare state, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 167–76. 14 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 128. 15 See ibid., 133–51 and 176. 16 Mouffe, Agonistics, 17.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

129

the overall tendency of his argument, over a period of thirty years or so, nevertheless progressively diminishes the constituent power of publics. For Habermas, it seems, the emancipatory demands of publics can only be fully realized through the normative procedures of the modern state; ironically, this implies that democratic constitutionalism and the liberal public sphere are victims of their own success. In Habermas’ account, the liberal public sphere dissipates into the administratively employed power of the modern state. The irony of Habermas’ account of the liberal public sphere and its relationship to modern constitutionalism is to some extent the result of the historical context in which he proposes his discourse theory of law and democracy: the unexpected, and perhaps unpredictable, social and constitutional success of Germany as a federal republic after the Second World War. Through its constitutional framework, the Grundgesetz, the German state was able to integrate and reflect radically changing public demands from the emergence of a social market economy in the 1950s and the political upheavals of the late 1960s to the constitutional response to 1970s terrorism and the eventual reunification with East Germany in 1990. Against this background, we might certainly expect that Habermas’ initial description of the public sphere as a counterbalance and corrective to the interests of the absolutist state is slowly transformed into an argument for the integration of the public sphere into the social welfare state.17 Habermas, in other words, seeks to constitutionalize the public sphere. Habermas’ tendency to constitutionalize the public sphere is also grounded in the internal logic of his historical account of the eighteenthcentury public sphere. The political relevance of the public sphere has its origin in the tension between civil society and the concrete interests of private individuals, on the one hand, and ‘depersonalized state authority’, on the other.18 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the increasing 17

For a balanced critique of Habermas’ emphasis on the social welfare state model, see John P. McCormick, Weber, Habermas, and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social, and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126–75. 18 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 19.

130

Christian J. Emden

polarization of society and state, as the consequence of a shift in economic power from the aristocracy and the absolutist state to the bourgeoisie, leads to the ideal type of an opposition between the ‘public sphere of civil society’ and the ‘public authority’ of the state.19 Commerce and consumption, in other words, imply different kinds of political liberty, as Adam Smith knew, and different practices of governance, as Montesquieu realized.20 Habermas’ use of the marker ‘public’ in relation to both the civil society of private individuals and the authority of the state reveals, however, that the opposition between governed and government is not quite as clear-cut as it might seem at first sight. The way in which the public sphere becomes conscious of its inherent constituent power is by producing public opinion which circulates in coffee houses and publications, and the manifestations of public opinions about specific state policies allows for the state, in Habermas’ account, to recognize the needs of citizens, even if the state might have limited interest in actualizing their demands.21 The public sphere becomes relevant, then, because the institutions of the state respond to it, albeit not always in positive ways. For good reason, Habermas is critical of state-centred accounts of political life that undercut the communicative dimension of the ‘political public sphere’, but it is interesting to note that the latter’s function is largely restricted to its existence as a ‘medium for permanent criticism’. Such permanent criticism is not intended to prepare the ground for revolution, and it is not directed against the institutions of the modern state. It merely alters ‘the conditions for the legitimation of political domination’, but it

19 Ibid., 23 and 28. See also ibid., 141. 20 See Duncan Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions and Judgement in Modern Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59–172; Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, new edn., forew. Amartya Sen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 67–114. 21 See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30–31 and 51–6.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

131

does not address the realities of political domination in any direct way.22 The liberal public sphere lacks revolutionary desire and rather follows the Kantian understanding of Enlightenment as a project of reform.23 Although it might be possible to argue that the liberal public sphere does not require revolution, since its interests are already represented by the state, such an argument, even from Habermas’ perspective, would also undermine the relevance of the liberal public sphere: if the state already represents the interests of the public sphere, there is no need for the existence of a public sphere, liberal or otherwise. The liberal public sphere might be open and always in a state of flux, but it also might not be the real site of political action: ‘The public sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view […]; the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions.’24 As Habermas’ account of the public sphere progresses from the more historical argument of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) [Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962)] to the discourse theory of law and democracy he advances in Faktizität und Geltung, the public sphere increasingly seems to become a rather vague mechanism for the legitimation of already existing normative procedures in which the originary tension between civil society and state authorities has disappeared. One reason for this might be that, thirty years after the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in Germany, Habermas’ conception of modern constitutionalism has a different empirical background: the extraordinary success of the Federal Republic’s constitutional

22 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984–87), vol. I, 341. 23 See Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss and trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd, Engl. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60: 55. On the broader context of Kant’s emphasis on reform, see H. B. Nisbet, ‘“Was ist Aufklärung?” The Concept of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of European Studies 12 (1982), 77–95. 24 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 360.

132

Christian J. Emden

framework, which weathered multiple challenges from the student revolts of 1967/68 and 1970s terrorism to the reunification of the two Germanies as an integral part of a new European Union. Given this background, and the historical experience of the Federal Republic over the last thirty or forty years, it is perfectly understandable that the public sphere plays a less central role in a constitutional democracy which, through administratively employed power, actively seeks to adopt, for instance, environmental policies that, during the 1970s and 1980s, could only be demanded by extraparliamentary protest movements. Once the latter, in the form of the Green Party, had moved into parliament, and took part in governance, the public sphere lost its status as a site of political agency and dissolved into a process of opinion formation relevant to ‘those who are potentially affected’ by any given policy decision – that is, it became relevant to everyone and nobody.25 Although it might indeed be possible to argue that public opinion can in fact influence policy decisions, this rests on the implicit assumption that a relatively autonomous public forces government to adopt a specific policy change in a straightforward and causal way. That the current German government decided to give up German energy policy’s reliance on nuclear power seems to reflect, on this account, the will of a public interested in environmental concerns and sustainable energy. But this leaves open the question how this will has been formed, and in complex societies with mass media will formation does not rest on the autonomy of a public – and it perhaps never has. Rather, the public’s seemingly autonomous will is formed by a broad range of interconnected factors that include private economic interests, lobbying groups, media, and government statements. This is precisely the reason why even Habermas ultimately has to admit that the liberal public sphere is everywhere and nowhere: In complex societies, the public sphere consists of an intermediary structure between the political system, on the one hand, and the private sectors of the lifeworld and functional systems, on the other. It represents a highly complex network that branches

25

Ibid., 365.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

133

out into a multitude of overlapping international, national, regional, local and subcultural arenas.26

The expansion of the public sphere, itself part of the Kantian project of Enlightenment, tends to empty the public sphere, quite unintentionally, of real political relevance. By the time Habermas reaches Between Facts and Norms, the liberal public sphere is not linked anymore to constituent power and it is in this respect quite different from its eighteenth-century predecessor. The long-term success of an ongoing project of Enlightenment culminated in the constitutionalization of political liberalism in most Western democracies during the Cold War and, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, this development promised a postnational future in which constitutionalism and its institutions would allow for political legitimation through the idea of human rights on an increasingly global scale.27 Constitutionalizing the project of the Kantian Enlightenment along such cosmopolitan lines, however, ironically undermined the very ideals of this project.28 Successful constitutionalization, in this respect, implies that the constituent power of publics is translated into constitutional norms, administrative procedures and the institutions of government. Challenging and contesting the authority of government would have to follow the normative administrative procedures that pertain to the modern state. Whenever citizens are unable to do so, this merely

26 Ibid., 373. 27 See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights’, in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed., trans. and introd. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 113–29. 28 See, for instance, James Tully, ‘The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives’, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 331–57. That cosmopolitan projects of constitutionalization are historically grounded in a distinctly Western European and American perspective on international relations also contributes to imperialist features in the formation of international law. See Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

134

Christian J. Emden

implies that constitutional norms are ‘insufficiently institutionalized’.29 Yet another legal regulation or administrative rule, as it were, would provide more freedom to citizens: more institutionalization would provide the means to partake in governance, even though it ultimately tends to limit political liberties. The original tension between civil society and state authorities, even though both often overlapped in the person of reformminded civil servants, was historically decided in favour of the modern state, and the paradoxical relationship between constituent and constituted powers was transformed into a democracy that Habermas – twenty years later, at the height of his work on discourse ethics – regarded as representing the ‘consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech’.30 In light of the universally normative claims achieved through rational consensus, itself a result of intersubjectivity in the lifeworld, the disruptive force of constituent power is ultimately necessary only as a quasi-transcendental point of reference that legitimizes the status quo.31 Criticism and political action outside the realm of administratively employed power can only became relevant to the polity on a broader scale if it is in principle possible to eventually integrate such opposition into an already existing system of constitutional norms and procedures – even though ‘sensational actions, mass protests, and incessant campaigning’ can occasionally provide renewed relevance to the public sphere.32 Against this background, it might indeed appear to be the case that Habermas’ vision of constitutional democracy in the modern welfare state unwittingly resembles the Anstaltsstaat of late imperial Germany – this is the state that Max Weber and Georg Jellinek regarded as the inevitable outcome of social and economic modernization, but it also was a state that separated parliamentary representation from democracy by conceiving of parliament as an extension

29 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 436. 30 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I, 10. See also ibid., vol. II, 371–2. 31 That such rational consensus formation is universally normative is the central claim of Habermas’ updated version of Kant’s categorical imperative. See Habermas, ‘Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action’, 120. 32 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 381.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

135

of government, thus undercutting the constituent power of publics.33 The liberal public sphere is a victim of its own success.

3. That the very success of the liberal public sphere, in the Kantian sense, eventually undermines its emancipatory potential becomes historically particularly obvious in the way in which it is inextricably linked to the problem of private property. The emergence of a market economy in the course of the seventeenth century not only runs parallel to the emancipatory political demands within the public sphere, but the demands themselves in fact reflect the very structure of a market economy centred on the notion of private property. The political dimension of the public sphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – first on the British isles and in the Dutch Republic and subsequently in France and many of the German-speaking lands – depends on the fact that private people with increasing financial might and interests beyond their immediate social environment seek to influence public power not because they have emancipatory demands but because they have concrete economic interests as property owners taking part in new forms of economic exchange.34 Since the latter, in one way or another, are regulated by the policies of the state and existing legal frameworks, which in turn reflect the concrete interests of absolutist governments, the flow of goods, commodities and capital transforms private people with similar interests into publics concerned with the policies of the state.

See Christoph Schönberger, Das Parlament im Anstaltsstaat: Zur Theorie parlamentarischer Repräsentation in der Staatsrechtslehre des Kaiserreichs (1871–1918) (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1997). 34 See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 56. 33

136

Christian J. Emden

Leaving aside that it might be necessary to backdate the tense and complex relationship between public political power and private economic interests to the Northern Italian city states of the Renaissance and later Middle Ages, as both Weber and, much later, the Cambridge School of intellectual history have done, Habermas’ account, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, rightly suggests, somewhat in contrast to his later arguments in Between Facts and Norms, that the origin of the public sphere lies in the emergence of private property. Although much of the discourse on private property, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as much as in contemporary political theory, is shaped by the link between civic liberty and economic liberalism in the tradition of British political thought, in particular John Locke and Adam Smith, it is Kant, who situates the question of private property at the heart of his political philosophy.35 What transforms subjects into citizens, then, is not a demand for political emancipation and constitutionalism, or an interest in rights, but it is economic interest. At the same time, the accumulation of private wealth, together with the necessary modernization of the state in both legal and economic terms, allows for the greater public influence of specific professions that straddle the increasingly uncertain boundaries between the public authority of the state and the public sphere of private people – from lawyers and physicians 35

See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. and intro. Peter Laslett, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 302 (Second Treatise, § 50), on the link between the legal regulation of property and the possibility of cooperative government; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 150–4 (III. 6), on the nexus between private property and civil liberty; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, abridged and ed. Laurence Dickey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 176–81 (V. i. 2), on the link between government and property; and Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor, intro. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 353–603: 401–52 (Ak. VI, 246–308). On the much-overlooked importance of private property for Kant’s political philosophy, see Wolfgang Kersting, Wohlgeordnete Freiheit: Immanuel Kants Rechts-und Staatsphilosophie, 2nd edn (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 225–93.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

137

to university professors and civil servants. Given the way in which education and economic interests are interlinked, for instance, since the late absolutist state is in dire need of administrative experts, and given the way in which the circulation of ideas largely follows the circulation of commodities, it is natural that cultural and intellectual goods, such as books, journals and newspapers, should increasingly become the site of political demands, directly or implicitly. The project of Enlightenment is, however, not simply coextensive with what Robert Darnton aptly described as the ‘business of Enlightenment’.36 Rather, the more cultural goods necessarily and inevitably turn into commodities for consumption, the more the political import of the public sphere, even of the Kantian public sphere, declines in political relevance.37 This is particularly the case where revolution is not necessary anymore since parliamentary structures already counterbalance absolutist power, as in the case of England. More importantly, the integration of Enlightenment ideals into the already existing structures of an authoritarian state through reform-minded civil servants, as in many of the Protestant German-speaking lands, created a public sphere that undercut these ideals. In Prussia, for instance, civil servants sought to introduce more rational and transparent forms of administration, coupled with public education and even local self-government, in order to enrich monarchy with a politically active population, but instead of liberal reform and increasing parliamentarization the results reinforced authoritarian rule through the rise of Prussian nationalism in the public sphere.38 Linked to the economic interests of the new bourgeoisie, such political configurations render obvious how the liberal public sphere could contribute to its own decline. The concrete economic interests that allow for the emergence of the liberal public sphere are ultimately also responsible for its decreasing relevance, and this development stretches, in Habermas’ earlier account, from the later eighteenth century to the present. The success of constitutional democracy, coupled 36 See Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 37 See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 159–75 and 181–97. 38 See Matthew Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

138

Christian J. Emden

with a capitalist economy and the eventual rise of mass media, brings with it the ‘disintegration of the electorate as a public’.39 Habermas – mainly because of the historical situation of late 1950s Germany after the end of Nazi dictatorship and shaped by the growth of a social market economy [soziale Marktwirtschaft] – remains oddly positive about this development in his early work. Modern social democracy, and with it the emergence of the welfare state, embody the demands and ideals of the liberal public sphere inasmuch as they necessarily rely on the communication of public needs through public channels that allow the institutions of the state to aim at distributive justice.40 Constituted power is always administratively employed power, and it is also interesting to note that the one area of German public law that, despite many innovations, shows a remarkable historical continuity from late Imperial Germany through the Weimar Republic and Nazi dictatorship to the Federal Republic is administrative law.41 For Habermas, it is not revolution or the actualization of constituent power that cashes in on the ideals of the public sphere, but it is the social welfare state: [T]he two conditions for a public sphere to be effective in the political realm – the objectively possible minimizing of bureaucratic decisions and a relativizing of structural conflicts of interest according to the standard of a universal interest everyone can acknowledge – can today no longer be disqualified as simply utopian. The dimension of the democratization of industrial societies constituted as social-welfare states is not limited from the outset by an impenetrability and indissolubility (whether theoretically demonstrable or empirically verifiable) of irrational relations of social power and political domination.42

39 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 217. 40 See ibid., 224–5. 41 The development of administrative law in this period shows much greater continuity than the development of constitutional law. For the contexts and trajectory of administrative law, see Michael Stolleis, A History of Public Law in Germany, 1914–1945, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 42 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 235.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

139

The philosophical irony of this development should not go unnoticed: it is the state which fulfils the demands of the public sphere, and this statization of the liberal public sphere is a consequence of developments that already take place in the eighteenth century, at least in the German-speaking lands: Public debate was supposed to transform voluntas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all. […] As a consequence of the constitutional definition of the public realm and its functions, publicness became an organizational principle for the procedures of the organs of the state themselves.43

Such publicness, and thus the shift from the arcana imperii to legal transparency and public justification, is a crucial hallmark of modern constitutional states, as Hegel rightly emphasized.44 It is in this respect that, as Rawls suggested, the concept of right, as it is central to modern constitutionalism, must not only be based on principles that are general, normatively applicable, and able to order conflictual situations, but these principles must also be understood to be public. There has to be, in other words, a ‘general awareness’ of the ‘universal acceptance’ of these principles as ‘fully effective moral constitutions of social life’.45 For Habermas, it is such principles that transform publics, or the liberal public sphere, into civil society properly speaking, and it is on the basis of such a rights-centred approach that civil society takes on the role of a corrective to the state and prevents mechanisms of exclusion.46 This also implies, however, that the constitutional state absorbs the ideal-type principles of the public sphere

43 Ibid., 83. 44 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 246–7 (§ 215) and 254–5 (§ 224): not only laws need to be publicly known, but there must also be a ‘publicity of the administration of justice’, which includes public reasons for judicial decisions and legal interpretations. 45 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 133. 46 See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 368, 372 and 374. Habermas’ discussion draws here on Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

140

Christian J. Emden

and of civil society: ‘constitutional rights and principles merely explicate the performative character of the self-constitution of a society of free and equal citizens’, so that they remain grounded in the constituent power ascribed to the liberal public sphere, but ‘[t]he organizational form of the constitutional state makes this practice [of society’s self-constitution] permanent.’47 Once again, the constituent power of publics is dissolved into the constituted powers of state institutions, which is indeed the reason why constitutionalization can be a double-edged sword. The question, however, is not whether it is possible to avoid translating the constituent power of citizens into the administratively employed powers of government given the organizational demands that pluralist polities place upon the institutions of the modern state. The question, rather, is how far such constitutionalization should reach. On the one hand, it subjects all types of public power and administrative authority to constitutional norms and procedures, thus creating standards of legitimacy for public power. On the other hand, this process of constitutionalization ultimately increases the authority of government over increasing areas of social and private life unconnected to the real concerns of governance.48 The basic problem with extending the authority of government in this way is not that it therefore begins to regulate matters of personal choice that overlap, or touch upon, the public interest, as in the case of public health. Government mandating that school children should be served more broccoli, that smoking should be limited in a broad range of situations, or that employers need to provide parental leave, does not amount to an infringement of civic liberties. Such individual cases will always vary, since they are context-dependent, culturally specific, and can be contested by citizens. The problem, rather, is of a structural kind: the more government is able to extend its authority over the social and private life of its citizens in the name of the public interest, the more able it will be to employ an

47 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 384. 48 See Martin Loughlin, ‘What Is Constitutionalisation?’, in Petra Dobner and Martin Loughlin, eds, The Twilight of Constitutionalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47–69: 59–68.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

141

appeal to the public interest in order to justify and legitimate an extension of its own authority that increasingly undermines the basic principles of democratic life by making it impossible for citizens to contest specific issues in the first place. Legislation concerned with terrorism and national security flatly falls into this category, for instance, when government and its agencies become constitutionally able not only to limit the rights of citizens and foreigners alike but to categorically deny any appeals process to address grievances. While parents, as a public, can argue through public protest or legal proceedings that broccoli on school menus should be replaced with chocolate, regardless of whether rational justification for this can be found, citizens and foreigners that are detained, or deported, on the basis of terrorism-related legislation would not have the same option. Moreover, once legislation has been passed that denies citizens the right to contest government, and that could include a provision which exempts specific government decisions from judicial review, it is the administrative agency entrusted with implementing this legislation that effectively decides what is in the public interest. It is not difficult to see how this can allow for arbitrary forms of domination, and it should not be difficult to recognize how such arbitrary domination can subsequently be employed to further private economic gain incompatible with the public interest. A largely formal and procedural conception of constitutionalism in the Kantian tradition, whose main aim is supposed to provide a valueneutral framework within which specific rights can be asserted, necessarily implies that the constitutional norms that provide this framework are not of a substantive kind and therefore do not entail specific political commitments. On these grounds it is entirely possible to imagine legislation that exempts executive power from providing reasons for its actions or from judicial review of these actions if a constitutional norm procedurally delegates the decision over whether any given right applies in any given case to an administrative authority does not require public justification for its decisions.49 It is at this moment that government would be able

49 See, for instance, David Dyzenhaus’ discussion of human rights law and national security in modern Britain in The Constitution of Law: Legality in a Time of Emergency

142

Christian J. Emden

to constitutionally extend its powers over virtually all parts of social and private life in an arbitrary way. Kantian constitutionalism can become an invitation to arbitrary domination – even though this is certainly not what processes of constitutionalization intend and even though this is exactly what Habermas’ discourse theory of law and democracy seeks to avoid.

4. Again, it should be noted that Habermas’ suggestion to constitutionalize the liberal public sphere, including the drawbacks of this project, can be seen as an effect of the historical context in which his argument develops: at least until the early 1980s, the Federal Republic is a surprisingly balanced Anstaltsstaat, in Weber’s sense of the term. But the demand for constitutionalizing the liberal public sphere is also a result of Habermas’ excessive emphasis on the rational justification of political and ethical claims which does not tally all too well with the centrality of power and the role of emotional attachments in the realm of real politics. On the one hand, the conception of the public sphere as a site of revolutionary agency – as it is advocated by proponents of insurgent democracy like Alan Badiou, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt50 – underestimates the way in which, in the world of real politics, the actions of both citizens and government are in part shaped by instrumental forms of rationality in Weber’s sense of Zweckrationalität. On the other hand, Habermas – more

50

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 160–73. Even though the British example is not fully compatible with the Kantian tradition, it shows very clearly what would be possible under an exclusively procedural conception of constitutional law. See, for instance, Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012); Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011).

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

143

so than Kant himself – overestimates the role of rational justification for human agency in the political realm and thus fails to fully recognize the manner in which the normal business of politics as much as broader practices of social agency stand under the influence of emotional appeals and are shaped by antagonisms that cannot be fully overcome on the grounds of discourse ethics. As a consequence, Habermas places much hope in the self-regulating and self-correcting tendencies of the public sphere: if public opinions were to be created artificially by lobbying groups or government agencies, he noted, they would eventually be recognized as inauthentic and lose their influence.51 The assumption of a normative plurality of opinions that can be negotiated through an authentic rational kind of public justification stands in some contrast to what Weber, not without reason, regarded as the lack of political education and ‘maturity’ among most citizens.52 Empirical observation of opinion formation shows that such opinion tends to be mediated, not in a self-correcting way, by public statements of politicians, newspapers, social media and other institutions of the public sphere. The rational insight of citizens, then, is limited on two fronts. First, the complexity of most, albeit certainly not all, policy questions requires the kind of expertise that most citizens simply do not have. This is especially the case if such questions transcend local governance, or if they are connected to broader economic and legal predicaments. Second, this makes it necessary, even inevitable, in any democracy to package such policy questions for public justification and consumption in largely emotional terms that appeal to the belonging, to the allegiances and attachments of citizens. While this can have detrimental effects on the pluralist polity, for instance, 51 52

See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 364. See ibid., 368 on the normative plurality of the public sphere. Max Weber, Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order: Towards a Political Critique of Officialdom and the Party System, in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 130–271: 144 and 180, of course, refers above all to the German situation in the aftermath of Bismarck, which he contrasts with the ‘maturity’ of the way in which parliament in Britain is controlled by the intensity of the public discussion of its affairs.

144

Christian J. Emden

when the viewpoints and rights of specific groups, not only minorities, are excluded and disregarded, it can also have positive effects, for instance, if it allows for the public recognition of what counts as a public good in any given polity, such as healthcare, education, access to water, sustainable infrastructure etc. This also means that, for better or worse, democracy and demagogy necessarily go hand in hand, as Weber suggested, and lying in politics might not be such a bad thing, since an ethic of conviction and moral authenticity might very well turn the superiority of the better argument into the violence of one moral community over others in the name of such seemingly rational superiority.53 Drawing on their experience with real politics, citizens are generally well-disposed toward what David Runciman termed ‘first-order hypocrisy’. Citizens tend to know that many of the promises politicians make during an election campaign will most likely be unrealistic and populist: either the politician has simply no intention to live up to the promises made, or the promises themselves cannot possibly be fulfilled given the circumstances the polity finds itself in, or circumstances not under the control of a future government might prevent the realization of promises. The demagogue – both in terms of the Greek meaning of championing the interests of the common people and in terms of the more pejorative modern meaning of appealing to populist emotions – is an inevitable part of public life in democracies. The real handbook of the demagogue was written at the height of the Third French Republic, in 1884, when the republican government was finally able to diminish the influence of both royalists and the Catholic church on French political life, ten years before the Dreyfus Affair reared its ugly head and highlighted deep divisions in French political culture.54 Since politics is concerned with power and power relationships, ‘[f ]irstorder hypocrisy is the ubiquitous practice of concealing vice with virtue,

On the link between democracy and demagogy see Weber, Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order, 220. See also Martin Jay, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politic (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 130–80. 54 See Raoul Frary, Manuel du démagogue (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1884). 53

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

145

which makes up the parade of our existence’, and this is simply necessary ‘to get by in this world’.55 Promises are not an inherently good thing. Indeed, the exploitation of citizens, the abuse of private dominium and the arbitrary use of imperium, flourish in particular under conditions of trust built on promises, and it is remarkable that citizens, by and large, tend to place great trust in the overall constitutional framework of democratic polities, even though such trust is not always justifiable on rational grounds.56 Even if they might be highly critical of any given set of institutions, like the US Congress or the British Parliament, citizens tend to trust these institutions implicitly through their broad consent. Such trust is not endangered, however, by first-order hypocrisy. Exploitation, rather, often happens under the conditions of what Runciman described as ‘second-order hypocrisy’: this occurs primarily, and practically speaking, if representatives of citizens involved in their governance really believe that the promises they make, and the reasons they give for their actions, are morally authentic and grounded in rational justification, despite the fact that they are involved in the abuse of private dominium and public imperium. Within this context, moral authenticity based on rational justification, and the assumed superiority of the better argument, are able to undercut a realistic understanding of politics and governance and, as such, even threaten democratic life itself. It is not only the case that ‘first-order hypocrisy leaks into second-order, because thoroughly self-deceived people will believe they really are being virtuous’, but also that citizens who are otherwise able to accept that hypocrisy is a

David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 53–4. 56 See Annette C. Baier, ‘Trust and Antitrust’, in Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 95–129: 95, and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, intro. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 243–7. This is one of the reasons why promises are not sufficient for social cooperation, but contractual obligations are required that are, nevertheless, voluntary and therefore enabling. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 666–81. 55

146

Christian J. Emden

‘ubiquitous social practice’ are surprisingly disinclined to recognize the dangers of ‘hypocrisy about hypocrisy’, and it is the latter which undermines democratic life.57 A discourse ethics of law and democracy that places its hopes in both moral authenticity and rational justification not only underestimates the role of power in the realm of politics and law, but it is also unable to square its hopes with the widespread existence of second-order hypocrisy that undercuts the way in which citizens in the liberal public sphere should control and counterbalance government. Precisely because they are supposed to contest government only through procedures provided for by the institutions of government and the latter’s interpretation of already existing constitutional norms, Habermas does not realize that a discourse ethics of democracy potentially allows citizens to fall into the trap laid out by second-order hypocrisy. Even if we leave aside such pejorative concepts as hypocrisy and demagoguery and focus on any given public’s understanding of its own constitutional situation as it is related to complex questions of policy-making, a strange paradox begins to emerge. On the one hand, public interest in judicial decisions and constitutional arguments is relatively limited and thus also its influence on such decisions and arguments. It is not only the case that in the United States, for instance, the public only follows a very limited number of highly emotionally charged constitutional cases concerned with abortion, same-sex marriage and immigration. Rather, the wider public’s understanding of such legal proceedings is itself limited due to the highly technical nature of arguments whether and how, for instance, the US Interstate Commerce Clause relates to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or whether the European Union emergency fund is compatible with the German Grundgesetz. On the other hand, and despite the technicalities involved, constitutional courts have to take public opinion into account. Otherwise, constitutional courts would establish quasipositivist laws and norms that merely reflect the interests of the branches

57 Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 47 and 54.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

147

of government, thus preparing the ground for the trap of second-order hypocrisy.58 Even though constitutional courts often track public opinion, this cannot imply that they do so because the formation of public opinion is grounded in rational justification. The rational justification of public reasons might be central to political liberalism in general, but it is also rather limited. Rawls might serve as a better example here than Habermas: although he emphasizes, for similar reasons as Habermas, the central role of public reasoning within modern constitutional democracy, the very nature of public reasons that could rationally justify any given constitutional decision remains as vague as Habermas’ own account of the public sphere.59 Public reasons, Rawls argues, are ‘constitutional essentials’, not least because publicity and transparency have to be central characteristics of modern constitutional democracy, but as such they have to be reasons that everyone can agree on, in principle, as a member of the public and thus as a citizen.60 This requirement bypasses the fact that public reasons are as contested as substantive public goods; indeed, they have to be contestable in order to reflect the pluralism of democratic polities and the tensions among different publics over their concrete interests. As a result, Rawls’s public reasons tend to be relatively empty, and because of the vacuum they create, they are immediately laden with substantive values and concrete interests that cannot be accepted by everyone who is a citizen. Intended to reach across different social, political and moral backgrounds, constitutional essentials – e.g. the idea of liberty – receive wildly different interpretations and are relevant in different ways to the life of different groups of citizens so much

58

This becomes particularly obvious in the United States, where empirical evidence suggests that Supreme Court decisions by and large track public opinion as closely as the policies of elected government track public opinion. See K. T. McGuire and J. A. Stimson, ‘The Least Dangerous Branch of Government Revisited: New Evidence on Supreme Court Responsiveness to Public Preferences’, Journal of Politics 66 (2004), 1018–35. 59 See John Rawls, Political Liberalism, exp. edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 212–53, and Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 329–87. 60 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 213–14.

148

Christian J. Emden

so that the public deliberation of such constitutional essentials highlights differences instead of overcoming them. Rational justification might ideally aim at consensus or compromise, but often it emphasizes more clearly the reasons why consensus fails.61 Despite his own emphasis on the primacy of rational deliberation, and his implied hope for moral authenticity in politics and governance, Habermas is entirely correct to point out that the political relevance of the public sphere, and of publics generally, tends to come to the fore especially in situations of crisis, regardless of whether the latter are real or merely perceived as such.62 In these situations, at the intersection of ‘communicatively generated power’ and ‘administratively employed power’, publics become more aware of the nature of their constituent power.63 The problem is, however, that in contexts of political, social or economic crisis, the emotional attachment of citizens to specific publics, and to the substantive issues these publics give a voice to, trumps not only rational justification but also a realistic assessment of the crisis itself. On the positive side, the emotionalization and personalization of highly abstract policy questions along melodramatic lines can provide renewed visibility to the inherently political nature of such questions, as in the case of the ‘politainment’ practiced by otherwise serious news outlets, such as Politico in the United States. On the negative side, crises, real as well as imagined, can trigger emotional attachments that simply ignore the complexity of the realities at stake, as in the case of those American citizens whose political education is derived mainly from Fox News or MSNBC.64 Under the conditions of modern mass media, including social media, the pluralist polity is threatened by the combination of populist and plebiscitarian visions of democracy that stand behind the emotionalization of

See Cass Sunstein, ‘The Law of Group Polarization’, Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (2002), 175–95. 62 See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 379. 63 Ibid., 483 (emphasized in the original). 64 See Andreas Dörner, Politainment: Politik in der medialen Erlebnisgesellschaft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2001). 61

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

149

the political.65 The sudden rise of right-wing anti-EU parties in Germany, France and the UK during the current financial crisis is a case in point: the Alternative für Deutschland, the Front National or UKIP not only grow their own membership and electoral success as a consequence of crisis, but they also tend to shift the parameters of mainstream political discourse as a consequence of such emotional attachments. Most importantly, however, they unwittingly highlight that, in highly complex and postindustrial polities, citizens that come together as a public are largely unable to solve the problems they perceive to be central to their own future prosperity and flourishing – at least if these problems transcend purely local contexts in which citizens are practically able to develop solutions through shared forms of governance. Neighbourhoods coming together in order to plant more trees is, however, of a different order than questions pertaining to the financing of single-payer universal healthcare as a public good, the redistribution of tax revenues to alleviate poverty, or the feasibility of humanitarian and military interventions. On the one hand, the complexity of such questions necessarily leads to the rise of expert cultures that shape policy decisions about public goods, such as education and healthcare, without much democratic oversight and without the need to address their own legitimacy. While this might be an inevitable outcome of the complexity that pluralist polities exhibit, on the other hand, it also tends to usher in a postdemocratic political culture in which the boundaries between private dominium and public imperium are blurred to an extent that invites the abuse of both.66 Direct forms of democracy, and the self-organization of citizens in local contexts alone, cannot cope with the complexity of policy-making in larger pluralist polities since they lack efficiency, knowledge, and the power to implement decisions on a scale that exceeds the local. Expert cultures might have efficiency, expertise and perhaps even power, but they are lacking in democratic legitimacy, since they do not reflect the pluralism of modern states. This shows that,

See Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 128–227. 66 See Colin Crouch, Post-democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 65

150

Christian J. Emden

in order to realize their emancipatory demands and concrete interests, citizens coming together as publics ultimately have to rely on some form of institutionalized governance, in which they can take a share.

5. Short of revolution, decisions are not made by publics, but the reach of the latter’s constituent power can only prove itself in practice if decisions are made that, at least to some extent, reflect the broader substantive interests of these publics. Habermas is right to argue that the power of publics to efficiently affect and shape real politics, and thus the workings of governance, depends on whether their demands and interests can be institutionalized through practices of governance. Institutionalized power, that is, normatively constituted power, in return requires public approval in order to be legitimate.67 For Habermas, this appears to be a fairly straightforward feedback loop between government and citizens, between administratively employed power and the liberal public sphere. The crucial point, however, is that, on this account, the consent of publics, or their criticism, can only take form through already institutionalized procedures, that is, by making use of elections, submissions to parliament or the courts, the freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, etc. The constituent power of publics, therefore, is dissolved into constitutional norms that, because they legitimize and shape governmental institutions, more often than not favour the interests of constituted powers, government in particular. The function of the modern state does not merely consist in safeguarding a framework for the public expression and manifestation of constituent power and political citizenship which might eventually conflict with the demands of government. Rather, the upshot of Habermas’ account is that publics are politically relevant only if they suit this framework, if they fit 67 See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 359–64 and 371.

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

151

the procedures laid down by the constituted powers of government in the broader sense of the term. The problem, in other words, is not at all that Habermas sees the political relevance of publics as dependent on the modern state, or on their ability to partake in governance, but that the political relevance of publics at any given time depends on the institutions of government at that moment in time. The constitutionalism envisioned by Habermas’ discourse theory of law and democracy – what James Tully once described as the constitutionalism of the moderns68 – is not oriented toward the future. It cannot account for the dynamics of pluralist polities that creates a normative order which undergoes change over time, depending on the way in which publics are able to negotiate with the institutions of government, or criticize and reject the latter, or partake in practices of governance themselves.

Bibliography Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, intro. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Badiou, Alain, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012). Baier, Annette C., ‘Trust and Antitrust’, in Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Boyle, Nicholas, ‘Private, Public, and Structural Change: The German Problem’, in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds, Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 75–89. Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Crouch, Colin, Post-democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 68 James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 62–70.

152

Christian J. Emden

Darnton, Robert, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Dörner, Andreas, Politainment: Politik in der medialen Erlebnisgesellschaft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2001). van Dülmen, Richard, Die Gesellschaft der Aufklärer: Zur bürgerlichen Empanzipation und aufklärerischen Kultur in Deutschland (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986). Dyzenhaus, David, The Constitution of Law: Legality in a Time of Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). , Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Frary, Raoul, Manuel du démagogue (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1884). Geuss, Raymond, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984–7). , The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). , ‘Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action’, in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, intro. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 116–94. , Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). , ‘Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights’, in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed., trans. and introd. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 113–29. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Heller, Hermann, ‘Die Krisis der Staatslehre’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 55/2 (1926), 289–315. Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, new edn., forew. Amartya Sen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere?

153

Honig, Bonnie, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Jay, Martin, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politic (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010). Kant, Immanuel, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss and trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd Engl. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). , The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor, intro. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Kelly, Duncan, The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions and Judgement in Modern Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Kersting, Wolfgang, Wohlgeordnete Freiheit: Immanuel Kants Rechts-und Staatsphilosophie, 2nd edn. (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1993). Levinger, Matthew, Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Lindhal, Hans, ‘Constituent Power and Reflexive Identity: Towards a Ontology of Collective Selfhood’, in Loughlin and Walker, eds, The Paradox of Constitutionalism, 9–24. , ‘The Paradox of Constituent Power: The Ambiguous Self-Constitution of the European Union’, Ratio Juris, 20 (2007), 485–505. Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. and intro. Peter Laslett, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Loughlin, Martin, and Neil Walker, ‘Introduction’, in Loughlin and Walker, eds, The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–8. Loughlin, Martin, ‘What Is Constitutionalisation?’, in Petra Dobner and Martin Loughlin, eds, The Twilight of Constitutionalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47–69: McCormick, John P., Weber, Habermas, and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social, and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). McGuire, K. T., and J. A. Stimson, ‘The Least Dangerous Branch of Government Revisited: New Evidence on Supreme Court Responsiveness to Public Preferences’, Journal of Politics 66 (2004), 1018–35. McNeely, Ian F., The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 13–127. Manheim, Ernst, Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung: Studien zur Soziologie der Öffentlichkeit (Brno: Rohrer, 1933). Mouffe, Chantal, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000).

154

Christian J. Emden

, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013). Negri, Antonio, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Nisbet, H. B., ‘“Was ist Aufklärung?” The Concept of Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury Germany’, Journal of European Studies 12 (1982), 77–95. Outram, Dorinda, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). , Political Liberalism, exp. edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Rothschild, Emma, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Runciman, David, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Schönberger, Christoph, Das Parlament im Anstaltsstaat: Zur Theorie parlamentarischer Repräsentation in der Staatsrechtslehre des Kaiserreichs (1871–1918) (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1997). Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, abridged and ed. Laurence Dickey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993). Stolleis, Michael. A History of Public Law in Germany, 1914–1945, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Sunstein, Cass, ‘The Law of Group Polarization’, Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (2002), 175–95. Tully, James, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). , ‘The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives’, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 331–57. Urbinati, Nadia, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Van Horn Melton, James, The Rise of the Public Sphere in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). , Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order: Towards a Political Critique of Officialdom and the Party System, in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Wenman, Mark, Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

part iii

Cultural and Theoretical Transformations II: The Aesthetic Potentials of Public Spheres

Juliane Rebentisch

Mass – People – Multitude: A Reflection on the Source of Democratic Legitimacy1

In contrast with aristocracy, the rule of the best or the select few, democracy, the rule of the people, may be conceived as the rule of the many or even of all. That is why one influential tradition in political philosophy translates the term ‘democracy’ as ‘rule of the masses’. And when philosophers put it that way, they usually do not mean this as a compliment. For while the idea of democracy is built up on the independence, rationality, ego strength and power of judgement of countless individuals, it also de facto establishes mechanisms, or so runs the caveat, that undermine these conditions. This pertains above all to the concept of the mass. In the mass, the differences between individuals, their individuality and their power of judgement disappear; democracy thus loses its foundation and perverts the very freedom that it sought to establish, potentially into its opposite. In contrast, some in contemporary political thought, most prominently Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, dream of what they call ‘absolute democracy’,2 a rule of the many that would not bring about the disappearance of the individual’s singularity, but on the contrary would fully realize it. This is seen above all in the contemporary usage of the term multitude. The multitude is a diverse

1

2

This text was originally published in German as ‘Masse – Volk – Multitude. Überlegungen zur Quelle demokratischer Legitimität’, in WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (2011/2), 3–18. The passages on Plato are partly drawn from Juliane Rebentisch, Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), ch. 1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).

158

Juliane Rebentisch

crowd that can never be reduced to any unity. It therefore stands in contrast to both the uniformity of the mass as well as the identity of the people. In the following, I would like to turn a critical eye to both ways of understanding the democratic rule of the people as a rule of the many. First – and this will make up by far the largest portion of my contribution – I will turn to the anti-democratic or democracy-sceptical critique of the masses, distinguishing here between various levels. My defence of democracy (or to speak more cautiously, of its potential) against the various aspects of the critique of the masses will result in a perspective from which – only at the very end of this chapter – the utopia of an absolute democracy would be realized in which the rule of the multitude must be rejected, paradoxically in the name of the idea of the multitude.

1. The earliest articulation of a critique of the masses in the theory of democracy can be found in Plato. He offers it by way of explanation for the demise of Athens, and he articulates it from the perspective of an aristocratic reservation against replacing the rule of the best (which is to say: aristocracy) with the rule of the masses (or democracy). According to Plato’s diagnosis, democracy must sooner or later perish from the barbarism of the masses, as it becomes dependent on the masses’ power of judgement. The reason for this is that the masses may be manipulated to the extent that their lack of education deprives them of the criteria of judgement. The masses are then nothing but a pliable mass, putty in the hands of those who are skilled at seducing them. For democracy, as Plato has his Socrates say in the Republic, ‘[cares] nothing from what practices and way of life a man turns to politics, but [honors] him if only he says that he loves the people.’3 The 3

Plato, Rep. 558b–c, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1969) [www.perseus.tufts.edu].

Mass – People – Multitude

159

government’s power no longer rests on knowing the best men who know what is best; the democratic principle of equality instead affords fundamentally everyone the freedom to aspire to the office of government. With that principle, following this diagnosis, the democratic people already deliver themselves up to the spell of semblance. If no rules determine in advance who may govern and who may not, the aspirants to political office must produce themselves before the people from which they themselves proceed. Nothing legitimates political power but the people’s assent to these theatrical productions. To Plato’s mind, this amounts to a perversion. The natural order of the state under the rule of the best is transformed into a spectacle, with more or less rhetorically gifted political actors, on the one side and, on the other side, an alarmingly ignorant public that, he argues, can rely for its political judgement on nothing but its unlimited willingness to be impressed. And so the paradigm for Plato’s image of the foolish masses, easily impressed by rhetoric and other superficial charms, is the theatrical audience, and, moreover, a theatrical audience miseducated by bad art. The demise of Athens, he makes his ‘Athenian’ recall in Laws, began with poets who, though gifted, ‘were ignorant of what was just and lawful in music’ and so were ‘frenzied and unduly possessed by a spirit of [pleasing their audiences].’4 Even more grievous than the young talents’ infraction against the rules of art is the fact that this renders the audience the decisive authority. Ungoverned by rules of its own, the new art encourages an uneducated audience to judge it even without familiarity with the old rules – purely on the basis of its pleasure or displeasure. The authority of so-called good taste with its rules is superseded by spontaneous expressions of the masses. Plato describes them as ‘hissing’, ‘unmusical shoutings’ and the ‘clappings which mark applause’.5 That was how, Plato continues, ‘in place of an aristocracy […] there sprang up a kind of base theatrocracy’, a mass rule of the audience. And this theatrocracy, Plato argues, is nothing other than the true face

4 5

Plato, Leg. 700d, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1967 and 1968) [www.perseus.tufts.edu]. Ibid., 700c.

160

Juliane Rebentisch

of democracy: democracy consists not of ‘free men’ but of a foolish and, what is worse, impudent people that have exchanged awe and reverence toward the judgement of those who are superior for ‘the universal conceit of universal wisdom’.6 Under these conditions, Plato believes, democracy is doomed to degenerate. In the end, the charismatic scoundrels will prevail, ‘fierce and cunning creatures’,7 as he puts it, the type that knows how to impress the people. Democracy’s fate seems sealed – sooner or later it must turn into tyranny. In other words, democracy turns the functioning political polity into an uncultivated no man’s land. Since it is no longer answerable to any recognized power, it must necessarily end up as the caprice of the dominant. Plato’s critique of theatrocracy, the mass rule of the audience, is influential. Yet, it is also ambivalent in a way that makes it interesting to the theory of democracy. It is, first, patently an aristocratic critique of the tradition’s decline due to the rise of increasingly impudent masses, but it is also a critique of the irrationality of those masses. Considered from the perspective of an apology of democracy, the two are not as closely associated as the critique of theatrocracy would have us believe. I would like to begin with the first strand of the Platonic critique of theatrocracy: the aristocratic critique of the tradition’s decline because of the rise of the impudent masses. This critique has many proponents to this day. In terms of perpetuating the Platonic amalgamation of the critical motifs of theatre and the masses, however, it perhaps finds its most striking exponent in Nietzsche. In 1874, for instance, Nietzsche complains that it has ‘so far’ proven to be ‘impossible to gain control over theatrocracy’.8 Rather, the

6 7 8

Ibid., 701a–b. Plato, Rep. 559d. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Sommer 1872-Ende 1874, in Kritische Gesamtausgabe III. 4, ed. Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and Karl Pestalozzi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978), 389.

Mass – People – Multitude

161

‘theatre mob’,9 consisting of ‘dilettantish gushers’,10 the layman and the ‘art-idiot’,11 is afloat everywhere; they organize clubs, as Nietzsche declares with disgust, appointing themselves as judges. The theatre, this ‘mass art par excellence’,12 has established itself; it is the art form in the democratic ‘century of the mob’.13 This means that good taste is over. ‘The theater’, notes Nietzsche in The Case of Wagner (1888), ‘is a form of demolatry in matters of taste; the theater is a revolt of the masses, a plebiscite against good taste.’14 The political implications of what Nietzsche describes in relation to Bayreuth immediately emerge when placed in the Platonic context: what in art is referred to as a lack of taste, in politics means a lack of criteria in questions of the common good. Upon closer examination, however, it can be seen that the ignorant masses are not ignorant in any absolute sense, even in Plato. The problem, according to Plato, does not consist in the fact, for instance, that a democratic people does not know any rules at all, but that it does not know the right ones. In the Politeia, Plato draws a picture of the democrat who does know what is better, due to his mediocre upbringing, but not what is actually and truly good. It is precisely in this point, however, that Plato’s critique turns out to be decidedly weak from today’s perspective, for, as one can justifiably object to Plato, all ordinary mortals are ignorant in this sense. The idea of a final knowledge about the actually and truly good seems untenable today in post-metaphysical thought. The good – and this is what we know today for certain – is only given to us as something historical. What we consider the best in each case

Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente. Herbst 1884–Herbst 1885, Kritische Gesamtausgabe VII. 3, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, with Marie-Luise Haase (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 406. 10 Ibid. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 182. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1982), 664. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Herbst 1884–Herbst 1885, 410. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 183. 9

162

Juliane Rebentisch

is itself historically variable. It can be troubled by changed circumstances, by the experience of the novel, the foreign, indeed of any particularity, and thus remains fundamentally open to the possibility of revision. Considered in this light, the scene Plato sketches in Laws takes on a different aspect. The new unruly art he describes is precisely that: an experience of something novel and foreign. The response of pleasure or displeasure is triggered by something for whose assessment no rules are yet available. Any judgement of this art will therefore of necessity be subjective. The subject itself judges, without reliance on the authority of tradition. Contrary to the picture painted by Plato, however, this does not mean that judgement of such objects is based exclusively on immediate responses of pleasure or displeasure. Rather, such responses may initiate a reflection that relates the novel and foreign to the traditional and familiar and then, in judging, either rejects them as regressive or accepts them as progressive, so that the hitherto prevailing concept of the good undergoes modification. This is how we may defend the democratic subject against Plato’s critique. It is by no means without rules – it is quite certainly a socialized or, as Plato himself puts it, an educated subject – but it is capable of modifying the rules as necessary, in light of its experience in engaging with the novel and foreign. The fact that judgement, in matters of taste as much as in matters of politics, must thus be conceived as fundamentally fallible does not render judgement as such invalid. Rather, the fallibility of judgement is directly related to its freedom. It is only because we may be impressed by novel impressions and foreign impulses, because we may respond to them by distancing ourselves from the principles instilled in us by our education, that free judgement and a self-determined life are possible; that the question concerning the good can even arise as a question; and that we may make the social practice we are part of our own or undertake to change it. True ego strength, one might also say, can only exist because the presumed weaknesses of a subject’s openness for, and its penetrability by, a changeable world can never be quite overcome. Freedom reduced to a pure, that is, untroubled ego strength would thus practically be a negation of freedom to the degree that the latter is misunderstood as an autonomy that could be partitioned off from any heteronomy. Freedom does not primarily mean becoming immune to changed circumstances or expected stimuli and

Mass – People – Multitude

163

influences in order to hold on to one’s orientation once one has it.15 On the contrary, sooner or later such a position would indeed lead to an autoimmune reversal of freedom into bondage. Because the circumstances of our existence can change, and we can change with them, the consciousness for the fundamental changeability of our conception of the good – and at the same time this means the consciousness for its historicity – constitutively belongs much more to a post-metaphysical understanding of freedom. What is at stake in the examination of Plato is nothing less than the ontology of the good, in other words, the correct understanding of the mode of being of the good itself. To the extent to which Plato believed he knew what is truly good, he failed to recognize that the possibility of questioning the good must itself belong to the good. Unlike the metaphysical idea of an objective good, we can never be quite sure whether what we today in good conscience consider the best will not ultimately turn out to be the worst option under changed circumstances. A post-metaphysical conception of the good must therefore take up the possibility of questioning the good in the very conception of the good, even in a way that takes priority over all definitions of the good based in content.16 Such an argument has far-reaching consequences also for the modern critique of the masses, as it does, for example, for Nietzsche’s polemic against the ‘art-idiots’. The word ‘idiot’ in Nietzsche should not be understood in the current sense of ‘highly moronic’. Up until the nineteenth century, the term was still being used in the sense of the Greek idiotes, which meant laymen and bunglers as much as private citizens. It corresponds to the adjective idios: proper, private, particular. Yet, the theatre audience’s judgement about unruly art is not subsumed in the idiotic – merely private and random – stirrings of desire or aversion, but rather can be understood as a paradigmatic case of the fact that pre-existing criteria of judgement can be called into question in light of new influences, foreign impulses, and

15 16

Cf. also Martin Seel, Sich bestimmen lassen: Studien zur theoretischen und praktischen Philosophie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2002), esp. 227–45, 279–98. Cf. also Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung: Sprachanalytische Interpretationen (Frankfurt /M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), 356 f.

164

Juliane Rebentisch

other perspectives. Furthermore, one can defend these challenges to the audience’s judgement in terms of a post-metaphysical ontology of the good, one which grants the possibility of questioning the definition of the good within the understanding of the good itself. As a consequence, the boundaries between private and public necessarily become contested as well. This is the scandal of theatrocracy: not only do we have a situation in which the people designated by the authorities for an idiotic life in private usurp a judgement about public things, such as art or politics; the understanding of judgement itself is altered in theatrocracy in a way that the boundaries between public and private become subject to negotiation. Judgement is no longer grounded in the problematic theoretical idea that the good is something that can be acquired in the mode of objective knowledge and that is therefore valid independently of individual experience. Rather, judgement of the good now opens up to the dimension of historically changeable experience. What is good can never be proven to be so other than in its practical implementation. At the same time, however, the dependence of the good on experiences made by individuals in living exchange with the world means that the private can never be conclusively separated from the public. Rather, the boundary between public and private is open to negotiation over and over again. Admittedly, the fact that the possibility of negotiating this boundary in democracy is, in fact, protected as much as freedom itself means, for those self-declared intellectual aristocrats in the wake of Nietzsche, that their definitions of the good are from now on exposed to the fearless judgements of others in relation to whom these aristocrats must justify themselves.

2. If the loss of ‘awe and reverence’ before the unquestioned authority of traditional determinations of the good is defensible from the perspective of a theory of democracy, such a defence envisions the popular masses as a

Mass – People – Multitude

165

multitude of individuals judging for themselves. This optimistic picture, however, contrasts sharply with another one: that of the agitated mob drowning out the cacophony of individual judgements with bellowing unanimity. This negative image of the mass no doubt poses a problem even for confident democrats. Yet the issue it raises is a very different one than the fearlessness of the masses judging for themselves beneath the apprehensive and hostile eyes of the aristocrats. This is a problem that is no longer reducible to the social status of the members of the mass. What we see is a psychologically interesting dynamic that annuls social distinctions and thus can also incorporate even the most distinguished of aristocrats. In the masses, an assembly of individuals of widely divergent backgrounds who do not know each other can come together into a unity, thus creating homogeneity that outshines everything that might be created in terms of assimilations within social groups. It is this egalitarian dynamic of the masses that Nietzsche is thinking of when he writes: ‘In the theater […] even the most personal conscience is vanquished by the leveling magic of the great number; the neighbor reigns, one becomes a mere neighbor’.17 I do not wish to comment any further on the fact that becoming a neighbour for Nietzsche is obviously the epitome of the individual loss of autonomy. The point that interests me here lies in the formulation that one becomes a neighbour in the theatre – and for Nietzsche that means: in the mass. The dynamic of the mass itself equalizes all its members quite irrespective of their various social backgrounds. Indeed, this dynamic of the mass has occasionally been defended in the name of a utopia of equality understood as democratic. Elias Canetti, for instance, speaks quite affirmatively of the ‘blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another’, which explains why people become a crowd or a mass.18 While the individuals otherwise reside in social differences, ‘during the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal’.19 From the perspective of a

17 Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, 664. 18 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1973), 18. 19 Ibid.

166

Juliane Rebentisch

theory of democracy, however, the problem of the masses does not already lie in the fact that social hierarchies are annulled in them, but rather in the associated dynamic in which the individual’s power of judgement is suspended. For a mass, in the sense of this dynamic, to arise from members randomly put together, there has to be an external occasion that targets the crowd as a collectivity, and thus effects a spontaneous process of organization that enables the members of the masses to be open to each other’s influence on the affective level. It is then primarily the force of mutual affective contagion among the members of the mass that casts such a spell over each of them, ultimately sweeping away his or her individuality and his or her ability to take distance and articulate criticism, or as Nietzsche says, their conscience, in a collective motion. Besides Émile Durkheim, Gabriel Tarde was the central figure in the French sociology of his lifetime; with Gustave Le Bon, he was his era’s leading theorist of the mass. According to Tarde, the sinister and mysterious phenomenon of the mass illustrates the fundamental role that imitation plays in socialization more generally. The members of a mass imitate one another in an unrestrained fashion. In that regard, Tarde writes, they resemble children: without constraints, qualms or doubts that would bridle this process. In time, the members of the mass become the ‘perfect medium of imitation’.20 Yet, the state of exception that is regression, the repression of consciousness in the mass, Tarde believes, only points up the involvement of the unconscious in all imitation. ‘Nothing’, he writes in his book The Laws of Imitation (1890), ‘is less scientific than the establishment of this absolute separation, of this abrupt break, between the voluntary and the involuntary, between the conscious and the unconscious.’21 In fact, we are not always completely conscious when we imitate. Others’ convictions and habits sometimes seep into us unnoticed. What is more, only an

20 Cf. Urs Stäheli, ‘Übersteigerte Nachahmung – Tardes Massentheorie’, in Christian Borch and Urs Stäheli, eds, Soziologie der Nachahmung und des Begehrens: Materialien zu Gabriel Tarde (Frankfurt /M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), 397–416: 397. 21 Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), xiii.

Mass – People – Multitude

167

imperceptible transition separates conscious imitation, an act of reflective will, from mechanical habit. For Tarde, while the masses do become the ‘stage for the drama of socialization’,22 on the one hand, they are equally inadequate as a model for social imitation in general due to their self-contained quality, on the other hand. In their life, individuals are perpetually exposed to a wide variety of influences; as Tarde puts it, they are affected by different ‘imitative rays’.23 ‘Our social life’, he writes, ‘includes a thick network of radiations of this sort, with countless mutual interferences.’24 This diversity is not only a source of individuality: it is also the source for a certain resistance on the part of individuals to the impressions that rush in on them. Yet, such resistance derives neither from an individuality we may presuppose as already existing nor from a meta-knowledge of the true good; instead it derives from the particular convictions individuals have adopted beforehand, or, we might say, from a prior imitation.25 At the same time, what is valid for us must time and again live up to the challenges of endlessly new competing influences and novel impressions. The situations in which such challenges arise are when we first become aware, or become aware once again, of convictions we have unconsciously adopted or unconsciously formed. What then plays out is the scene of an internal conflict, a ‘miniature internal battle’,26 which precedes the conscious judgement of our own convictions. For Tarde, autonomy is thus only to be understood as the reflected relation to a doubled heteronomy. Autonomy only exists in the release of the conditions of stress between mechanical habit and outside impulse, sedimented imitation and mimetic opening – in which the way out is open in each case. In the end, the judgement either rejects the new – the new

22 Stäheli, ‘Overreaching Imitation’, 405. 23 See for example Gabriel Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 54. 24 Gabriel Tarde, On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 171. 25 Cf. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 45; Stäheli, ‘Overreaching Imitation’, 413. 26 Gabriel Tarde, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology, trans. Howard C. Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 84.

168

Juliane Rebentisch

idea, the new art, the new politics – in the name of the old, or it can take up something better in opposition to the old. The reference to the connection between democratic freedom and an ontology of the good, understood as post-metaphysical or anti-aristocratic, thus once again proves to be instructive in the context of mass theory. But if that is the case, attempts to limit and control the exercise of influence are unfit as means to fend off the danger of mass conformity; quite to the contrary, we must work to maintain the diversity of influences. Such openness cannot abolish the phenomenon of the mass as such; at the moment when we are members of a mass, we cannot exclude – and if you consider sports events, for example, we perhaps do not want to exclude – the possibility that we are drawn in by the energy of its movement; but the variety of influences that otherwise define our lives tends to limit the effects of the mass to the time and space of its emergence. A related matter is that the mass, in the sense I have just discussed, can be stabilized, and that its conformity can be translated into social forms, only when other influences are largely neutralized. That is the case in totalitarian societies, which, as we know, were especially compatible with the phenomenon of mass or group psychology. Sigmund Freud accordingly pointed out the fundamental role that a prominent leader-figure plays for the long-term sustainability of the mass. The libidinous relation to this figure binds the masses together, enabling their members to build a stable identification with one another. ‘Many equals’, says Freud, ‘who can identify themselves with one another, and a single person superior to them all–that is the situation that we find realised in groups which are capable of subsisting [in der lebensfähigen Masse].’27 As a member of the enduring mass, Freud argued, the individual appears not so much as a herd animal, but rather as a horde animal, the member of a horde ruled by a leader.28 What is decisive here is that the individual’s lack of freedom in the organized mass is closely

27 28

Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 68. Cf. ibid.

Mass – People – Multitude

169

connected to the exclusivity of the masses. This also explains why masses are intolerant of what is outside them.

3. Tarde contrasts these mass phenomena with a tendency that, it seems at first glance, positively runs counter to them. The age of the masses as one in which, as Freud puts it, the primal horde is revived,29 is opposed to the age of the democratic mass publics facilitated by modern communication media. The decisive difference, Tarde argues, begins with the plurality of these publics. Unlike the mass, which tends to absorb the whole person, the democratic mass publics enable the individual to be a member of several sub-publics or specialized publics, generating a process of exchange between them in which they qualify and correct one another. If this process fosters the critical consciousness of the individual, it would seem to be fitting that modern publics tend to be detached from the basis on which the psychological masses rest: the material aggregation of bodies in space. Publics are virtual entities, established solely through simultaneity; they form by means of the participation – often via media – in a specific idea at a particular moment in time. Yet the history Tarde lays out is not one of linear progress. That is because the problem of conformism resurfaces on the side of the democratic mass publics as well; it may be less extreme there, but if it is less conspicuous, it is more ‘chronic’, as Tarde observes.30 The conditions of democracy reveal an aspect that is merely covered up by the unquestioned exceptional status that the leader enjoys in the case of organized masses: the fact that those who give impulses to the mass public are at once dependent on that same public – in order to retain their positions of eminence above the mass, they must at least partly conform to it. 29 Cf. ibid., 70. 30 Cf. Gabriel Tarde, ‘Le public et la foule’, in L’opinion et la foule (Paris: P.U.F., 1989), 52.

170

Juliane Rebentisch

The problem has long been discussed under the famous title Alexis de Tocqueville coined for it, that of a ‘tyranny of the majority’. The conformity that emerges through the processes of mutual adaptation between impulse givers on the one hand and mass public on the other is also the central problem of the chapter on the culture industry in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47). Tocqueville’s diagnosis, that tyranny in democratic societies no longer targets bodies, but goes directly after the mind and thinking,31 has, according to Adorno and Horkheimer during the 1940s, been ‘fully borne out in the meantime’.32 ‘Culture today’, they quip, ‘is infecting everything with sameness.’33 The logic at work here is one according to which anything that does not adapt to the idea of mass compatibility – that is to say, anything that is considered too outlandish, too complex, too difficult, too original, or too eccentric – may be marginalized, condemned to quasi-private existence, or even forced into resigned silence. Yet however consequential the decisions taken in the name of the majority, of the mainstream or public opinion may be, however shockingly insatiable the logic may be that invokes that majority for justification, this is not the logic of democracy as such. We are dealing here with a dangerous dimension, not with the sole truth, of the theatrocratic-democratic situation in which those who strive for power depend on the assent or repudiation, or in short, on the judgement of their audience. We should note, first and foremost, that public opinion does not exist independently of its representation. It never appears as such. Public opinion is neither to be found out there like an object, nor does it speak like a subject. One may quote it, appeal to it, summon it, make it speak, but one always merely ‘ventriloquizes it’, as Jacques Derrida has put it.34 In a related context, Niklas Luhmann speaks Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. James R. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), 410. 32 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragements, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 105. 33 Ibid., 94. 34 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 87. 31

Mass – People – Multitude

171

of the fact that public opinion must be understood as ‘the Holy Spirit of the system’. For public opinion, Luhmann continues, ‘is’ nothing other than ‘what is observed and described as public opinion, a semblance created by public communication itself […] a kind of mirror in which communication reflects itself.’35 On the one hand, the fact that public opinion – the mainstream – is the majority, cannot be detached from its representation at any particular point in time highlights the aspect of rhetoric that is always at play when we talk about the entity in whose name political action is taken. On the other hand, the nonexistence of public opinion outside its representation also implies the question of power. The presumption of power and domination comes into being at the very moment that someone claims to speak for everyone, or at least for the mainstream or the majority, claiming to represent public opinion.36 The figure of speaking for everyone is effective to the degree that it can literally be taken referentially, that is, that it can seem to speak public opinion by ventriloquizing it. As a figure, or figurality, it simultaneously refers, however, to the facelessness and voicelessness of those who only get a face and voice through it – and that is the unorganized, inhomogeneous crowd, or even: the multitude. The fact that public opinion never exists outside its representation at the same time implies the question of power. For the presumption of power and rule already exists at the moment when one member of the crowd steps forward and claims to speak for everyone, or at least for the majority, or to represent public opinion.37 At that moment, a moment of sovereignty, a Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), 286; trans. Hendrickson and Jackson. 36 At issue here is the figure of the prosopopoeia. Quintilian describes it as a figure through which ‘cities also and peoples may find a voice’ (Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, vol. IV, Books 9–10, trans. Donald A. Russell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, IX. 2, 31). On the history of this rhetorical figure, cf. also Bettine Menke, Prosopopoiia: Stimme und Text bei Brentano, Hoffmann, Kleist und Kafka (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2000), 137–216. 37 Cf. Christoph Menke, ‘Die Depotenzierung des Souveräns im Gesang. Claudio Monteverdi’s “Die Krönung der Poppea” und die Demokratie’, in Eva Horn, Bettine Menke, and Christoph Menke, eds, Literatur als Philosophie – Philosophie als Literatur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 281–96. 35

172

Juliane Rebentisch

division is established between the representative and those he or she represents, a division that cannot be conceived without asymmetry, which is also to say: without power and domination. Such power exists both on the side of politics and on that of the press and the media, which, as we all know, can also represent public opinion in opposition to politics. The media may give a voice to minorities that are without representation in institutions; they may help correct the mistakes committed by official politics, and if things go well, see to it that inequities are redressed. Yet as Derrida was right to emphasize, that should not lead us to conclude that they constitute the legitimate representation of ‘a “public opinion” […] without filtering or screening’.38 Even the most liberal press undeniably wields a degree of power by virtue of its ability to determine what is of public interest and what is not. That is why the freedom of the press that democracies grant must also include a freedom vis-à-vis the press, namely, the right to counterargument and rejoinder, which, once again citing Derrida, ‘allows the citizen to be more than the fraction (the private, deprived [privée] fraction, in sum, and more and more so) of a passive, consumer “public”, necessarily cheated because of this.’39 Such a critique of the public, which is always also a critique of the structures that severely restrict the right to an opposing point of view by constraining formats and demanding speed, however, is nonetheless formulated within the theatrocratic setting, in which everyone who appears in order to represent public opinion is judged by a heterogeneous audience, which is often not in agreement with his or her representations. The power of representation – in politics as well as in the press, that comments on politics – can be called democratic to the degree to which it recognizes that it itself must be recognized,40 that is, the degree to which, following its own self-understanding, it remains excluded from the possibility of an opposing view or rectification. This, of course, does not automatically go 38 Derrida, The Other Heading, 98. 39 Ibid., 105f. 40 Cf. Christoph Menke, ‘Von der Ironie der Politik zur Politik der Ironie’, in Die Ironie der Politik: Über die Konstruktion politischer Wirklichkeiten (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2003), 19–33: 27–8.

Mass – People – Multitude

173

along with deciding for the latter. It is, as is evident today from the commentary on online magazines and newspapers, not always the opposing view of the commenting citizen which appears more reasonable. It is, however, decisive that power, political power as well as media power, is compelled to justify itself through the possibility of an opposing view, and that in principle the possibility exists to change, at any time, what is considered to be public opinion. The decisive impulses do not always and only arise from opposing views in the media. As is well known, they can also result from demonstrations on which the media reports. This is where the spatio-corporal masses, with their own ambivalent dynamic, once again become significant. Any demonstration is also the demonstration of a public, and the medium of such a demonstration is usually the sheer quantity of a mass – it is important that a significant number of people come together so that the issue uniting them ceases to be the quasi-private concern of a small group and becomes a public concern. The mass as such always harbours the potential to unleash its peculiar affective dynamic – hence the customary police presence. The proverbial spark is occasionally sufficient. Because of its disinhibiting dynamic, the transition to action in the masses often means the transition to violence. Thus, mass psychology talks about the destructive frenzy of the masses; it is what first strikes the eye, especially in revolutionary and transient masses. Once the mass escalates from demonstrating its own existence to action, it shows a preference for smashing windows, kicking down doors and setting fires. The power of the masses is articulated here, as Canetti has emphasized, almost literally in the form of crossing boundaries.41 Even the peaceful demonstration has the goal, if you will, of shifting boundaries; it aims for a different definition of the boundary between public and private, for a different social perception of what is considered relevant to a majority or even counts as public at all. Yet the very insight into the potential for violence inherent in the demonstrating mass should lead us to insist on the difference that separates it from the fascist mass. The difference between the demonstrating mass and the fascist mass consists in the fleetingness 41 Cf. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 18ff.

174

Juliane Rebentisch

of the one and the durability of the other. The demonstrating mass finds fulfilment in its negative function; it disturbs an ostensible consensus, disrupting one social order in the name of another, which it itself cannot hope to embody or anticipate. The fascist mass, however, translates its dynamic into the positivity of social forms. While the demonstrating mass quiets down as the fires go out that it may in extreme instances set,42 the fascist mass, by contrast, elevates the torch to the status of a social symbol. The actual difference, then, consists in the fact that the demonstrating, fleeting mass does not substitute its logic for the political order, but remains in a fraught relation to it.

4. Such demonstrations, we might say, thus also constitute very clear manifestations of a gulf separating the democratic public from itself; a self-difference of the public. Yet, in a democracy, this difference is present on several and sometimes interlocking levels. It is apparent not only in the relation between government and extra-parliamentary opposition, but also in the relations between government and parliamentary opposition, between politics and the press, between the press and the citizen and last but not least in the relation between the citizen and the human being, which becomes virulent at the edges of the democratic polities in the discourse of human rights. All these levels of democratic life, which attest to a contention over different views of what is of public relevance, of the collective will, correspond to a conception of democracy that has abandoned the idea of an ultimate and truly good order of political rule. A democratic society, as the French democracy theorist Claude Lefort put it famously, is a society that

42 Ibid., 20.

Mass – People – Multitude

175

no longer claims to be able to be completely ‘in agreement with itself ’.43 This conception of democracy, it bears repeated emphasis, differs widely from a conception of democracy in which the problem of sovereignty has supposedly been overcome because ‘the people’ themselves now appear in the position of the sovereign, a notion that presupposes the fiction of the identity of the demos with itself. But democracy, as Jacques Rancière has recently been emphasizing with particular insistence, only begins when even this fiction, which is more or less openly totalitarian, is laid to rest. It begins with the acknowledgment of an ‘original division’, as Rancière says, of the demos into, on the one hand, a politically positioned unity, and on the other, that which necessarily remains supplementary to this unity, and which thus, as he writes, ‘displaces any social identification.’44 What he means by this is the irresolvable duality between the form that the demos achieves in its representations, on the one hand, and the facelessness of the demos in its (non-)form as heterogeneous crowd or multitude, on the other. The supplementarity of the demos in relation to all its political representations, however, itself remains curiously ungrounded if we do not relate it back to the insight that each individual member of the demos always remains open to outside and new influences, and thus to the possibility of changing his or her life and understanding of the self and the world. Such changes are never only private in nature. Through changes in myself I change the practice that I am a part of. This can happen almost imperceptibly; but it can also mean that I, in order to continue living in the world, must engage in a battle over recognition. The multitude, in other words, is therefore incalculably heterogeneous, because the individuals have the potential to self-transformation. This context explains why the multitude can never completely and definitively coincide with its representations. Certainly, this does not imply that such representations should be avoided. In fact, there can be

43 Claude Lefort and Maurice Gauchet, ‘Sur la démocratie: le politique et l’institution du social’, Textures 2–3 (1971), 7–78. 44 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 100.

176

Juliane Rebentisch

no equality, no justice and no freedom without defining the boundary between public and private matters, without defining the collective will. But this mandates the recognition of an irresolvable tension between the demos as incalculably heterogeneous crowd or multitude, on the one hand, and the sovereign power that time and again gives it a form, a face, a will, and a voice, on the other. This tension cannot be removed from the life of democracy. On the contrary: the historical life of democracy at its many levels consists in nothing more than in discharging this tension. And to say this also has certain consequences for thinking about democratic sovereignty, which, as kratía, is indelibly encoded in the term democracy. Since the unity of the demos cannot simply be taken for granted, it must be politically produced, sovereignly positioned over and over again along with the social order that is meant to contain it. Unlike monarchic sovereignty, democratic sovereignty does not refer to any absolute, external, transcendent pole from which to legitimate its positions. This is why sovereignty, precisely in democratic societies, appears purely as power. But when the belief in a power legitimated by a transcendental position and a quasi-natural order, founded on an absolute basis, collapses, sovereignty is exposed to the problem of its legitimacy. To put it another way: when sovereignty appears purely as power, it is no longer pure, absolute, or divine sovereignty. It is then reliant on recognition. This is the scene of theatrocratic democracy. As soon as sovereignty appears on the stage of democracy, thus becoming recognizable as power, it has to justify itself and the political order endowed by it in which the demos is meant to be recognized as a unity. It therefore has to face up to the challenge from potential counter programs and competitors. But then, democratic sovereignty is no longer any pure, indivisible sovereignty; it forfeits its immunity and indivisibility. Democratic sovereignty is reliant on being recognized by the incalculably heterogeneous multitude, over and over again. In democracy, therefore, there is neither anything like a pure, indivisible sovereignty nor is there anything like a pure participation that would be free from all sovereignty. Such an idea could only be conceivable if the demos were in fact equipped with an unmediated sovereignty, an undivided will, one voice, one opinion. Given the insight of the incalculable heterogeneity of the multitude, however, this proves to be a structurally totalitarian idea.

Mass – People – Multitude

177

5. Now I can finally come to what I announced at the beginning, to the ‘absolute democracy’ that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt advocate at the end of their book entitled Multitude (2004). What is interesting in our context is that they do indeed propose the multitude as the Other of sovereignty. Because of its heterogeneity, they write, it ‘cannot be sovereign’.45 At the same time, however, they do not use this to draw the conclusion that there is a necessary relation of tension between sovereignty and multitude, and that negotiating this relation, as I have said, is what constitutes the historical life of democracy. Rather, they dream of a ‘full and absolute democracy’46 in which sovereignty, and thus also the difference between ruler and ruled, would be abolished, and a self-governing of the many would be achieved. This utopia is oriented toward the idea of an absolute immanence in which not only is there no longer any external authority, that is, one legitimated by a transcendental position, but there is also no hierarchy whatsoever, no asymmetry. All elements should be integrated at the same level.47 The discussion of a ‘destruction of sovereignty in favor of democracy’ should also be understood in this ‘absolute’ sense. It is not simply about a democratic transformation of sovereign power into a power of recognition, as I just outlined above. Rather, it is about abolishing any relation of power and domination whatsoever. Of course, this is nothing else than the utopia of a socially realized equality. Under this condition, as Negri and Hardt would have it, the multitude should also be able to emerge in a permanently liberated, pure shape. For instance, according to Negri’s and Hardt’s example, the difference between the sexes should be able to become ‘a creative, singular power’, ‘only when every discipline of labor, affect, and power that makes gender difference into an index of

45 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 330. 46 Ibid., 357. 47 Ibid., 337.

178

Juliane Rebentisch

hierarchy is destroyed.’48 The same must then hold for all other differences. Transforming them into new singularities means setting them up before the backdrop of a final equality. The goal of this utopia is a final equality in which every distortion would be obliterated, achieving a state of fundamental understanding, so that in the end politics would coincide with the freedom of the unrepresentable individual. The problem, or crux, of this vision lies in the fact that, in the last consequence, it can only be thought of as the negation of historical life, only as a state beyond history. For the idea of a final equality, and this means a completely realized equitableness, implies getting rid of the possibility of error, of deception, and of self-deception, which indeed, as Albrecht Wellmer has justifiably stressed over and over again, ‘structurally belongs to the mode of being of finite beings, which are always entangled in limited and particular perspectives on themselves and on the world in a history that is open to the future’.49 With the idea of being able to overcome the possibility of going wrong, one also overcomes the multitude, whose incalculable plurality of perspectives arises from the conditions of finiteness. Only because the world is never present to us in anything other than the limitation of our finite perspectives does the possibility arise of discovering something new and of thinking of changing one’s own outlook, of acting differently. As long as the multitude is tied to this condition–both with respect to the incalculability that exceeds every unity and to a number of determinate differences–it cannot be reconciled with the idea of a final perspective, a final and total integration. To put it another way: a humanity that would be ‘all multitude’50 in the sense of absolute democracy, would no longer be one (that is: no multitude, but also no longer humanity either). Now, one could think that this objection misconstrues the status of ‘absolute democracy’ in Negri and Hardt, namely that this understanding of practice should purport a kind of regulative idea. This could be countered,

48 Ibid., 355. 49 Albrecht Wellmer, Sprachphilosophie: Eine Vorlesung (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2004), 247–8. 50 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 355.

Mass – People – Multitude

179

however, by the argument that the democratic multitude should neither believe in this idea nor should it hope for its realization in any way, because the idea of an ‘absolute democracy’ shifts the character of democratic politics in advance. Democracy does not aim for individual singularity as the result of its politics; rather, the singularity of the individual is its starting point with regard to the experience that there is a structurally insurmountable gap between the political definitions of the community and its corresponding ideas of equality, on the one hand, and the multitude assembled from an incalculably large number of singularities, on the other. Democracy begins with the insight that equality under the conditions of finiteness is never realized as absolute, but always only as contingent and limited equality, and this means: it is never released from the question of power. In other words, the insight into a moment of sovereignty at the heart of democratic societies is not the weary end, but the beginning of democratic politics. It is a politics with a dynamic that is partially the result of the experiences of a self-difference within the demos and which thus cannot be adequately described either in terms of absolute transcendence, or in terms of absolute immanence. It is a dynamic of the self-transgression of democracy that is constitutively to be conceived historically in which democracy does not asymptotically reach a regulative idea, but in which it finds itself, time and again, only in and through the battles over how it is understood. Only in these battles can the multitude manifest itself as democratic force. Translated from the German by Daniel Hendrickson and Gerrit Jackson

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragements, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1973). de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. James R. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010).

180

Juliane Rebentisch

Derrida, Jacques, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992). Freud, Sigmund, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). Lefort, Claude, and Maurice Gauchet, ‘Sur la démocratie: le politique et l’institution du social’, Textures 2–3 (1971), 7–78. Luhmann, Niklas, Die Politik der Gesellschaft [The Politics of Society] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2000). Menke, Bettine, Prosopopoiia. Stimme und Text bei Brentano, Hoffmann, Kleist und Kafka [Prosopopoeia. Voice and Text in Brentano, Hoffmann, Kleist and Kafka] (Munich: Fink, 2000). Menke, Christoph, ‘Von der Ironie der Politik zur Politik der Ironie’ [From the Irony of Politics to the Politics of Irony], in Christoph Menke, Die Ironie der Politik. Über die Konstruktion politischer Wirklichkeiten (Frankfurt/M. : Campus, 2003), 19–33. , ‘Die Depotenzierung des Souveräns im Gesang. Claudio Monteverdi’s “Die Krönung der Poppea” und die Demokratie’ [The Depotentialization of the Sovereign in Song. Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘The Coronation of Poppea’], in Eva Horn, Bettine Menke and Christoph Menke, eds, Literatur als Philosophie – Philosophie als Literatur (Munich: Fink, 2006), 281–96. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969). , Nachgelassene Fragmente. Herbst 1884–Herbst 1885, Kritische Gesamtausgabe VII. 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974). , Nachgelassene Fragmente. Sommer 1872–Ende 1874, Kritische Gesamtausgabe III. 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978). , Nietzsche contra Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1982). Plato, Leges, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1967 and 1968) [www.perseus.tufts.edu]. , Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1969) [www.perseus.tufts.edu]. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Rancière, Jaques, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

Mass – People – Multitude

181

Rebentisch, Juliane, ‘Masse – Volk – Multitude. Überlegungen zur Quelle demokratischer Legitimität’, in WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (2011/2), 3–18. Seel, Martin, Sich bestimmen lassen. Studien zur theoretischen und praktischen Philosophie [To Let Oneself be Determined: Studies in Theoretical and Practical Philosophy] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002). Stäheli, Urs, ‘Übersteigerte Nachahmung – Tardes Massentheorie’ [Overreaching Imitation – Tarde’s Theory of the Masses], in Christian Borch and Urs Stäheli, eds, Soziologie der Nachahmung und des Begehrens. Materialien zu Gabriel Tarde (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), 397–416. Tarde, Gabriel, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903). , Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology, trans. Howard C. Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1907). , On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). , L’opinion et la foule (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). Tugendhat, Ernst, Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung. Sprachanalytische Interpretationen [Self-consciousness and Self-determination: Interpretations Based on Linguistic Analysis] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1979). Wellmer, Albrecht, Sprachphilosophie. Eine Vorlesung [Philosophy of Language. A Lecture] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2004).

Christoph Menke

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

Recent theories and diagnoses of social states of affairs have attempted to use the figure of the aesthetic to gain insight into central mechanisms of contemporary society. These attempts rest on the assumption that the aesthetic is a figure of subjectivity, or more precisely, of freedom. This assumption is correct: the last word of aesthetics is human freedom.1 More pressing is the need for us to clarify what aesthetics means by freedom. For only when that is clear can we decide how compelling the attempt is to describe, let alone to explain and evaluate,2 today’s emerging postmodern society by referring to figures of thought elaborated by the aesthetics of modernity between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. This attempt 1 2

Christoph Menke, Kraft: Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008), 129; Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology, trans. Garrit Jackson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 98. For a descriptive-phenomenological usage of the category of the aesthetic see Axel Honneth, ‘Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung. Paradoxien der Individualisierung’, in Axel Honneth, Das Ich im Wir: Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 202–21. In contrast to this usage, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello ‘Die Arbeit der Kritik und der normative Wandel’, in Marion von Osten, ed., Norm der Abweichung (Zurich: Springer 2003), 57–80, as well as Andreas Reckwitz, ‘Vom Künstlermythos zur Normalisierung kreativer Prozesse. Der Beitrag des Kunstfelds zur Genese des Kreativsubjekts’, in Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch, eds, Kreation und Depression: Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Kadmos, 2011), 98–117. These authors use the category of the aesthetic in order to explain the development of certain social formations and figures, on the basis of a process of aestheticization. On the use of the aesthetic and the aestheticization as categories of value assessment see the comprehensive study by Juliane Rebentisch, Die Kunst der Freiheit: Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012).

184

Christoph Menke

attributes to modern aesthetics an anticipatory quality with regard to today’s postmodern social developments. In the following, I will argue that this recourse of social theory to aesthetics must fail: the emerging forms of a postmodern subjectivity (or, as I will say, for reasons I will explain, a subjectivity that is both postdisciplinary and post-autonomous) cannot be understood as the social realization of a figure delineated by modern aesthetics. That is so for two reasons that seem to be mutually contradictory: because the aesthetic freedom of modernity is both less and more than the freedom of the postdisciplinary subjectivity we currently see taking shape. On the one hand, the post-disciplinary form of subjectivity goes beyond the idea of freedom framed by aesthetic modernity; the former is not the late social realization of the latter (but in fact a result of its crisis). On the other hand, however, the idea of freedom framed by aesthetic modernity likewise goes beyond the post-disciplinary form of subjectivity; the former is not the blueprint for the latter (but in fact energizes its critique). I will explain this double hypothesis with a few desultory remarks about the concept of taste. ‘Taste’ is an aesthetic category and at once a social one. It is an aesthetic category because taste constitutes the exemplary figure of aesthetic freedom. Taste is a faculty of freedom because it is a faculty of perception and evaluation in which the subject proceeds, quite radically, ‘without guidance from another’:3 without the guidance of tradition, but also without the guidance of a generally defined method, and indeed even without the guidance of a determinate, which is to say, predetermined concept. At the same time, this possibility is available to all: whereas only a few people can have genius, the freedom of aesthetic creation, taste is that faculty of aesthetic freedom that everyone may develop. And taste is a social category because taste is of fundamental importance for the subject’s social constitution and its social function. That is true not because (or not only

3

Kant clarifies this formulation from ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ in Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of the Power of Judgment] (§ 40, B 158–9) as an overcoming of the ‘passivity’ of reason. To guide oneself constitutes the activity of reason, or transforms the self into a subject.

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

185

because) the concept of ‘good’ taste designates yet another field in which social distinctions and convertible forms of accumulated capital may be generated.4 Rather, it is true first and foremost because the faculty of taste is crucial – though crucial in very different ways – both to modern society and to the emerging postmodern or post-disciplinary society.

Autonomy The category of taste, more than almost any other, is tied to the emergence of aesthetics in the eighteenth century.5 It is here that the concept’s essential features take shape: ‘taste’, as aesthetics defines it, is a faculty of cognition and judgment that belongs to the ‘sensible’, which is to say, it proceeds without predetermined rules or concepts. Taste is the faculty of perceiving and judging the qualities of an object without methodical verification or argumentative justification in an act of sensible comprehension. This conception is opposed at once to traditional doctrines of artistic production and to the philosophy of rationalism. Against the traditional doctrines of artistic production, it describes the aesthetic objects of taste as incapable of regulation and as fundamentally exempt from theory and its conceptual-discursive knowledge. It is not enough, aesthetics likes to say, quoting Horace, that poems be beautiful (in accordance with the rules): ‘let them be tender and affecting, and bear away the soul of the auditor whithersoever they please.’ To have taste means to have understood that 4

5

This is Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis (presented here in an abbreviated form), which is part of his attempt to reverse the ‘denial of the social’ that tries to define taste and to uncover its hidden social function. But perhaps the social element of taste lies precisely in its denial of the social. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 11. For more detailed and exact analyses of the following see Christoph Menke, ‘Subjekt, Subjektivität’, in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds, Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden V (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 734–87.

186

Christoph Menke

a ‘work that is full of breaches of the rules can be excellent’: taste savours the ‘irrégularités heureuses [the happy irregularities]’.6 Yet the aesthetic category of taste is at once also opposed to the philosophy of rationalism, which had declared the idea of a faculty of sensible judgment to be absurd: operating in the sensible and without clearly defined concepts, rationalism had argued, we do not comprehend objects but project our impressions and preferences (and then immediately forget that we merely projected). Good taste, as La Rochefoucauld puts it in a maxim aimed against the rationalist reduction of the judgment of taste to a mere projection of preferences, is distinguishable from bad taste, good taste being that taste which knows ‘the real value of things’: it ‘teaches us’, Jean-Baptiste Dubos says, ‘how something is in itself ’; it discloses things as they truly are.7 Aesthetics, then, defines taste as the conjunction of two conflicting elements: the form of subjectivity and the aspiration to objective validity. Taste is a subjective faculty: an ability that has been acquired through practice and is therefore irreducible to rules, an ability the subject can apply on its own responsibility, without the guidance of lived tradition or rational method. In taste, the subject itself judges. And yet taste is at once an objective authority: the ability to see things as they are in themselves without the dissembling veil of prejudice and naïveté. Taste judges the thing itself. It is not the reason of scientific method but reason as aesthetic taste that lends the clearest expression to the bourgeois ideal of autonomy. For to be ‘autonomous’ means to unite within oneself the freedom of self-governed activity with the normativity implied by the ‘law’ of the thing itself. Because aesthetic taste can meet this normative requirement without relying on external guidelines for orientation, and because it can comprehend the thing according to its own constitution and valence, it is the exemplary autonomous agency.8 6 7 8

Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture II (Genf: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 368. La Rochefoucauld, ‘Réflexions diverses’ X, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard 1964), 517; Dubos, Réflexions critiques, 343–4. Taste is without laws, but not without Law: taste conforms without law – or rather without submitting itself to law – to the law of objectivity.

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

187

Part and parcel of the aesthetic idea of taste is the awareness that the form of subjectivity and the aspiration to objective validity are not given and in mutual agreement by nature. Taste is a matter of ‘education’: taste, and thus aesthetics, is a product of cultural formation, an artefact. There is taste only in a culture. For only he who, setting out as a natural being, has been formed into a participant in a culture has acquired that form of subjectivity which is capable of objectivity. This is where the internal connection between modern aesthetics and the disciplinary society becomes apparent. This connection consists in how both conceive the subject. The disciplinary procedures that ‘in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, […] became general formulas of domination’ manifest the ‘subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected.’9 Disciplinary procedures exercise social power in such fashion that they turn those they subject into subjects who are capable and willing of their own accord to render the services required of them. The addressees of disciplines do not obey instructions whose normative substance they cannot understand (that is the traditional definition of the servant or slave). Instead, the addressees of disciplines can orient themselves in accordance with the norms whose implementation they are required to perform; therein lies their being ‘subjects’. That is why procedures of exercise and examination stand at the centre of the disciplinary society, procedures through which individuals become subjects. The educational institutions that are in charge of this process come to play an utterly fundamental role in the disciplinary society; education becomes the institution of institution, the meta-institution.10 In other words, by describing the subject as something that has become, or more precisely, that has been made, aesthetics merely repeats the new

Michel Foucault, Überwachen und Strafen: Die Geburt des Gefängnisses (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 176 and 238. (With the formulation ‘subjektivierende Unterwerfung’ [subjectifying subjection] the German translation reflects the ambiguity of Foucault’s concept of ‘assujettissement’. Cf. ibid., 137 and 185.) 10 Every institution in the disciplinary society is also an educational institution: the institution first produces the subjects that then are able to enter into society. 9

188

Christoph Menke

social reality of disciplinary domination.11 Aesthetics is a theory and practice of the procedures of subjectivation – of exercise, of the heightening and coordination of forces, of examination – that constitute the core of the social discipline. Without the very social procedures that engender a social subject by way of the internalization of social norms, there would be no aesthetic taste either. And yet aesthetic taste and hence the aesthetic subject, are in one crucial regard antithetical to the faculties of self-control that constitute the subject of the disciplines: in the disciplinary subject, the prehistory of its disciplinary training remains inscribed in perennially legible form. As a disciplinary subject it orients itself in accordance with the norms defined by the institutions in which it participates. Yet this self-governance always retains the recollection of the heteronomous scene of disciplination in which this faculty was first acquired. In the aesthetic subject, by contrast, the prehistory of its disciplinary training has been left behind – forgotten or repressed. The way aesthetics portrays it in its concept of taste, the aesthetic subject not only orients itself in accordance with social norms. It also does so in such a fashion that any difference between what it is of itself and what the social norm wants from it seems to have been effaced altogether. The aesthetic subject has entirely transformed its sensible forces into faculties of its own: by developing fully and in complete freedom, its sensible forces agree of their own accord with the legal form of the social norms12 to which they were subject to as an external compulsion 11

12

The connection between aesthetics and disciplinary society is so close that Foucault could take the fundamental categories of his theory of the disciplinary subject directly from the programmatic writings of the emerging aesthetic discipline, especially from Baumgarten’s Aesthetica. For more on this see Christoph Menke, ‘Die Disziplin der Ästhetik: Eine Lektüre von Überwachen und Strafen’, in Gertrud Koch, Sylvia Sasse and Ludger Schwarte, eds, Kunst als Strafe: Zur Ästhetik der Disziplinierung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2003), 109–21; ‘Zweierlei Übung: Zum Verhältnis von sozialer Disziplinierung und ästhetischer Existenz’, in Axel Honneth and Martin Saar, eds, Michel Foucault: Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), 283–99. For more on this description of taste see Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 35, B 145–6. In the aesthetic harmony between the sensuousness of ‘imagination’ and the social norms of ‘reason’, Kant reformulates Baumgarten’s ideal of felix aestheticus.

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

189

in the scene of disciplination. The aesthetic subject is the effortless subject: the subject to which its being a subject is natural; that did not need to first be made a subject but, even though it was first exercised and educated, appears as though it were – or seems to be – a subject ‘of itself ’. The aesthetic subject is the semblance of the subject; the aesthetic subject is ideological, and the aesthetic ideology is the ideology of the subject.13 Aesthetics, as a theory and practice, means: aestheticization of discipline. Not before, and only in, the aesthetic subject of taste does the teleology of the disciplinary society – to make the heteronomy of disciplination disappear in the autonomous self-disciplination of subjects – come to fulfilment. The subject of aesthetic taste is the epitome of the bourgeois idea of autonomy because autonomy exists only in aesthetic semblance. That renders the beautiful, with its ‘felicitous irregularity’, the exemplary object of taste.14 True, the domain of taste is much wider than the field of aesthetically beautiful or sublime things: it comprises everything for whose cognition there is as yet no concept, whose assessment is not yet subject to any rule. The domain of taste is a field that is expanding ever more rapidly in the bourgeois society: the field of the unknown. Bourgeois society needs taste in order to comprehend all those unfamiliar forms of behaviour and objects with which it confronts the individual. Within this field, the beautiful is not only an unusual case but also, and precisely therefore, a comforting one. The beautiful as an object of taste is at once also the medium in which the aesthetic subject assures itself of its possibility. In the beautiful, taste becomes conscious of itself: the taste for the beautiful assures the aesthetic subject that the labour of education can succeed, that the form of subjectivity and the aspiration to objective validity are capable of a perfect union. The aesthetic taste for the beautiful is not merely an especially cultivated and refined sort of taste, it is the taste for taste. In taking pleasure in the beautiful, the subject takes pleasure in the perfection of its self-education: an education in whose course all heteronomy, which

13 14

See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Wiley, 1990), Ch. I. Cf. Paul de Man, Die Ideologie des Ästhetischen, ed. by Christoph Menke (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), Part I.

190

Christoph Menke

defines the social existence of the disciplinary subject, has been sublated. ‘Beautiful things’, Kant writes, are evidence ‘that man fits into the world’.15

Consumerism The aesthetic of taste is tied to the contemporaneous emergence of bourgeois society; aesthetics supplies that society’s disciplinary subjectivation with the ideal of autonomy: of a subjectivity that can be purely self-governing because it is capable of forming itself. This ideal of autonomy is realized only in aesthetic semblance, but it is precisely therein that it constitutes the social reality in which the disciplinary subject appears as the ‘citizen’. The subjectivity of the bourgeois citizen is made by social disciplination and yet capable of objectively comprehending the qualities and valences of things. In the citizen’s taste, social disciplination is transmuted into objectivity freely undertaken. Taste as aesthetic ideology is required so that the disciplinary subject, as the citizen, can believe itself capable of an (objective) understanding of its world based purely on its own (subjective) judgment. In today’s post-disciplinary capitalism,16 taste presents a very different figure and serves an entirely different function: taste now becomes the decisive precondition for mass consumption. ‘Mass consumption’ is not merely a quantitative term, describing the consumption of larger amounts of commodities by larger groups of consumers. Rather, ‘mass consumption’ means that the central aim and motor of economic activity is the mass production of commodities that serve solely to satisfy needs that were generated in the first place specifically for and by these same commodities. The needs 15 16

Immanuel Kant, ‘Handschriftlicher Nachlass: Logik’, Akademie-Ausgabe vol. 16, Berlin: Reimer, 1914, 127 [Nr. 1820 a]), accessed 1 April 2015. For more on this characterization see Gilles Deleuze, ‘Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’ [Postscript on the Societies of Control], in L’autre journal 1 (1990) accessed 3 January 2014.

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

191

with relation to which these commodities are to possess ‘use value’17 in the system of mass consumption are thus ‘cultural’ needs in an eminent sense: they are not just artificially generated but of themselves directed toward the meaning that the commodity and the possession of it are said to have. Mass consumption accordingly does not just presuppose mass culture; rather, the systems of mass consumption and mass culture are identical.18 In this system, the economic consumer is thus essentially a cultural participant: he needs taste. If the mass-consumerist economy entails the unprecedented acceleration of the production of forever new commodities, their reception conversely requires a no less drastically heightened flexibility and enthusiasm for novelty on the part of the consumer’s faculty of judgment. What the consumerist taste accomplishes is a new conjunction of creation and adaptation. The consumerist taste is as creative as it is adaptive: it is adaptive by virtue of its creativity. The economy defined by mass consumption continually produces commodities to satisfy needs that cannot even exist yet. That is what is called here ‘innovation’: going beyond what is already known to be needed. And so production engenders what, by past and current standards, is pointless and useless: what is the human being of 2006 supposed to be able to do with the iPhone, a device that, Time magazine declared, was ‘the invention of 2007’? It is of no use to him until he has transformed himself into someone else: into someone who is equal to the presence of this device. Its producers bet on the creative performance of consumers who, guided by advertisements and the culture industry, in the first place engender those standards and the needs directed toward their attainment that are a match for this device. Because this creative performance of taste has become, in mass-consumerist capitalism, an 17

18

That, for this reason, the differentiation between use and exchange value becomes itself problematic is also the thesis in Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Über den Fetischcharakter der Musik und die Regression des Hörens’, in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 9–45. According to Zygmunt Bauman’s terminological suggestion this constitutes the difference between consumption and consumerism. Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2007), 25–51. Michael Makropoulous, Theorie der Massenkultur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008).

192

Christoph Menke

essential precondition for its ongoing operation, taste has shed all aspects of the social privilege that aesthetically good taste, despite its aspiration to universalizability, still implied.19 Taste is as widespread in the system of mass-consumerism as the role of the consumer. Taste has accordingly become commonplace. It is no longer concerned only with the beautiful sides of life, but now with life in its entirety. At this moment, all of life is beautiful: there is no commodity that does not have its beautiful (or less beautiful) side, no commodity whose consumption does not call for a judgment of taste. And so in contemporary capitalism, taste is also no longer something anyone could take pride in: everyone has (or must have) taste. Indeed, despite the pride which the new bourgeois take in their own ‘good taste’, often hard-won against their petit-bourgeois backgrounds, it is precisely the avant-gardes of mass-consumerism, lusting after the day’s newest product, who have the most highly developed faculty of taste. They perform the ongoing labour of giving meaning to what is meaningless by inventing criteria by which to judge the new product. At the same time, this heightening of creativity that distinguishes the consumerist from the bourgeois taste serves the principle of adaptation. Taste is the faculty of choosing: it judges and thus prefers one to the other, slights the other in favour of the one. Like, and even more fundamentally than, aesthetic taste before it, consumerist taste cannot rely on criteria that are already defined as it assesses products. It must first develop the criteria that will fit these products – it must creatively invent them. Yet unlike the bourgeois-aesthetic taste, the consumerist taste does not seek to find these criteria in the things at hand; it instead looks to the practices and lifestyles into which things are supposed to fit. It is not the things themselves but such relations of fittingness that concern the mass-consumerist taste: does this 19

The aesthetic regime of taste does not tolerate the originally proclaimed openness of its criteria in its social reality and ‘[die] so überzeugend vorgetragene Theorie rekurriert schließlich doch wieder auf Schichtung’ [the (thus) convincingly presented theory refers back again to stratification]. Niklas Luhmann, ‘Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus’, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik 3 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 205. Bourdieu’s analyses refer to the mechanisms through which ‘good’ taste is defined as ‘our’ taste.

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

193

thing fit into my life? Or rather: which life fits this thing? And how does the life that fits this new thing fit my old life? How do I have to change my life, to redefine and reinvent my life, so that this new thing will fit into it, or that I can make myself fit for this new thing? The harmonious mutual fit between the human being and the thing, of which the aesthetic taste assured itself in the pleasure it took in the beautiful, is transformed into the continual effort to be fit for, and to adapt to, forever novel products. With all its creativity, the consumerist faculty of taste pursues a single aim, to ensure the subject’s fitness: pure self-preservation. Many observers have noted and lamented that ‘self-preservation’ in this sense cannot mean the realization or fulfilment of a self that, by virtue of the meaningful continuity of its judgments, appears to itself and others as identical to itself (and that consumerist mass culture talks so much about ‘self-fulfilment’ only because no fulfilment of the self in any demanding sense in fact takes place): the consumerist taste is the creativity of adaptation, which no longer has the resources to worry over such questions of meaning and continuity; it is the expression of infinite flexibility.20 Yet it is important to note that the consumerist subject does not suffer this ‘corrosion of character’ as Richard Sennett called it in the title of his book; on the contrary, it performs this corrosion. ‘[T]he playing down and derogation of yesterday’s needs and the ridicule and uglification of their objects, now passés, and even more the discrediting of the very idea that consuming life ought to be guided by the satisfaction of needs’21: all these are things the consumerist subject does itself, by virtue of its faculty of taste. Flexibility is the service it renders. And it does so for the one reason for which services are rendered in capitalism: in order to sell them. The sole 20 Cf. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998), ch. 5. – For a more precise determination of the contemporary, socioeconomic form of creativity as well as its economicaesthetic pre-history, see Ulrich Bröckling ‘Über Kreativität. Ein Brainstorming’, and Dieter Thomä, ‘Ästhetische Freiheit zwischen Kreativität und Exstase: Überlegungen zum Spannungsfeld zwischen Ästhetik und Ökonomik’, both in Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch, eds, Kreation und Depression, 89–97 and 149–70. 21 Bauman, Consuming Life, 99.

194

Christoph Menke

purpose of consumption is to be capable of being consumed – to become consumable: ‘Members of the society of consumers are themselves consumer commodities […]. Becoming and remaining a sellable commodity is the most potent motive of consumer concerns.’22 In other words, the social meaning of consumerist taste, unlike that of aesthetic taste, no longer consists in the ideological transfiguration of discipline into autonomy. Its social meaning is instead immediately economic: it serves the ‘recommoditization’ (Zygmunt Bauman’s term) of the subject, its self-representation and self-advertisement as a commodity to be bought and used by others. As a commodity, the subject is the commodity of labour: by being a competent participant in mass consumption as mass culture, the subject acquires, and shows that it possesses, the very abilities – the creativity of adaptation – that render its labour a commodity that is in demand.23 In this fashion, the consumerist subject reveals itself to be post-disciplinary: if the disciplinary society defined commercially useful abilities in institution-specific ways (so that the acquisition of a given ability at once also entailed the certainty that the subject would find its lifelong home in the respective institution), these abilities now consist in the unspecific or meta-ability of flexible adaptation. The subject who can do that – which is to say, who can do anything – is marketable as the commodity of its labour. And taste is where the subject exercises and exhibits this ability.

22 Bauman, Consuming Life, 57. 23 Provided that ‘dignity’ characterizes the quality that the (bourgeois-autonomous) subject attains as it portrays its individual identity beyond its disciplinarily authenticated institutional roles, the formally extrasocial performance of dignity now becomes, in postdisciplinary society, the actual determination of labour as commodity. Conversely, this also means that the creation and maintenance of labour now becomes an extrasocial, ‘private’ performance.

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

195

Counter-taste There are socioeconomic causes behind this transformation of the bourgeois-aesthetic taste into the consumerist taste, but also cultural and intellectual ones. This second set of causes was at the centre of the debate over postmodernism. For the theories of postmodernism were the first ones, since the bourgeois aesthetics of the eighteenth century, to focus again on the concept of taste: they are apologies of the consumerist taste.24 This apology is articulated in the name of aesthetic freedom: in the postmodern reading, the transformation of the bourgeois into the consumerist taste is an unleashing of its true aesthetic potential – an act of ‘aestheticization’: only when taste, formerly a bourgeois privilege, becomes an egalitarian possession of the masses, this interpretation argues, does it become truly creative; only then does it truly break free, as its conception in aesthetics had already promised, from all predetermined rules and standards. The culture industry’s control of aesthetic freedom and the functional role it plays in capitalist exploitation belie its postmodern praise. Yet postmodernism remains right to reject the nostalgic apology of bourgeois taste as a faculty of autonomy. For there is a good reason for the demise of the bourgeois taste in mass consumerism, a reason that blocks the return to it: the bourgeois taste is false; the identity it asserts between the form of subjectivity and the claim to objective validity is an ideological subreption. When this taste comprehends things as they objectively are, it takes credit for this success as being the fruit of its own subjective effort,25 which it 24 This is most clear in the programmatic writings of architectural theory (Charles Jencks, Robert Venturi) that oppose postmodernity to an elitist modernity in the name of the ‘popular’. Cf. Christoph Menke, ‘Aporien der kulturellen Moderne’ [Aporias of Cultural Modernity], in Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, and Cristina Lafont, eds, Habermas-Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009), 205–14. 25 What Kant says about the taste for beauty also applies to the bourgeois faculty of taste in general: ‘We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence.’

196

Christoph Menke

believes guarantees such success. The bourgeois subject performs this effort in its ‘operation of reflection’, which it understands as a re-enactment of that labour of formation that engendered it in the first place. ‘Now we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that happen to attach to our own judging’.26 In the work of subjectivation associated with disciplination, comparing the subject’s own judging to that of the other and sloughing off its crudeness until it had become like the other’s, and hence ostensibly objective, was done by others and from outside the subject. Now taste is to accomplish the same of its own accord and by virtue of its own faculty, in the operation of its reflection. This free repetition of the work of disciplination by power of self-reflection constitutes the autonomy of taste: it proceeds solely in accordance with its own law, which enables it to comprehend things in themselves.27

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 46. 26 Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 40, B 157, trans. Pluhar, 160. 27 It also holds true for consumerist taste that it ‘ultimately rests on individual performances’. The exercise of taste is a ‘task that must be individually undertaken and resolved with the help of consumer skills and patterns of action individually obtained]. Bauman, Consuming Life, 75. What differentiates consumerist taste from bourgeois taste is that the latter’s personal contribution consisted in the free repetition of social disciplination, whereas consumerist society demands that the subject itself turns itself into a subject, becomes his own creator. What constitutes the post-disciplinary character of consumerist taste is the ability to participate socially. Thus, the marketable labour is no longer produced by those institutions which then consume it as it was the case in the disciplinary society, instead, in today’s mass consumerist society the performance of subjectification-through-socialization is privatized. It is this paradox – whose resolution overstrains everyone – through which mass-consumerist society also produces mass depression. See Alain Ehrenberg, ‘Depression: Unbehagen in der Kultur oder neue Formen der Sozialität’, Texte zur Kunst 65 (2007), 57–65. The desperation of the mass-consumerist subject in the face of the impossible task of producing its labour as a consumable commodity replaces the unanswerable doubt of the bourgeois subject of taste as to whether or not it has appropriated the disciplinary

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

197

In light of this optimistic ideology of cultivation, which defines the bourgeois taste, the consumerist taste would seem to be not so much a postmodern progression toward aesthetic freedom but rather the result of a disillusionment for which there are very good reasons: the promise of the bourgeois model of taste that the subject’s own reflection can form taste into the authoritative source of objectivity has become implausible. Pure reflection leads toward the ‘precipice of bottomless profundity’, a profundity that ‘things, in the simplicity of their essence’, elude.28 Yet the disconsolate conclusion that the consumerist taste draws from this disillusioned insight merely replaces the aspiration to objectivity undertaken by the subject, which the success of a flexible adaptation of the consumerist subject, in keeping with the postmodernist program, glorifies into aestheticcreative self-fulfilment: consumerist taste is not about comprehending objects as they themselves are, but rather about performing the ever more demanding feats of adaptation required, under conditions of accelerating change, to attain the status of a consumable commodity and to shore up the illusion of an identity engaged in self-fulfilment. This double care – for the subject’s own consumability and for its self-fulfilment – supersedes the idea of truth whose unregulated-subjective comprehension had been at issue in aesthetic taste. *** Is there a conclusion to be drawn from the disintegration of bourgeois taste that would be different from consumerist taste (and its postmodernist theory)? Is there a different taste? A different taste can emerge only from the force with which taste turns against itself. Adorno writes:

28

requirements completely enough in order to become ‘universal’ and therefore capable of objectivity. Walter Benjamin, ‘Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels’, in Gesammelte Schriften VI/1 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 402–3, trans. Jackson. Cf. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 231.

198

Christoph Menke Taste is the most accurate seismograph of historical experience. Unlike almost all other faculties, it is even able to register its own behavior. Reacting against itself, it recognizes its own lack of taste. […] It is precisely the nerves most highly-developed aesthetically that now find self-righteous aestheticism intolerable.29

Silvia Bovenschen explains: By performing this idiosyncratic reaction against itself, taste can become a sort of aesthetic conscience. If taste guides the idiosyncrasies, the latter are conversely constitutive of taste; they are – in a process of infinite one-upmanship – the other side of taste, ensuring that it does not degenerate into rule or diktat.30

When taste turns against itself, it implies a break with the subject’s certainty that the reflective repetition of its disciplinary socialization will render it free and capable of comprehending things as they are of its own accord. This break is an intervention of the ‘nerves’; it is fed by the ‘repugnance for all artistic subjectivism’.31 Taste turns against itself, as a faculty of autonomous subjectivity, by virtue of the fact that it is force – passion (pathos) or energy. That is the motif which the programmatic writings on aesthetics, as it emerges in the eighteenth century, incessantly encircle, the motif with which aesthetics itself turns, from the very outset, against the bourgeois model of taste that Baumgarten delineated and Kant thought through to its conclusion. Aesthetics itself thus already contains the idea that leads beyond the – false, bad – contradiction pitting the bourgeoisautonomous taste against the consumerist-postmodern one. It is the idea of the ‘aporia’ of taste:32 that taste is split into subjective faculty and aes29 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 145; Germ. orig. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1978), 191. 30 Silvia Bovenschen, Über-Empfindlichkeit. Spielformen der Idiosynkrasie [Hypersensitivity: Variations of Idiosyncrasy] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), 89, trans. Jackson. 31 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 145; Germ. orig. Minima Moralia, 191. 32 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 146; Germ. orig. Minima Moralia, 192. On the development of this aporia (of taste) in programmatic writings of aesthetics cf. Menke, Power, 31–47; Germ. orig. Kraft, 46–66.

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

199

thetic force; the idea that taste is indeed intrinsically antagonistic: it is always already busy examining its imaginations in a reflective operation and recovering them by supplying reasons and turning them into judgments others share for reasons. That is what elicits the ‘repugnance’ (Adorno) felt by taste as force: the force is the counter-will, the will against the will to control the imaginations of taste in an operation of reflection. The force of taste expresses itself as ‘impression soudaine’ or ‘sentiment subit’33 – as a sudden and unexpected sensation that, abruptly bursting forth, disrupts the steady progress of reflection and renders the subject incapable of proceeding based on reason. And it is precisely thereby that the force of taste makes possible for the subject what the subject cannot do by means of its own faculty: to be open to the thing itself. The relation of taste to the thing has its locus exactly where the two aspects it joins in an aporetic union of mutual repugnance collide. The passion of taste is the individual at his core, the ‘most particular’ singularity that defines him, yet it remains forever alien to him because it is here that the individual transcends himself; that the possibility opens before him to approach things as they are. It is by virtue of what is most particular to him that the individual is most objective: only the ‘repugnance’ of taste against its own ‘subjectivism’ enables taste to comprehend the thing. Another taste cannot emerge but where the subject does not rely on its ability to live up to its aspiration to objectivity by means of its own reflective accomplishments, while on the other hand the individual does not expend his creativity on performing accomplishments of adaptation. Taste is what constitutes us; and for this very reason, taste is what discloses things to us as they are. A different taste begins with the insight that the unconditionality of truth is owed to aesthetic force. Translated from the German by Gerrit Jackson

33 Dubos, Réflexions critiques, Vl. II, 343–4.

200

Christoph Menke

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Über den Fetischcharakter der Musik und die Regression des Hörens’ [On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening], in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 9–45. , Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1978), 191. , Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 145. Bauman, Zygmunt, Consuming Life (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2007). Benjamin, Walter, ‘Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels’, in Gesammelte Schriften Vl.I (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 402–3. , The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003). Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello, ‘Die Arbeit der Kritik und der normative Wandel’ [The Work of Critique and the Normative Change], in Marion von Osten, ed., Norm der Abweichung (Zürich: Springer 2003), 57–80. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bovenschen, Silvia, Über-Empfindlichkeit. Spielformen der Idiosynkrasie [Hypersensitivity: Variations of Idiosyncrasy] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2000). Bröckling, Ulrich, ‘Über Kreativität. Ein Brainstorming’ [On Creativity: Brainstorming] in Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch, eds, Kreation und Depression Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Kadmos, 2011), 149–70. de Man, Paul, Die Ideologie des Ästhetischen, ed. by Christoph Menke (Frankfurt /M.: Suhrkamp, 1993). Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’ [Postscript on the Societies of Control], L’autre journal 1 (1990), accessed 3 January 2014; German trans. as Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postskriptum über die Kontrollgesellschaften’, in Unterhandlungen. 1972–1990 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 254–62. Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture II [Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting] (Genf: Slatkine Reprints, 1967). Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Wiley, 1990).

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption

201

Ehrenberg, Alain, ‘Depression: Unbehagen in der Kultur oder neue Formen der Sozialität’ [Depression: Unease in Civilization or New Forms of Sociality], Texte zur Kunst 65 (2007), 57–65. Foucault, Michel, Überwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisses [Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison] (Frankfurt /M.: Suhrkamp, 1977). Honneth, Axel, ‘Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung. Paradoxien der Individualisierung’ [Organized Self-Realization: Paradoxes of Individualization], in Axel Honneth, Das Ich im Wir. Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 202–21. Kant, Immanuel, ‘Handschriftlicher Nachlass: Logik’, Akademie-Ausgabe 16 (Berlin: Reimer, 1914) accessed 1 April 2015. , Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987). , Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of the Power of Judgment] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991). La Rochefoucauld, ‘Réflexions diverses’ X, in La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes, Paris 1964. Luhmann, Niklas, ‘Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus’, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik [The Structure of Society and Semantics] 3 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1993). Makropoulous, Michael, Theorie der Massenkultur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008). Menke, Christoph, ‘Die Disziplin der Ästhetik. Eine Lektüre von Überwachen und Strafen’ [The Discipline of Aesthetics: A Reading of Discipline and Punishment] in Gertrud Koch, Sylvia Sasse and Ludger Schwarte, eds, Kunst als Strafe. Zur Ästhetik der Disziplinierung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 109–21. , ‘Subjekt, Subjektivität’, in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds, Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden V (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2003), 734–87. , ‘Zweierlei Übung: Zum Verhältnis von sozialer Disziplinierung und ästhetischer Existenz’ [Two Kinds of Exercise: On the Relationship between Social Disciplination and Aesthetic Existence], in Axel Honneth and Martin Saar, eds, Michel Foucault: Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), 283–99. , ‘Aporien der kulturellen Moderne’, in Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide and Cristina Lafont, eds, Habermas-Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009), 205–14. , Kraft. Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008); Eng. trans. as Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

202

Christoph Menke

Rebentisch, Juliane, Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz [The Art of Freedom – On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence] (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2012). Reckwitz, Andreas, ‘Vom Künstlermythos zur Normalisierung kreativer Prozesse. Der Beitrag des Kunstfelds zur Genese des Kreativsubjekts’ [From Artist Myth to the Normalization of Creative Processes: The Contribution of the Field of Art to the Genesis of the Creative Subject], in Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch, eds, Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Kadmos, 2011), 98–117. Sennett, Richard, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998). Thomä, Dieter, ‘Ästhetische Freiheit zwischen Kreativität und Exstase. Überlegungen zum Spannungsfeld zwischen Ästhetik und Ökonomik’ [Aesthetic Freedom between Creativity and Ecstasy: Thoughts on the Field of Tension between Aesthetics and Economics], in Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch, eds, Kreation und Depression Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Kadmos, 2011), 89–97.

Kam Shapiro

Biopolitical Reflections: Cognitive, Aesthetic and Reflexive Mappings of Global Economies

We have associated new materialism with renewed attention to the dense causes and effects of global political economy and thus with questions of social justice for embodied individuals. — diana coole and samantha frost It is not a question of effacing what can be felt, but of multiplying the powers of producing what can be felt and making them intersect. — jacques rancière Maps to me are tricky and insidious, and they’ve always fascinated me. — mark bradford

In this essay I reflect on Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that ‘an aesthetic of cognitive mapping [of social processes] is an integral part of any socialist political project’ in light of recent theories of embodied cognition. I first explore mappings of social processes in connection with popular media accounts of the global economy of coltan (a metal used in consumer electronics). I then consider possibilities for a reflexive orientation to the processes shaping such mappings. That is, I consider what happens when we try to map the political economy of our embodied and mediated perceptions of political economies. Reflexive mapping of this kind leads quickly to a series of limits and paradoxes. However, I argue that an encounter with such limits comprises an important component of a materialist politics. Moreover, I find encounters of this kind are also staged in popular media. Insofar as this is the case, I conclude, such media can contribute to what

204

Kam Shapiro

John Dewey called a properly ‘aesthetic’ experience of global life, namely a rhythmic movement between emotional provocations, critical reflections and practical itineraries.

Totalities and Itineraries In a typically eloquent and delightfully cranky essay originally delivered at a conference on Marxism and the interpretation of culture in 1988 (he declares he considers himself the only Marxist present), Fredric Jameson surveys various attempts to mediate what he describes as the ‘growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience.’1 Whereas in simpler times ‘the immediate and limited experience of individuals is still able to encompass and coincide with the true economic and social form that governs that experience’, the complex global economies forged by monopoly capital preclude any direct phenomenological access. A gulf emerges between lived experience and its economic basis, or as Jameson puts it, The phenomenological experience of the individual subject […] becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed-camera view of a certain section of London or the countryside or whatever. But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong.2

1 2

Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60: 349. Ibid., 349.

Biopolitical Reflections

205

Largely invisible to those who participate in diverse networks of production, exchange and consumption, the economy enters experience only through a ‘play of figuration’, a series of distorted expressions of what Louis Althusser described as the ‘absent cause’ of our lived experience, namely a multinational capitalist system.3 In subsequent writings, Jameson assigns these expressions to a ‘postmodern’ culture symptomatic of late capitalism. From this perspective, all manner of artistic and political discourses, from the ‘thematics of mechanical reproduction’ to various conspiracy theories, amount to so many allegories for the dislocation of structure from agency and experience.4 Jameson proposes that rather than play with figures, we might instead try to cognitively map the social processes that determine our locally embodied experience. His account of cognitive mapping combines Althusser’s account of ideology – the representation of an imaginary relation to material conditions of existence – with Kevin Lynch’s studies of colloquial ‘cognitive maps’ of urban geography. Jameson argues, ‘the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is an integral part of any socialist political project.’5 Jameson does not propose that political subjects should possess a complete diagram of the complex material networks of labour, exchange, consumption and communication in which they are immersed. Instead, he calls for an as-yet unrealized vision of a ‘social totality’, that encompasses all who participate in the global economy. Absent a recognition of capital’s dominant ‘fundamental laws’ of profit, etc., he argues, a progressive person ‘is doomed to social democracy, with its now abundantly documented treadmills of failures and capitulations. Because if capital does not exist, then clearly socialism does not exist either […] without a conception of the social totality (and the possibility of transforming a whole social system), 3 4 5

Ibid., 350. Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, 356; Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, 353.

206

Kam Shapiro

no properly socialist politics is possible.’6 Jameson avows that he has no idea what this ‘new aesthetic’ would look like. He would later endorse Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s vision of a global confrontation between Empire and the Multitude.7 Notice in these passages the slippage from an aesthetic of mapping to a conception of totality. Seeking the ‘truth’ of daily experience in the latter, Jameson sets up parallel oppositions between local and global spaces, on one hand, and between phenomenological experience and conceptual understanding on the other. As Jameson well knows, oppositions of this sort are at odds with Althusser’s account of ideology as a situated, material practice. By the same token, they run counter to the insights of new philosophies and sciences of embodied cognition, which flesh out, so to speak, the material character of ideology.8 In this view, there is no conception of totality that is not also an aesthetic experience, meaning it is imbued not only with sensory experience (including visual images) but also with affects and dispositions. Moreover, sensory capacities, affects and dispositions are also conditioned by global economic processes. In light of these insights, how might we map the global processes that determine our local, embodied experience? To recover aesthetic dimensions of global mappings we might first go back to Lynch. As Jameson notes, the colloquial image of urban space Lynch describes provides users neither with a fixed-camera view, nor with a conception of totality. ‘Lynch’s subjects are rather clearly involved in pre-cartographic operations whose results traditionally are described as

6

7 8

Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, 354–5; cf. ‘The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.’ Postmodernism, 54; The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 4. See Kam Shapiro, ‘The Myth of the Multitude’, Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York: Routledge, 2004), 289–314. See Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 24.

Biopolitical Reflections

207

itineraries rather than as maps.’9 Rather than an encompassing vision of social spaces and relationships, itineraries involve various heuristic distortions and simplifications. The ‘image’ Lynch describes parcels the city into various paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.10 That is, it consists of a series of figures much like those that Jameson repudiates: The image itself was not a precise, miniaturized model of reality, reduced in scale and consistently abstracted. As a purposive simplification, it was made by reducing, eliminating, or even adding elements to reality, by fusion and distortion, by relating and structuring the parts. It was sufficient, perhaps better for its purpose if rearranged, distorted, ‘illogical.’ It resembled that famous cartoon of the New Yorker’s view of the United States.11

Urban itineraries, furthermore, are replete with remembered and anticipated encounters, sensations and actions. The image is not simply a visual picture, but a complex blend of intention, expectation, memory and diverse sensory cues.12 As Jonathan Flatley notes, ‘our spatial environments are inevitably imbued with feelings […] and these emotional valences […] affect how we create itineraries.’13 Legibility therefore not only confers instrumental competence, but also ‘heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience.’14 How might Lynch’s ‘image’ be extended to global social processes? How do we develop a legible map of such processes? How do they become navigable, or gain depth and intensity? Furthermore, in what sense do 9 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51–2. 10 Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 46. 11 Ibid., 87. The cartoon in question is Saul Steinberg’s ‘View of the World from 9th Avenue’, New Yorker, 29 March 1976) accessed 10 September 2014. Looking west, the cartoon reduces everything between the Hudson river and the Pacific to several landmarks (Nebraska, Chicago, etc.) and a couple of mountains, comprising perhaps half the scale of several New York avenues. 12 Lynch, Image of the City, 4–5. 13 Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 77. 14 Ibid.

208

Kam Shapiro

such maps coincide with the truth (as Jameson puts it) of the complex material relationships in which they are embedded? Although we may not grasp them as a whole, we most certainly possess images of trans-national economies. With contemporary media and the technological prosthetics that extend our senses across the globe, our everyday perceptions of the relations in which we participate most definitely include India and Hong Kong. Like those of the urban landscape, moreover, our maps of global economies are not only cognitive but also aesthetic. As Lynch suggests, the image we gather of our surroundings comes not from a fixed, but a moving camera, both in the sense that it plots the past and present movements of our bodies, and that the image is invested with affects.

Aesthetic Mappings Consider, for example, the image of global political economies staged in a New York Times article on cassiterite (tin ore) miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In one of several vivid reports, Lydia Polgreen traces a complex series of material processes linking her largely Western readers to the miners about whom they now read. She writes, ‘This is Africa’s resource curse: The wealth is unearthed by the poor, controlled by the strong, then sold to a world largely oblivious of its origins.’15 She then arouses the oblivious with a harrowing account of the economies in which they unwittingly participate. Cassiterite is widely used in electronics such as laptops and cell phones. Though she does not harp on the point (others have), it is possible that the laptop on which we read the article contains

15

Lydia Polgreen, ‘The Spoils, Congo’s Riches, Looted by Renegade Troops’, New York Times (15 November 2008) accessed 29 September 2014.

Biopolitical Reflections

209

traces of the metals harvested in those muddy tunnels. In related articles, we learn that not only the bodies of miners and prostitutes but also populations of mountain gorillas and large tracts of rainforest are despoiled in conjunction with the mines. How should we characterize the mapping of global economies that corresponds to reading this article? Like the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in our cells, the metals and silica in our machines and the electronic signals they configure have travelled across the globe, circulating through bodies and places we can only (partially) imagine. Surveying the relationships between violent militias, state politics, mining camp economies (including prostitution), international corporations and Western consumers, we move from the unconscious immediacy of our technologically supplemented experience to the abstraction of global networks of law, technology and biology, then back to the local scale of our participation in these networks on which we now sentimentally reflect. We thus encounter a complex blend of intimacies and abstractions that intersect but do not neatly coincide. Let us briefly consider each in turn, and then reflect on their entanglement. We can start with attempts to become conscious of our participation as consumers and producers in the networks of a global capitalist bioeconomy, what in Marxist terms might be called de-fetishizing investigations of commodity relationships. Following the social labour invested in our everyday use objects, Polgreen’s article leads us into a maze of interconnected bodies, from guerrillas to gorillas. Some of these connections are captured in Figure 1.16

16

Jeroen Cuvelier and Tim Raeymaekers, ‘Supporting the War Economy in the DRC’, report by IPIS (International Peace Information Service, 2002), 1–28: 10 accessed 13 February 2015.

210

Kam Shapiro

Figure 1

However, Figure 1 hardly accounts for the phenomenological encounter staged by Polgreen’s article.17 Rather than provide a complete diagram of the myriad processes linking western consumers to mines in the Congo, Polgreen’s article highlights what might be called nodes and landmarks of production, exchange and consumption. It lends depth and intensity to complex social processes by bringing the reader into contact with the lives of particular individuals caught up in the cassiterite economy in the Congo through anecdotal descriptions of despotic generals, quotations from weary but aspiring miners, and photographs of their hard labour. As Lynch argued regarding urban spaces, simplifications and distortions of this kind are the preconditions of pragmatic and sentimental legibility. Regarding the latter, 17

A more extensive description of the relevant economic agents and processes can be found at the website of the Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center. See accessed 12 September 2014.

Biopolitical Reflections

211

one recent study suggests that empathy wanes as soon as we contemplate more than one life (people tend to donate less to a brother and sister pair than to a single orphan), a rather low threshold of complexity.18 Taking these insights to heart, activists seeking to mobilize public campaigns against what they call ‘blood phones’ often supplement complex diagrams of commodity chains with simplistic, evocative images. Some of these images visualize what the phrase implies, namely that the technologies that disembody our communication are wrought by flesh and drenched in blood.19 By means of such images, people are moved to pay attention, to investigate and to act. To this end, the author of one online article devoted to the subject of mineral auditing required under the Dodd-Frank bill begins by collapsing the distance created between bodies by global trade: What if I told you that the distance between you and a Congolese rape victim was three feet? Take a look around. There is probably at least one electronic product within a three-foot radius around you right now. It may be the BlackBerry in your pocket, the MacBook Pro sitting next to you, or the iPod blasting from your headphones. Regardless, the true connection between you and a Congolese rape victim sits in every one of those electronics.20

Thus, the author inverts the parochial distortions of the aforementioned New Yorker cartoon, bringing what is distant into the foreground.21

Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), 253–4. For an example see accessed 29 September 2014. 20 Kathleen Brophy, ‘Bloody BlackBerrys: the true cost of today’s electronics’, accessed 15 April 2011. 21 For concerned consumers, the ‘Enough Project’ has compiled a graph that ranks companies for their relative responsibility in sourcing minerals: accessed 29 March 2012. See their updated report, ‘From Congress to Congo’, somewhat hopeful: accessed 29 September 2014. 18 19

212

Kam Shapiro

We may be suspicious of being emotionally manipulated this way, but should we prefer not to be moved? David Harvey – who has done as much as anyone to trace material relays between the aesthetics of urban experience and global economies – has argued for a politics in which ‘the long-lost techniques of empathy and translation across sensory realms is reconstituted as a vital way of knowing to supplement (and in certain instances to transcend) introspection and all the various objectivizing modes of enquiry that exist mainly in the sciences and social sciences.’22 Harvey does not merely promote the stimulation of empathy. Rather, he implores social scientists to avow the communication of sensory, aesthetic experience as a condition of legibility, and so to question not only their epistemology but also their discursive techniques. One might compare his arguments in this regard to those of John Dewey, who charged artists with the task of an aesthetic communication of social consequences. As he put it, ‘Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation’.23 The work of ‘blood phone’ activists, and that of others like the ‘Beehive Collective’, which provides traveling exhibits of the ‘true costs’ of coal, can be seen in this light.24

David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 225. 23 John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (New York: H. Holt Press, 1927), 184. 24 The Beehive Collective is a popular group on college campuses, which uses educational posters and celebratory gatherings to promote activist movements against agricultural biotechnology and coal industries. These activists draw attention to the ‘true costs’ of coal, bringing factors externalized by market calculations to our attention. However, their posters and gatherings also frame information concerning industrial processes and their effects with sentimental metaphors, cartoons and celebratory communal gatherings. See accessed 7 February 2012. 22

Biopolitical Reflections

213

Reflexive Mapping Polgreen’s article provides what might be called an aesthetic map of the cassiterite economy, lending it not only visibility but also depth and intensity. But in what sense does the reader’s image of this economy coincide with what Jameson calls the ‘truth’ of the social processes shaping that experience? Reading Polgreen’s description of the tin mines and looking at the accompanying photos, we may tear up. But the empathy that now inhabits the same body linked by cassiterite to those whose suffering it now imagines has other sources than the mines and miners in the Congo. In the case of the Times article, the image we develop is inflected by the local media genre (or ‘genre groove’ as advertisers put it) as well as the space in which it is read, a genre geared for empathic recognition or for trans-national activism, a café with an upscale weekend brunch crowd or a classroom for students enrolled in a community development sequence. To map the processes shaping our local experience, we have to trace not only the material processes involved in producing objects we consume, but also those that shape our perceptions, ethical judgements and sentimental dispositions toward them. A reflexive orientation to embodied experience at any scale quickly leads to the challenges facing any materialist philosophy. As John Dewey argued, the Darwinian insight that organs of perception and cognition also evolve by variation leaves us with two alternatives: ‘We must either find the appropriate objects and organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions of changing things; or else, to escape the infection of change, we must seek them in some transcendent and supernal region.’25 The mutual interactions in question encompass both social processes and the organs by which they are apprehended. Speaking metaphorically, Arjun Appadurai describes the effects of mutual interactions among disjunctive global ‘scapes’ of finance,

25

John Dewey, ‘The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy’, in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1910), 1–19: 6–7.

214

Kam Shapiro

technology, media and migration as a ‘globally variable synaesthesia’.26 In his account of aesthetic experience, Dewey suggests a parallel with sensuous experience. Much as commodities congeal global flows of labour and material, he suggests, emotions congeal diverse sensory phenomena as distinctive qualities or tones of feeling. Physical things from far ends of the earth are physically transported and physically caused to act and react upon one another in the construction of a new object. The miracle of mind is that something similar takes place in experience without physical transport and assembling. Emotion is the moving and cementing force. It selects what is congruous and dyes what is selected with its color, thereby giving qualitative unity to materials externally disparate and dissimilar. It thus provides unity in and through the varied parts of an experience.27

Returning physical transport and assembly to the mind, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as neural ‘maps’ of potential relationships between objects and bodies. In his language, the affective unities Dewey describes are ‘qualia’.28 We need only add that the processes of the brain are embedded in those of the body and its environment, including the global economy, with manifold reciprocal influences and exchanges. That is, the transport and assembly involved in sensory experience is not only analogous to, but literally intertwined with that of commercial objects. In the words of one Starbucks advertising campaign, ‘Geography is a Flavour.’29 Of course, figural conflations and confusions of this kind are precisely what Jameson laments in both postmodern culture and post-Marxist theory: We have already experienced a dramatic and instructive meltdown of the Althusserian reactor in the work of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, who quite consequently observe the incompatibility of the Althusserian attempt to secure semiautonomy for the

26 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 37. 27 John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Penguin, 1934), 44. 28 Antonio R. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Mariner Books, 2003). 29 accessed 20 March 2012.

Biopolitical Reflections

215

various levels of social life, and the more desperate effort of the same philosopher to retain the old orthodox notion of an ‘ultimately determining instance’ in the form of what he calls ‘structural totality’. Quite logically and consequently, then, Hindess and Hirst simply remove the offending mechanism, whereupon the Althusserian edifice collapses into a rubble of autonomous instances without any necessary relationship to each other whatsoever.30

Jameson would have us believe that without a supernal region of determination structural relations give way to so many fragments of rubble.31 However, our incapacity to map the totality of forces defining our local experience – including that of global economies – does not leave each consciousness a closed world in ‘impossible’ coexistence, or what Jameson calls a ‘monadic relativism’ – a Leibnizean formulation that invites a complementary God’s eye view. Rather, each participates in a plurality of partial encounters. Our maps of the material processes in which we are embedded are not ‘ships in the night, a centrifugal movement of lines and planes that can never intersect.’32 To the contrary, as Lynch argues, our images of social totalities frequently overlap. A ‘public image’, he suggests, is composed by the overlap of many individual images. Or perhaps there is a series of public images, each held by some significant number of citizens. Such images are necessary if an individual is to operate successfully within his environment and to cooperate with his fellows. Each individual picture is unique, with some content that is rarely or never

30 Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, 354. 31 Similar worries drive other critics. Thus, for instance, Jonathan Edwards allows that capital is discontinuous and everyday life composed of interdependent but relatively autonomous practices, capable of altering broader patterns of reproduction, only to conclude by admonishing the radical leaps of new materialists. He protests, ‘For most people, everyday life continues to be experienced in the shape of interactions with a hierarchical ordering of material practices in a given, lived space that is governed by the state and the geopolitical system.’ Jonathan Edwards, ‘The Materialism of Historical Materialism’ in Coole and Frost, eds, New Materialisms, 281–97: 296. He does not explain just what that ordering might be, how it enters experience, or what distinguishes the experience of most people from others. Lived experience is ‘given’ differently in different media, genres and spaces, between which people shift with varying degrees of automatism, adjustment, confusion or shock. 32 Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, 350.

216

Kam Shapiro communicated, yet it approximates the public image, which, in different environments is more or less compelling, more or less embracing.33

So understood, the overlap that constitutes a public image would not be a common set of ideas or values, but rather a convergence of moving itineraries.

Meta-Affects, Dizzying Maps No one knows what associations define humanity.34 — bruno latour

By virtue of circulating media, our images of social processes include some of the distant economies that produce the machines through which we perceive them. But might these images also include those processes shaping the organs of those perceptions? Might such images also intersect, making such processes into matters of public concern and responsiveness? We are less often prompted to reflect on the political economy of our sentimental dispositions than we are on that of our consumer electronics. This appears to be changing, however, as recent theorists of a ‘new materialism’ explore the contributions of nonhuman matter to perceptions, feelings and judgments.35 Insights concerning what Jane Bennet calls ‘agentic materialism’, moreover, are making their way into popular and commercial discourse.

33 Lynch, Image of the City, 46. 34 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 156. 35 See Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), and William Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

Biopolitical Reflections

217

Staying with the New York Times, we find a move in this direction in a curious article by the evolutionary biologist and columnist Olivia Judson in which she speculates on the possible effect of obese pregnancies on the political affiliation of offspring.36 Judson outlines scientific studies showing the effects of different in-utero conditions on the personalities of mammals (affecting their startle responses) and connects them with political studies showing links between personality and political threat perceptions. She then notes the effects of obesity on the hormonal composition of pregnant women. She speculates, when an obese woman becomes pregnant, her fetus is exposed to various ‘fat’ hormones. Whether these hormones shape someone’s personality is unclear. But since exposure to hormones in the womb affects personality in so many other cases, it strikes me as possible that it could here too. In the United States, the obesity epidemic began about 30 years ago. We are now at a point where one third of all pregnant women are obese. Their children will be voting in about 20 years’ time. If an ‘obese’ environment in the womb has an impact on aspects of personality that affect political views, we may soon be seeing a big shift in the body politic.37

To be clear, I do not simply endorse Judson’s speculations, much less take the studies she reports at face value. These speculations, in any case, do not take account of the many factors shaping political dispositions, nor does she claim they do, for that matter. They do not allow us to assign a value to the effects of corn syrup on American voting behaviour. Nonetheless, her article suggests that values and judgements are conditioned by nutritional and ecological contexts as well as by ideological discourses, and it exemplifies the way such connections are becoming objects of public scrutiny, contemplation, and potentially of action.

36 Olivia Judson, ‘Weighing the Vote’, New York Times (21 October, 2008), accessed 29 September 2014. 37 Ibid.

218

Kam Shapiro

Judson’s speculations could readily be linked with studies of agribusiness and nutritional science as they bear on the US obesity epidemic.38 They highlight the effects of economic practices not only on human morphology, but also on sentiments and dispositions. They find their academic counterpart in recent work by thinkers such as Jane Bennet, who proposes that political theory take account of, among other things, ‘the strivings and trajectories of fats as they weaken or enhance the power of human wills, habits, and ideas.’39 For a better-understood and more widely accepted example of the political-economic constitution of interpretive capacities, consider the role of micronutrients (such as iodine) in determining intelligence.40 More evidence of such entanglements might be sought in the emerging field of ‘behavioral epigenetics’, a field whose popular allure has already attracted critical suspicions.41 Judson’s article suggests that, in effect, global economies modify sentimental and ideological perspectives on global economies. Simply put, how people grow what you eat may affect how you think and feel about the political messages you encounter about how people grow what you eat (flavour, after all, also has a geography). Of course, so does what you read 38

Consider Michael Pollan’s influential discussions of the effect of corn subsidies on the fast food industry. See Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006). Links can also be drawn to the role of ‘endocrine disruptors’ in commercial products. See Nicholas D. Kristof, ‘How Chemicals Change us’, New York Times (5 March 2012) accessed 11 March 2012. 39 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 43. Cf. Masters and Coplan, ‘Inasmuch as the aggregated effects of environmental toxins can be shown to have deleterious effects upon judgment and behavior, the implication is that cleaning up the environment or changing diet may be more efficacious than incarcerating disaffected urban youth.’ Cited in Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, 18. 40 Nicholas D. Kristof, ‘Raising the World’s I.Q.’, New York Times (4 December 2008) accessed 29 September 2014. 41 Greg Miller, ‘The Seductive Allure of Behavioral Epigenetics’, Science 329/5987 (2010), 24–7 accessed 3 August 2013.

Biopolitical Reflections

219

and what you watch. The insights here hardly encompass the myriad social processes whereby perception and judgement are influenced. Nonetheless, they expand our understanding of the registers and sites of that influence, bringing reflexive attention to bear. An expansion of this kind is also at work in the popular television show House, in which medical conditions are frequently diagnosed by analysing the personality traits of patients, highlighting the reciprocal interaction of bios and ethics. Such interactions extend to the abrasive personality of its eponymous protagonist, Gregory House, whose diagnostic virtuosity may in part depend upon his chronic pain, his addiction to opiates or the effects of a syphilis infection.42 Studies have indicated that viewing the show affects the bioethical perspective of medical residents.43 When we extend our reflections on social processes to those shaping subjective perceptions and judgements, we enter a mis-en-abyme of metareflections, or as one of Judson’s readers put it in the public comments section appearing with her article, we get dizzy (see Figure 2).

42 See House, Episode 4–13C, ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’. In this episode, the improbable ‘niceness’ of a patient is attributed to brain damage caused by syphilis. When House’s blood also tests positive for the disease, his students ponder the ethics of treating him that might contribute to the dispositions and capacities on which his life-saving medical insights rely. In other episodes the same question arises for his addiction to pain killers, resulting from treatment of an embolism in his thigh muscle. 43 ‘The House Debate: Can a Jerk Doctor Teach Ethics? And What about the “Gattaca” Effect on Perceptions of Medical Cloning?’, accessed 15 March 2012.

220

Kam Shapiro

Figure 2

Dwell for a moment on this (admittedly crude) diagram of social processes (Figure 2) shaping the embodied perception of the coltan economy, some referenced in this chapter. Even in this schematic form, the relationships in question challenge conceptual, purposive and sentimental legibility. Furthermore, the diagram you now contemplate is being composed by a set of intertwined activities, including the energy resources and technologies that generate the script on the page (or screen), the light in the room, and all your sensory and cognitive processes. Now, what is the political value of this sort of dizziness? We can imagine what Jameson would say, if he could stop laughing. Yet several contemporary thinkers attuned to affective dimensions of politics have suggested that dizziness of this kind might comprise a salutary meta-affect, opening subjects to critical reflection on their sentimental responses to commercial and political messages. In her book Ugly Feelings, for example, Sianne Ngai describes affective disorientation as the definitive affect of critical inquiry. ‘Despite its marginality to the philosophical canon of emotions, isn’t this feeling of confusion about what one is feeling an affective state in its own

Biopolitical Reflections

221

right? And in fact a rather familiar feeling that often heralds the basic affect of “interest” underwriting all acts of intellectual inquiry?’44 As Ngai points out, this meta-affective confusion can be evoked by systematic formal techniques, namely that of a fixed camera, which can function precisely to draw our attention to what is not visible, the challenge of allegorical perspective for Jameson. She explains, the dysphoric affect of affective disorientation – of being lost on one’s own ‘cognitive map’ of available affects – is concretely rendered through a spatial confusion made possible by a notoriously unstable narrative technique that film scholars have credited the genre of film noir with most fully instrumentalizing: subjective or first-person camera.45

The first-person camera leaves us uncertain of the position-slash-person through which we look, generating an anxiety usually relieved by the reverse shot but placed in suspense where the latter is delayed or absent. Similarly, being instructed in the political economy of our own affects may give us pause, reminding us we are all unreliable narrators of our own experience. Of course, affective disorientation can lead to anxiety and reactionary hostility of the sort Appadurai describes. It can also paralyze action altogether. As William Connolly puts it in his reading of another noir, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, adding a little touch of dizziness can stimulate thinking, but a lot can ‘freeze you into a zombie’.46 In the case of Judson’s article, one presumes the dizziness in question is commonly experienced at a comfortable remove from urgent demands for action, softened by a pleasant space of reception, etc. In his book, Affective Mapping, Jonathan Flatley suggests that a reflexive mapping of affective experience could serve as a correlate to Jameson’s ‘cognitive’ orientation. He finds such mappings promoted by texts that both induce and describe affects, allowing the reader to trace the historical basis of their sensuous experience. He writes, ‘Such a representation is accomplished by way of a self-estrangement that allows one to see oneself 44 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 14. 45 Ibid. 46 William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 16.

222

Kam Shapiro

in relation to one’s affective environment in its historicity, in relation to the relevant social-political anchors or landmarks in that environment, and to see the others who inhabit this landscape with one.’47 In his Freudian example, ‘The effect is not unlike the moment in a therapy when the analyst says: “Hmm, well, perhaps this is about those early conflicts with your father.”’48 However, reflecting on the origins of those affects that (as in Flatley’s example) associates the city of Detroit with a fear of crime, does not lead to a thorough reconstruction of the diverse historical forces that shape the post-industrial landscape along with those informing perceptions of danger.49 Instead, it points us to ‘landmarks’ among those forces by which we navigate the totality of their historical determination in a partial, heuristic manner.50 Contrasting such mapping with the cognitive mapping Jameson describes, he writes, ‘The difference with the social map is that where the totality of Boston is quite representable, the “totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole”, conversely, is not.’51 As Lynch argued, to the contrary, a legible image of the city is not grounded in an encompassing representation. Rather, we encounter the totality of a city much as we do that of the global economy. In urban experience as Henri Lefebvre describes it, ‘opacity and horizons, obstacles and perspectives implicate one another because they complicate one another, imbricate one another to the point of allowing the Unknown, the giant city, to be glimpsed or guessed at. With its diverse spaces affected by diverse times: rhythms.’52 Moreover, he argues, ‘No camera, no image or series of images can show these rhythms. It requires equally attentive eyes

47 Flatley, Affective Mapping, 80. 48 Ibid., 83. 49 Ibid., 78. 50 Ibid., 80. At times, Flatley suggests that a more encompassing view will result, as when he compares the navigation of affective maps to a ‘global positioning device that tells you where you are at this particular moment, giving you a satellite view of your life’. Ibid., 84. 51 Ibid., 77. 52 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2004), 33.

Biopolitical Reflections

223

and ears, a head and a memory and a heart.’53 Thus, Lefebvre suggests that amidst our itineraries, or between them, reflection alerts us to the totality of forces we encounter in parts. The result is not a complete picture but a different sensibility. Or, more precisely, it is a series of overlapping pictures accompanied by a sense of their incompleteness.

Conclusion: Rhythms and Itineraries Flatley and Lefebvre describe mappings that oscillate between guidance and estrangement, figures and reflection. Taken together, Judson’s and Polgreen’s articles – which appeared in the same publication, at different times – might be said to engender a similar rhythm. First, they illustrate some of the complex economic networks in which we participate. Second, they stimulate a set of sentimental responses, including sympathy, but also aversion, etc. Third, they instruct us in the indirection of our own cognitive and sentimental responses, inflecting our perspective with a little dizziness. In ‘Art as Experience’, Dewey attributed a rhythm of this kind to aesthetic experience as such. As he describes it, such experience begins with the disruption of equilibrium between organism and environment, that is, of a harmonious coordination of changing states and external conditions. It is (provisionally) completed when a new coordination is established by way of increasingly complex, encompassing co-ordinations, or ‘representations’. ‘Order is not imposed from without but is made out of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another.’ In other words, experience is also formed by the interaction of changing things, rather than from a transcendent region. Moreover, it ‘develops’, that is, ‘It comes to include within its balanced movement a greater variety of changes.’54

53 Ibid., 37. 54 Dewey, Art As Experience, 13.

224

Kam Shapiro

Dewey’s proposals for the aesthetic education of reflexive public sensibilities (attuning people to the relationships that define their shared social worlds) are commonly contrasted with Walter Lippmann’s more sceptical view. Yet Lippmann also had hopes for reflexive orientations to embodied cognition. Keenly aware of what he called the ‘bigotry’ of science in favor of measurable quantities, he hoped comparative psychology might allow experts to investigate their own influences and motivations. Like Flatley, he gathered from Freud ‘a technique for cutting under the surface of our thoughts’, or at least those of others. ‘We now ask of an economist, who his friends are, what his ambitions, his class bias.’ Science, he proclaimed, can thus become ‘its own critic’ and ‘control its own bias.’55 In some respects, the reflexive disposition Lippmann advocated for the scientist conforms with that Dewey sought for the public. ‘The more we see, the more we think; while the more we think, the more we see in our immediate experiences, and the greater grows the detail and the more significant the articulateness of perception.’56 Much hinges, however, on the difference between the enhancement of perception and the control of bias. Dewey did not propose that a democratic public learn to control its own bias, an ideal that would forfeit interests and desire to an objective standard he repudiated.57 He therefore not only had more faith in publics, but also less faith in experts than Lippmann. Whereas Lippmann thought that public reflection on the complexity of social processes might inculcate a deference to experts, Dewey hoped it might encourage an experimental attitude. By extending reflection to the processes shaping cognitive and sentimental capacities, new materialisms do not complete public knowing (an approach Lippmann dismissed as the ‘homeopathic fallacy’), but rather create possibilities for different itineraries.

Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1917), 274. 56 Ibid., 295. 57 Dewey, Art As Experience, 46. 55

Biopolitical Reflections

225

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). , Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Brophy, Kathleen, ‘Bloody BlackBerrys: The True Cost of Today’s Electronics’, accessed 15 April 2011. Connolly, William, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). , A World of Becoming (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2011). Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Cuvelier, Jeroen, and Tim Raeymaekers, ‘Supporting the War Economy in the DRC’, report by IPIS (International Peace Information Service, 2002), 1–28, accessed 13 February 2015. Damasio, Antonio R., Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Mariner Books, 2003). Dewey, John, ‘The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy’, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essay (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910), 1–19. , The Public and its Problems (New York: H. Holt Press, 1927). , Art as Experience (London: Penguin Books, 1934). Edwards, Jonathan, ‘The Materialism of Historical Materialism’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 281–97. Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Flatley, Jonathan, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). Jameson, Frederic, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Cary Nelson, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60. , Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

226

Kam Shapiro

, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Judson, Olivia, ‘Weighing the Vote’, New York Times (21 October 2008), accessed 29 September 2014. Kristof, Nicholas D., ‘Raising the World’s I.Q.’, New York Times (4 December 2008), accessed 29 September 2014. , ‘How Chemicals Change us’, New York Times (5 March 2012), accessed 11 March 2012. Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Lefebvre, Henri, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2004). Lehrer, Jonah, ‘Cartesian Metaphors’, The Frontal Cortex, accessed 20 February 2010. Lippmann, Walter, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1917). , Public Opinion (1922) (New York: Free Press, 1997). , The Phantom Public: A Sequel to ‘Public Opinion’ (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1930). Lynch, Kevin, Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Miller, Greg, ‘The Seductive Allure of Behavioral Epigenetics’, Science 329/5987 (2010), 24–7, accessed 29 September 2014. Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Ong, Aihwa, Neoliberalism As Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Pollan, Michael, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006). Polgreen, Lydia, ‘The Spoils, Congo’s Riches, Looted by Renegade Troops’, New York Times (15 November 2008), . Pearlman, Wendy, ‘Emotions and the Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings’, Perspectives on Politics 11/2 (2013), 387–409.

Biopolitical Reflections

227

Protevi, John, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Shapiro, Kam, ‘The Myth of the Multitude’, Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York: Routledge, 2004), 289–314. Steinberg, Saul, ‘View of the World from 9th Avenue’, New Yorker (29 March 1976), accessed 29 September 2014. Vedantam, Shankar, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010).

part iv

Three Case Studies: From Postcolonial to Global Literary Public Spheres

Fernando Unzueta

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere in Latin America

Literature, Nations and Publics The emergence of literature in Latin America, and of the novel in particular, is closely related to nation building (understood both as the scriptural institutionalization of nation-states and as the forging of national identities in the context of postcolonial societies) and to the formation of a public sphere. As Angel Rama and others have shown, the region’s letrados, or men of letters, which included bureaucrats, lawyers and historians, were also poets and writers of fiction. They played a key role in supporting and promoting the agendas of the colonial states and, after the wars of independence (1810–25), in the establishment of the new republics and the formation of nations. Basically the same group of author-politicians wrote the new countries’ constitutions, laws and histories, along with the patriotic poetry and national novels that would enshrine their heroes and other foundational myths. Not surprisingly, Benedict Anderson, in the second edition of his important work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, highlights the role of the ‘Creole pioneers’ of the Americas (Europeans born in the New World, both North and South) in the formation of modern nations: ‘It had been part of my original plan to stress the New World origins of nationalism.’1 Developing what may arguably be

1

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, [1983] 1991), xiii.

232

Fernando Unzueta

the most influential constructivist approach to the nation, Anderson notes the importance of print media (newspapers and novels in particular) as the technological means that allow the people in a certain territory to imagine themselves as belonging to the ‘imagined communities’ that are nations. While he acknowledges the insignificance of the ‘European-style “middle classes”’ at the end of the eighteenth century in South and Central America, and the ‘social thinness of Latin America’s independence movements’, he nevertheless plays up the role of late colonial newspapers in developing a sense of a ‘Spanish-America-wide nationalism’ and anti-metropolitan resistances that were ‘conceived in plural, “national” forms’ prior to independence (62–5). Anderson also highlights the relevance of Mexico’s El Periquillo Sarniento [The Itching Parrot] (1816)2 as a ‘nationalist novel’: ‘Here again we see the “national imagination” at work in the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside.’3 Ultimately, more local economic interests and older administrative structures would prevail over a continental nationalism and lead to the decades-long development of several different national communities. Regardless of the heuristic value of Anderson’s approach to the nation, the specific historical details of his argument with regard to Latin American nations have been taken to task by specialists in the field: ‘Anderson’s argument takes for granted that before 1808 Spanish America had quietly and informally divided into national communities aspiring to independence–a proposition problematical indeed.’4 More bluntly, John Chasteen notes that

José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, El Periquillo Sarniento (Mexico City: Porrúa, [1816] 1987). 3 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 30. 4 François-Xavier Guerra, ‘Forms of Communication, Political Spaces, and Cultural Identities in the Creation of Spanish American Nations’, in Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, eds, Beyond Imagined Communities. Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2003), 3–32: 4. 2

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

233

Anderson’s analysis ‘does not bear close inspection’.5 While Creole elites began to develop regional identities during the colonial period and, in its final decades, to distance themselves from European Spaniards, they still considered themselves to be part of the same ‘Spanish nation’ (a monarchy with several kingdoms or land possessions throughout the world) at the beginning of the independence movements (circa 1808–10). Unlike some other countries, Latin American nations developed their identities after gaining independence.6 Print media and literature played an important role in this process throughout the nineteenth century. The summary just presented has important parallels with the formation of the public sphere in Latin America. Even though Jürgen Habermas largely ignored issues of nationalism in his considerations of the public sphere, as Geoff Eley has noted, ‘the emergence of nationality (that is, the growth of a public for nationalist discourse) was simultaneously the emergence of a public sphere.’7 The interconnectedness of nationalism and the public sphere is particularly relevant in the Latin American context, where most literary organizations, discursive projects and institutions of the nineteenth century had specific political and national agendas; and where the roles of legislator, politician, historian or poet were held by the same letrados. Thanks to several important studies published over the last couple of decades,8 the basic outline for the development of the public sphere (of 5

6 7 8

John Charles Chasteen, ‘Introduction: Beyond Imagined Communities’, in Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, eds, Beyond Imagined Communities. Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2003), ix–xxv: xix. Nicola Miller, ‘The Historiography of Nationalism and National Identity in Latin America’, Nations and Nationalism 12/2 (2006), 201–21: 201. Geoff Eley, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 289–339: 296. François-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière, eds, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica. Ambigüedades y problemas. Siglos XVIII-XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998); Víctor M. Uribe-Urán, ‘The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America During the Age of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42/2 (2000), 425–57; Carlos A. Forment, Democracy in Latin America,

234

Fernando Unzueta

civil society) in the region is relatively clear.9 The first newspapers were established and new forms of sociability developed toward the second half of the eighteenth century. During the process of independence newspapers multiplied, and both monarchists and patriots used them to support the war efforts and broadcast political messages. With the establishment of the new republics, starting in the 1810s, the number of newspapers published and civic associations established grew exponentially, particularly in the second-half of the nineteenth century. Readerships expanded, political parties were established, and more participatory elections became the norm.10 The following pages will show that the development of literature and the public sphere are closely connected in this era, and that both are also inextricably linked to nation-building. Literature became institutionalized in Latin America throughout the nineteenth century; the process was gradual and filled with contradictions. At the beginning of this period, any type of writing concerned with educating or entertaining readers was considered ‘literature’. These writings included scientific, philosophical and even theological texts as well as works of fiction, drama and poetry. The initially sporadic ‘literary sections’ of newspapers were transformed by 1900 into elegant and cosmopolitan modernista publications: glossy magazines employing the latest print and graphic technologies and, more importantly, the new literary sensibilities and contributions of increasingly professional writers like Rubén Darío, with refined aesthetic tastes. While articles about the latest scientific discoveries remained in vogue, literature was more narrowly defined and included, primarily, poetry, short stories and urban chronicles.

9

10

1760–1900. Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Pablo Piccato, ‘Public Sphere in Latin America: A Map of the Historiography’, Social History 35/2 (2010), 164–92. In Habermas’ classic definition: ‘The public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people coming together as a public.’ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 27. Forment details the rise of civic associations as central to the development of public life and democracy in Latin America. Forment, Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

235

The growing specialization of literature, which can only be alluded to here, is accompanied and supported by several parallel transformations. A whole set of formal cultural organizations dedicated, at least partially, to the study and transmission of literature were established, such as libraries, institutes and universities as well as tertulias [literary meetings] and other informal types of gatherings associated with the public sphere.11 With the rapid expansion of printed materials, several literary anthologies and histories were published. These canonizing texts mark the central role literature would play in the processes of nation-building, as they contain programmatic efforts to invent patriotic or Americanist traditions.12 All these publications, and others, provided a medium for the constitution of an incipient critical community; that is, a discursive space in which general ideas about literature and culture or about particular works were conveyed and debated. More importantly for our purposes, literature and discussions about literature were concerned with politics and with the creation of new publics and stood at the centre of an emergent public sphere. As Antonio Cornejo Polar has noted, independence would bring about a ‘nueva articulación de la literatura con el público’ [new articulation of literature with the public] and the formation of a new public; postcolonial Latin American literature was closely linked to newspapers and is part of the emergence of public opinion.13

11 12

13

See Perales Ojeda for an extensive record of Mexico’s nineteenth-century literary associations. Alicia Perales Ojeda, Asociaciones literarias mexicanas. Siglo XIX (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1957). González (1987) was one of the first critics to examine the nationalist agenda of Latin America’s literary histories of the previous century. Achugar has followed the same vein, touching on two topics that are particularly relevant to this study, namely the formation and insertion of literary traditions in a public sphere and the subject interpellations of poetic parnasos [anthologies]. Antonio Cornejo Polar, ‘La literatura hispanoamericana del siglo XIX: continuidad y ruptura’, in Beatriz González Stephan et al., eds, Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX. Cultura y sociedad en América Latina (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1995), 11–23: 13. All translations are mine.

236

Fernando Unzueta

This gradual and uneven process of institutionalization gets a jolt in the 1840s and takes off in the second half of the century. By mid-century, Latin America’s printed materials begin to articulate what Domingo F. Sarmiento calls the ‘sistema de publicidad’ [system of publicity] characteristic of modern societies.14 Forming the central part of this system, literature is constructed as a discursive formation (Foucault) and as a cultural field that is relatively autonomous, but that can, at the same time, be conceived as the theater where discourses, institutions and areas of knowledge with their particular perspectives and needs intersect. This paper explores the fact that this ‘Republic of Letters’, to use Andrés Bello and Alberto Blest Gana’s expression, possesses many of the elements Habermas attributes to the public sphere.15 Unlike Habermas’ public sphere of letters, however, Latin America’s republic of letters was closely connected to nation-building and to politics.

An Incipient Public Sphere16 As an Enlightenment legacy, critical activity and the creation and study of literature were seen as appropriate means toward the search for truth through the use of reason and argumentation in a public forum, the key

14

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, ‘Las novelas’, in Norma Klahh and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos 1 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1856] 1991), 23–6: 24 15 Andrés Bello, ‘“Bosquejo histórico de la constitución del gobierno de Chile” por don José Victorino Lastarria’, in Temas de historia y geografía. Obras completas de Andrés Bello 23 (Caracas: La Casa de Bello, [1848] 1981), 219–27: 224; Alberto Blest Gana, ‘Literatura chilena: algunas consideraciones sobre ella’, in Norma Klahn and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1861] 1991), 46–58: 48. 16 I first developed some of the following arguments in Fernando Unzueta, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Toward a Public Sphere or a Mass Media?’, in Edmundo

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

237

principles of Habermas’ concept of a public sphere.17 These ideas are at the centre of the late colonial ‘Sociedades de Amigos (o Amantes) del País’ [Societies of Friends (or Lovers) of the Country] and their periodical publications and are reinforced during the Independence movements and afterwards. José Agustín Caballero, toward the end of the eighteenth century, and Camilo Henríquez, at the beginning of the next, believe that all ‘tareas literarias’ [literary work] and ‘escritos luminosos’ [enlightened writings], the central print-elements of the precarious Latin American public sphere of those years, contributed directly to the correction of ‘errors’ and the overall improvement of society. In Caballero’s words, whose ‘Carta’ [Letter] was published – symptomatically – in a colonial newspaper, the Papel Periódico de La Habana (in 1794), ‘el anhelo de encontrar la verdad […] debe ser norte de nuestros escritos’ [the aspiration to find the truth (…) should be the goal of our writings].18 Understandably, the search for the truth will come up repeatedly in the prospectos or editorial statements of many newspapers as they were launched. Like Habermas much later, these Enlightened thinkers believed that the ideas discussed in a discursive space located between the state and civil society, in which they were read and published, acted as a guide for society. They exerted political influence to the extent that private individuals, gathered as a public, forced the authorities to seek legitimacy before them through rational argumentation and publicity.19 Seyla Benhabib and others have noted that Habermas’ concept of the public sphere is based on an ideal model of egalitarian verbal communication, one that presupposes the existence of a liberal state that supports a free press as well as individual freedoms and a representative democracy.20 Paz-Soldán and Debra Castillo, eds, Latin American Literature and Mass Media (New York: Garland/Hispanic Issues, 2001), 21–40. 17 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 82–3. 18 José Agustín Caballero, ‘Carta de un amigo sobre las tareas literarias’, in Cintio Vitier, ed., La crítica literaria y estética en el siglo XIX cubano (La Habana: Biblioteca Nacional ‘José Martí’, [1794] 1968), 53–5: 55. 19 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 25–6. 20 Ibid., 89.

238

Fernando Unzueta

It is worth remembering, therefore, that these conditions were simply nonexistent in a region where the Spanish crown imposed strict censorship and limited political associations and participation. While cultural and scientific associations were permitted, and cafes and new forms of sociability became part of daily life, political discourse remained limited. The Diario de México, for instance, made it clear in 1805 that it would respect colonial authorities and would not address ‘materias de alta política, y de gobierno’ [matters of high politics, and of government] in its pages.21 Even after Latin American countries gained independence, newspapers would tread carefully in their criticism of the government, and the participation of the majority of citizens in political decisions was quite limited until the late nineteenth century, at best. Most constitutions granted citizenship with full (electoral) political participation only to those who were literate, owned property and/or belonged to specific professions and trades. Thus, the notions that everyone had access to the same communication networks, that the public sphere could allow the state to self-regulate, and that the social and political direction the government should take came from civil society itself need to be questioned. In Latin America, partly because of censorship, but also because of the restrictive nature of its new republican governments, and on account of the close relationship between power and the written word,22 the separation between the state and the public sphere has not been nearly as clear as in the ‘golden age’ of the public sphere as described by Habermas.23 Moreover, whereas Habermas points out the importance of the ‘public sphere in the world of letters’ as an immediate

21 22 23

Cited in Annick Lempérière, ‘República y publicidad a finales del Antiguo Régimen (Nueva España)’, in Guerra and Lempérière, eds, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica, 54–79: 69. Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1984). For a critique of the application of Habermas’ model to Latin America see Guerra and Lempérière, ‘Introducción’, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica. Ambigüedades y problemas. Siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), 5–21. In spite of his critique Guerra is one of the most influential scholars in discussions surrounding ‘espacios públicos’ [public spaces] in Latin America in the late eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

239

precursor to the political public sphere,24 in Latin America, the world of letters would not give up its political role before the end of the nineteenth century, if at all,25 and it was very much part of the political public sphere of civil society until then. The first main objective of Latin America’s public sphere seems to be, from its very beginnings, the improvement of society as a whole, particularly in an environment considered to be dominated by its colonial legacy, with traditions of ‘obscurantism’, backward customs and the subjugation of reason. Not surprisingly then, a great emphasis was placed on education. Henríquez points out that: ‘para hacer felices a los pueblos es preciso ilustrarlos’ [to make people happy it is necessary to enlighten them].26 Similarly, Caballero notes that public education allows writers to ‘servir a la Patria’ [serve their Fatherland] and to be ‘útiles a sus conciudadanos’ [useful to their co-citizens].27 These last quotes also point to the second main objective of the public sphere: community or homeland and, later on, nation building. The urgency felt by intellectuals to educate ‘the People’, and even authorities, suggests an awareness of the limits of the culture of the ‘lettered city’;28 limits due to a small reading public in a culture that was, after all, based on the knowledge of a few ‘Enlightened books’ read by even fewer letrados [men of letters].29 In this context, in addition to celebrating the exponential growth of the periodical press, several nineteenth-century writers saw a clear role for literature’s participation in educational and nation-building projects and, in particular, they perceived the novel as 24 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 57. 25 See Julio Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: Literatura y política en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). 26 Camilo Henríquez, ‘De la influencia de los escritos luminosos sobre la suerte de la humanidad’, in José Promis, ed. Testimonios y documentos de la literatura chilena (1842–1975) (Santiago: Editorial Nascimiento, [1812] 1977), 69–72: 72. 27 Caballero, ‘Carta de un amigo sobre las tareas literarias’, 54. 28 See Rama, La ciudad letrada. 29 Even a few decades later, Blest Gana would regret the shortcomings of lettered culture: ‘lo reducido de la parte ilustrada de nuestra población’ [the small numbers of our educated population]. Blest Gana, ‘Literatura chilena’, 46–7.

240

Fernando Unzueta

a literary genre uniquely appropriate to expand the reading public and, consequently, the public sphere.30 According to the poetics of the Latin American novel,31 as it has been articulated in its meta-texts (the many prologues, articles, and critical and other self-reflexive commentaries of the period), this genre is distinguished from other, more traditional literary forms, precisely through its prominent place in the creation and debates of the public sphere.

Novel Spaces José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), long considered Mexico’s and Latin America’s first novel, clearly inaugurates a new type of literary space in the continent’s letters, thanks to three related phenomena. First, this novel calls for a much wider readership; secondly, its publication and dissemination are closely connected to newspapers, and consequently, and thirdly, it enters into a market of consumer goods, with cultural goods increasingly among them. By following the story of a pícaro, or rogue, who repents at the end of his life, the novel elaborates a broad social critique of late colonial life in Mexico, focusing on education, family and social mores, including traditional ideas about nobility. Ultimately, however, the author had to be careful as to how he addressed political issues given colonial censorship, and it is not at all clear that he supported independence when he wrote 30

31

Poblete makes a similar argument for the Chilean case in terms of a social history of reading. See Juan Poblete, ‘La construción social de la lectura y la novela nacional: el caso chileno’, Latin American Research Review 34/2 (1999), 75–108, and Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras autoriales (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2003). See Wilfrido Corral, ‘Hacia una poética hispanoamericana de la novela decimonónica (I): el texto’, in Beatriz González et al., eds, Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1994), 307–30.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

241

the novel. The popular Insurgency of 1810 that eventually led to Mexican independence in 1821, for instance, is described as a ‘popular mutiny’ whose results produced a ‘truly fatal and disastrous era for New Spain’.32 To be fair, alluding to censorship, Fernández de Lizardi points out the dangers of writing about these issues when composing the novel in Mexico, in 1813.33 As a journalist who edited and printed nine newspapers between 1812 (right after freedom of the press was declared) and 1827, and wrote hundreds of articles, he had experienced censorship directly and been in jail for some of his writings in 1811, and he would go back to prison, briefly, in 1821. His novel El Periquillo was distributed in serial form, with its chapters sold as separate pamphlets to subscribers and to the public at large. The Crown suppressed its fourth part, which addresses the topic of slavery, and the complete version of the novel was published only after independence was declared in Mexico, and included in the novel’s ten editions or printings published in the nineteenth century. Lizardi had turned to fiction as a way to avoid the censorship that restricted his journalistic freedom, even more: he wrote his four novels in the 1816–19 period, when censorship was re-imposed by the Crown, and went back to journalism after it was again lifted, in 1820.34 In spite of these limitations, with the publication of El Periquillo, Lizardi was able to able to inaugurate a new type of relationship between writing and the public. Lizardi’s (first) prologue, echoing an old colonial grievance, points to the ‘material difficulties’ involved in ‘dar a luz’ [bringing to light] a work like Vida de Periquillo [Life of Periquillo] in the Americas. The Spanish Crown had prohibited the circulation of novels in Spanish America, and even after censorship was lifted, costs could make the local production of novels prohibitive.35 Thus, Lizardi notes the novelty of seeing his work ‘en José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Don Catrín de la Fachenda (México: Porrúa, [1832] 1996), and El Periquillo Sarniento, 450 and 452. 33 Ibid., 452. 34 Nancy Vogeley, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 21–2 and 32–3. 35 Limited access to printing presses in the late-colonial period was a major concern among Creoles, as was the high-price of books. Books were perceived as European 32

242

Fernando Unzueta

letra de molde’ [in print type].36 Manuscripts still circulated widely and the novel was a new genre in Latin America in the early nineteenth century. As the Mexican novelist and critic Ignacio Altamirano would later observe, the novel’s circulation, unlike that of other literary forms, depended on the print industry and its technological advances.37 Instead of calling on a traditional ‘mecenas’ [patron] to subsidize the publication of the book, the ‘Mexican Thinker’ (the pseudonym Lizardi used as well as the title of one of the newspapers he published) accepted the suggestion that it should be the readers who pay for its printing.38 By doing so, he presented his work as part of a developing ‘mass culture’, both in terms of its market orientation and with regard to the breadth of its readership, which the author mockingly acknowledged could be quite heterogeneous: ‘Sé que acaso seréis, algunos, plebeyos, indios, mulatos, negros, viciosos, tontos y majaderos’ [I know some of you may be plebeians, Indians, Mulattos, Blacks, vicious persons, fools and uncouth men].39 Print-capitalism, the consumption of commodities and large publics are central to both Anderson’s concept of the nation and to Habermas’ public sphere. The new discursive space created by Lizardi, however, does not depend on the direct dialogue among citizens, as in the classic model of the public sphere, but on the consumption of an intellectual and commercial product, elements characteristic of modern mass media and commercial publicity. Nevertheless, the significance of publishing ideas about important social issues related to the common good cannot be underestimated.

36 37 38 39

imports that threatened local production of printed goods. Staples reports that goodquality and affordable paper became available in Mexico only around 1845. Cited in Amy Wright, ‘Novels, Newspapers, and Nation. The Beginnings of Serial Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Mexico’, in William G. Acree Jr. and Juan Carlos González Espitia, eds, Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), 59–78: 75. Fernández de Lizardi, El Periquillo Sarniento, 1. Ignacio M. Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, in Escritos de literatura y arte: Obras completas XII (Mexico City: SEP, [1868] 1988), 40–1. Fernández de Lizardi, Don Catrín de la Fachenda, 3. Ibid., 4.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

243

In fact, the opinions presented in Lizardi’s novels were widely discussed in other print media and public spaces after their publication. Lizardi himself not only debated his ideas in hundreds of newspaper columns but was also involved in establishing a ‘Sociedad Pública de Lectura’ [Public Reading Society], where passages from his works would be read out loud (Flores). The oral reception of novels and newspapers and their informal distribution (beyond the number of readers who bought the books or subscribed to the newspapers where they appeared) were common practices in Latin America.40 At a certain level, Lizardi’s observations come across as a simple parody of the traditional relationship between authors and their readers and patrons, including Don Quijote’s invocation to the ‘curioso lector’ [curious reader]. The diversity and scope of El Periquillo’s public, however, as well as the author’s awareness of the book’s circulation in a market of cultural products present a radical rift with older reading models. A few years later, in Don Catrín de la Fachenda (published in 1832), Lizardi will refer to the ‘buena acogida’ [good reception] readers gave his Periquillo.41 In the ‘Apología de El Periquillo Sarniento’, he indicates that he writes ‘[para] la instrucción de los ignorantes’ [in order to educate those who are ignorant] and not those who are already ‘sabios’ [wise], but he also mentions ‘la general aceptación’ [the general acceptance] his work has received and the positive responses by the ‘personas literatas’ [learned people] and ‘el público ilustrado’ [lettered public].42 More importantly, Lizardi alludes to his readers as ‘compradores’ [buyers] who feed with their ‘reales’ [coins] something that comes as close to a print-culture industry as one can imagine for Mexico around 1820. He tells his readers: 40 See Enrique Flores, ‘El loro de Lizardi. Lectura en voz alta del Periquillo Sarniento’, Literatura Mexicana 3/1 (1992), 7–39; Fernando Unzueta, ‘Periódicos y formación nacional: Bolivia en sus primeros años’, Latin American Research Review 35/2 (2000), 35–72; Wright, ‘Novels, Newspapers, and Nation’, 59–78. 41 Fernández de Lizardi, Don Catrín de la Fachenda, 3. 42 José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, ‘Apología de El Periquillo Sarniento’, in Norma Klahn and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1819] 1991), 15–22: 20–1.

244

Fernando Unzueta que [Dios] os guarde muchos años, os dé dinero, y os permita emplearlo en beneficio de los autores, impresores, papeleros, comerciantes, encuadernadores y demás dependientes de vuestro gusto.43 [may (God) save you for many years, give you money and allow you to use it in benefit of the authors, printers, paper sellers, men of commerce, binders and other tradesmen of your liking.]

In fact, Lizardi expresses satisfaction with the high demand for and commercial success of his novel, in spite of its high price. He marvels at ‘la ansia con que se busca [su obra], el excesivo precio a que la compran y la escasez que hay de ella’ [the desperation with which people look for it, the excessive prices at which the buy it and its scarcity].44 Since its beginnings, Latin America’s nineteenth-century novel has been much closer to a budding commercial and mass culture and to social and political discourses than to the ideal of disinterested art. While the absence of an autonomous literary field in Latin America has been noted before, particularly in terms of the political orientation of many of the literary trends of the period (such as romanticismo social [social romanticism]), the importance given to market issues has not been properly foregrounded.45 In the prologue mentioned above, Lizardi invites each of his readers to buy several chapters (‘cada uno, seis o siete capítulos cada día’ [each one, six or seven chapters every day]) and to subscribe to many as well (‘cinco o seis ejemplares a lo menos’ [five or six numbers at least]).46 Open invitations (and exhortations) to the public to buy a subscription are a recurrent journalistic topic in the nineteenth century. Novels and newspapers were interconnected in this period, which partially explains the close relations between novels and the market. Most nineteenth-century Latin American novels (and other important works), 43 Fernández de Lizardi, El Periquillo Sarniento, 4. 44 Fernández de Lizardi, ‘Apología de El Periquillo Sarniento’, 20. 45 Ramos acutely explores this issue but, as many other critics, he is mostly concerned with the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. 46 Fernández de Lizardi, El Periquillo Sarniento, 4.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

245

were first (and sometimes only) published as folletines [feuilleton] or in some type of serial newspaper format. Folletines, a particular type of serial publication in which parts of other texts were published sequentially in the pages of the newspapers (as opposed to as separate pamphlets), were widely distributed in most Latin American newspapers starting in the 1840s as a way to increase their readership.47 These included mostly works written by French romantic authors (Sue, Dumas, etc.), but there were also efforts to publish ‘original’ works (i.e. national or Latin American). Once the serial publication was completed, the same printing house would re-publish the work in book-form. Several newspapers around the middle of the century offered their readers either the folletines or, after their publication, copies of novels (in book form) as a way to get them to buy subscriptions,48 attesting to the popularity of the genre in terms of its market value, to the close ties between novels and newspapers, and to their parallel efforts to broaden their largely shared readership. Serial novels were both part of a marketing strategy and a nationalist cultural project.49 This means of publication allowed the regions’ most important novels to reach broader audiences, via their more extensive and less expensive distribution in the pages of newspapers, and also provided for a dialogue between the novel and the news and opinions expressed in the paper where they were published.50 The

47 See Sarmiento’s ‘Nuestro pecado de los folletines’ (1845) for a description of the beginnings and popularity of folletines in Chile. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, ‘Nuestro pecado de los folletines’, Obras de D. F. Sarmiento (Buenos Aires: Gobierno Argentino, [1845] 1883–1900), 2: 314–17. Garrels’ article discusses this topic as well. Elizabeth Garrels, ‘El Facundo como folletín’, Revista Iberoamericana 54/143 (1988), 419–47. So does the chapter by Wright, Wright, ‘Novels, Newspapers, and Nation’. 48 See Fernando Unzueta, ‘Periódicos e historias literarias’, Estudios 6/11 (1998), 161–78: 171–3. 49 See Poblete, ‘La construción social de la lectura y la novela nacional: el caso chileno’, and Wright, ‘Novels, Newspapers, and Nation’. 50 For an intertextual reading of a national novel and the newspaper where it was first published, see Fernando Unzueta ‘Soledad o el romance nacional como folletín: proyectos nacionales y relaciones intertextuales’, Revista Iberoamericana 72/214 (2006), 243–54.

246

Fernando Unzueta

readership of newspapers and of the literature published in them went far beyond the number of copies printed.51 Nineteenth-century novels’ ‘interested’ character permeates several of its defining features, including an openness toward the market and new readers, a marked didacticism, and its political, social or ‘extra-literary’ contents. Continuing an Enlightenment tradition, most of the novelists of this century, from Lizardi to Clorinda Matto de Turner, seek to educate the people, to improve their costumbres [customs/mores] and to better their societies. The novelty is that they write for a much wider public thanks to the genre’s larger circulation, attributable to its distribution in newspaper media and growing literacy, and to the languages and styles they use. In other words, the novel as a literary form becomes more popular, in both senses of the term.52 Lizardi, for instance, criticizes the use of Latin in literature and decides to write El Periquillo in his own style: ‘el mío natural’ [my natural one].53 Furthermore, he responds to accusations of writing a novel using the ‘estilo de la canalla’ [style of the plebs] and depicting ‘gente soez’ [base people] by defending his right to represent a heterogeneous

51

52

53

Besides the distribution of newspapers to public libraries and other reading spaces, several articles of the period observe that newspapers circulate from ‘hand to hand’ and are read by the whole neighborhood. In what must be an exaggeration that nevertheless illustrates how common this habit was, Silva cites a reader’s letter published in the Papel Periódico de Santafé de Bogotá in 1791 stating that ‘un solo ejemplar suele servir a más de cien personas, si acaso no es a una tercera parte de la ciudad’ [one copy (of the newspaper) is often used by more than a hundred people, if not a third of the city’s population]. See Renán Silva, ‘Prácticas de lectura, ámbitos privados y formación de un espacio public modern. Nueva Granada a finales del Antiguo Régimen’, in Guerra and Lempérière, eds, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica, 80–106: 83. Martín-Barbero sees the European folletín as one of the early keys to the mass tendencies of culture. With regards to its language and ‘popular’ character, he writes: ‘el folletín habla al pueblo del que habla’ [the folletín talks to the people about which it speaks]. Jesús Martín-Barbero, De los medios a las mediaciones. Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía (Mexico City: Ediciones G. Gili, 1987), 148. Unfortunately, he has not paid close attention to Latin American nineteenth-century serial novels. Fernández de Lizardi, Don Catrín de la Fachenda, 6.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

247

social landscape and to include the sociolects of all groups represented: ‘yo he hablado en el estilo de esta clase de personas’ [I have spoken in the style of each class of persons].54 While Lizardi’s Periquillo was among the few works of fiction published in this early period, the writing and reading scene in Latin America would change significantly in the following decades, but not the concern for addressing important issues before a broad public through novels.

A Poetics of the Novel, Seduction and the Public Sphere In comparison to other literary forms and to narrative fiction of the previous century, nineteenth-century novels radically democratize literature by portraying lower social classes, previously excluded from serious representation (they were included only in the comic mode, as the objects of ridicule or of exemplary lessons), and by broadening its reading public. Like Lizardi, Blest Gana would later also note that the novel should ‘study’ all the ‘diversas esferas sociales’ [diverse social spheres].55 Similarly, he trusts in its growing ‘popularity’: La novela […] cuenta entre la generalidad de los lectores con un número mucho mayor de aficionados que la poesía, porque la primera está al alcance de todos […]. El estudioso y el que no lo es, el viejo y el joven, la madre de familia y la niña […] todas las clases sociales, todos los gustos, cada uno de los peculiares estados en que las vicisitudes de la vida colocan al hombre, encontrarán en la novela un grato solaz. […] la novella […] tiene un especial encanto para toda clase de inteligencias, habla el lenguaje de todos, pinta cuadros que cada cual puede a su manera comprender y aplicar, y lleva la civilización hasta las clases menos cultas de la sociedad, por el atractivo de escenas de la vida ordinaria contadas en un lenguaje fácil y sencillo.56

54 Fernández de Lizardi, ‘Apología de El Periquillo Sarniento’, 15–22: 17–19. 55 Blest Gana, ‘Literatura chilena’, 56. 56 Ibid., 52–3; my emphasis.

248

Fernando Unzueta [The novel (…) has among the general readership a much larger number of followers than poetry, because it is accessible to everyone (…). Students and those who are not, old and young, mothers of families and girls (…) all social classes, all tastes, each of the particular states in which life’s fortunes place men, will find leisurely enjoyment in the novel. (…) the novel (…) has a special attraction for all types of intelligent beings, it speaks in everyone’s language, it paints scenes that everyone can understand and apply in his own way, and it carries civilization even to society’s less cultured classes, because of the attractiveness of scenes of daily life narrated in an easy and simple language.]

The novel not only represents the lower classes, but it does so in a language that they can understand. Its target audience, in addition to the generic and supposedly universal ‘hombre’ [man], has been broadened to include women and members of all social classes (including the ‘less cultured’ [menos cultas]); like the public sphere, ‘está al alcance de todos’ [it reaches everyone], at least potentially.57 Even though statements with regard to the social depth and reach of the novel – like Blest Gana’s – may seem like exaggerations, they were shared by most Latin American intellectuals in the middle of the century. Altamirano, for instance, a Mexican novelist and critic, considers the novel as ‘lectura del pueblo’ [reading for the people]. ‘La novela es el libro de las masas’ [The novel is the book of the masses], he adds, particularly because of ‘la influencia que ha tenido y tendrá todavía en la educación de las masas’ [the influence it has had and will continue to have in the education of the masses].58 The ‘education’ to which Altamirano alludes, however, embraces a much wider scope than the narrow Christian morality promoted by Lizardi a few decades earlier, as it implies nothing short of the ‘iniciación del pueblo en la civilización moderna’ [induction of the people into modern civilization].59 Under the nineteenth-century liberal conception of culture

57

Habermas admits that the early configurations of the ‘public’ involved small numbers, a fact that needs to be further stressed in the Latin American context. Nevertheless, he highlights the significance of the belief, also expressed by Blest Gana, that the public sphere is ‘in principle inclusive’: ‘everyone had to be able to participate.’ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 37. 58 Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, 56. 59 Ibid.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

249

and society, ‘civilization’ is associated with European or urban and highculture Latin American values; for Altamirano, the novel is an ‘artificio’ [artifice] used by intellectuals (‘hombres pensadores’ [thinking men]) in order to make certain ideas more palatable to the masses: ‘[para] hacer descender a las masas doctrinas y opiniones que de otro modo habría sido difícil que aceptasen’ [to bring down to the masses doctrines and opinions that would otherwise be very difficult for them to accept].60 Novels use fiction, and even seduction, to express opinions and incite discussions on social and political issues among an increasingly larger public. In spite of their elitist attitude, for authors like Sarmiento, Blest Gana and Altamirano, the novel has a mediating role in society: it builds bridges among different social classes.61 Altamirano makes this point eloquently when he writes that novels contribute to the ‘nivelación de las clases por la educación y las costumbres’ [leveling of social classes through education and customs]62 and goes on to add: ‘la novela, como la canción popular, como el periodismo, como la tribuna, será un vínculo de unión con ellas [las masas], y tal vez el más fuerte’ [novels, like folk songs, like journalism, like oratory, will be a uniting link to them (the masses), and perhaps the strongest one].63 Thus, the novel is perceived as possessing the ‘mediating function’ Habermas attributes to the public sphere.64 The optimism the representatives of lettered culture express with regard to its diffusion

60 Ibid., 39. 61 Poblete describes Blest Gana’s theory (or poetics) and practice of the novela nacional de costumbres [national novel of customs/manners] in terms of its ‘transactional’ role, particularly between gendered ways of reading. Poblete, ‘La construción social de la lectura y la novela nacional: el caso chileno’. 62 Ibid., 48. 63 Ibid., 56. 64 Martín-Barbero makes a similar argument for mass media (and Altamirano’s mention of ‘canción popular’ and ‘periodismo’ is particularly relevant here); when the masses emerge in culture, he writes, culture itself is articulated as ‘un espacio estratégico en la reconciliación de las clases y reabsorción de las diferencias sociales’ [a strategic space in the reconciliation of social classes and the re-absorption of social differences]. Martín-Barbero, De los medios a las mediaciones, 154.

250

Fernando Unzueta

and effects is somewhat nuanced by Altamirano’s use of the future tense (‘será’) in the previous quote. While they often use the present, most of the ideas proposed in the poetics of the novel formulate a ‘project’ more than describe a reality.65 Nevertheless, by comparing the novel with songs, newspapers and political discourse, Altamirano is basically describing a ‘popular’ public sphere. Indeed, many Latin American novels of the period dramatize political arguments, represent major historical movements and ideologies (they often consider themselves ‘estudios sociales’ [studies of society]) and, at the same time, incorporate a wide range of society’s cultural elements, sometimes in acute conflict. These novels often question Habermas’ privileging of one public sphere that all others emulate and to which they are subordinated (and consequently denying the significance of alternative or counter-public spheres); the different ‘esferas sociales’ represented tend to have their own language and (uses of ) public spaces that sometimes interact with or challenge the dominant public sphere.66 The novel, that ‘Proteo de la literatura’ [Proteus of literature],67 which is a polymorphous genre by definition (Bakhtin), is considered in Latin America’s mid-century as the main discursive space where society’s crucial problems are discussed and debated. In Blest Gana’s words, ‘en su esfera

65 It is interesting to note that most of the criticisms of Habermas’ historical account of a bourgeois public sphere, as those included in Calhoun, also show the significance of the formulation as an ideal, normative model, with ‘utopian aspirations’. Mary P. Ryan, ‘Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 259–88: 286. 66 Another serious critique of Habermas’ model concerns the lack of participation of women in his ideal bourgeois public sphere (see Ryan, ‘Gender and Public Access’, and others). Masiello, while not mentioning Habermas, poses women’s nineteenthcentury journalism in Argentina as a counter-sphere. Francine Masiello, ‘Introducción’, in Francine Masiello, comp., La mujer y el espacio público (Buenos Aires: Feminaria, 1994), 7–19. Ramos discusses the relevance of Habermas’ concepts to modernista writers. Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina, 99–103. For the role of female authors in twentieth-century public spheres, see Ignacio Corona’s essay in this volume. 67 Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, 55.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

251

se discuten los más palpitantes intereses sociales’ [the most pressing social issues are discussed in its sphere].68 Similarly, according to Altamirano, es necesario apartar sus disfraces y buscar en el fondo de ella [la novela] el hecho histórico, el estudio moral, la doctrina política, el estudio social, la predicación de un partido o de una secta religiosa. [… La novela es] la liza en que combaten todos los días las escuelas filosóficas, los partidos políticos.69 [it is necessary to put aside its (the novel’s) masks/costumes and to look in its depths for the historical fact, the study about morals, the political doctrine, the social study, the preaching of a political party or religious sect. (… The novel is) the arena where philosophical schools, political parties struggle every day.]

Save for Altamirano’s use of words like ‘artificio’ [artifice] and ‘disfraces’ [masks] in the previous quotes (to refer to aspects of the novel), he could very well have been describing the rational argumentation of the Habermasian public sphere, a sphere in which a consensus based on truth is sought and, ideally, achieved.70 The significance of this literary ‘surplus’, however, does not go unnoticed in the poetics of the novel of the period. While at the beginning of the century this surplus is associated with what Lizardi, following Horace, considers a writer’s duties, namely, ‘enseñar al lector y entretenerlo’ [to teach and entertain the reader]; a few decades later it will be related much more to the seduction and desire generated by novels.71 The corrupting potential of novels is often associated with their ‘frivolous’ nature, as when they are considered mere forms of fiction and 68 Blest Gana, ‘Literatura chilena’, 55. 69 Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, 39, 48; my emphasis. 70 Habermas is aware of the class implications of ‘public opinion’; nevertheless, he insists on the need for those opinions to be ‘congruent with the general interest’, a characteristic that emerges from a ‘critical debate of the public’ that has to be, in his opinion, ‘rational’. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 87. Blest Gana also believes that the novel contains the ‘indagación de la verdad filosófica’ [exploration of philosophical truth]. Blest Gana, ‘Literatura chilena: algunas consideraciones sobre ella’, 51. 71 Fernández de Lizardi, ‘Apología de El Periquillo Sarniento’, 21.

252

Fernando Unzueta

entertainment, in contrast to the gravity of ‘serious’ writing, such as history, science and religious or moral treatises. Juan Poblete has shown that in an increasingly bourgeois society that nevertheless retained distinctive conservative attitudes toward cultural issues, the leisurely, ‘easy’ and feminine reading of novels is perceived negatively when contrasted with the more ‘difficult’ – and therefore more ‘productive’ and ‘masculine’ – reading of texts about traditionally sanctioned topics. While the frivolity of novels is an issue, more commonly novels, and sentimental novels in particular, are simply criticized for their excessive and uncontrolled sensuality. According to Altamirano, love stories can ‘seduce’ readers and lead their ‘souls’ astray unless they temper their ‘passion’ with morality.72 The non-rational aspects of the novels, associated with the ‘sentimientos del corazón’ [feelings of the heart], much more than Lizardi’s moralistic (but rational) digressions, have the ambivalent capacity to modify the costumbres, behaviours and subjectivities of the readers.73 In spite of the banality of this type of sensibility from a contemporary perspective, a novel’s morality, or lack of it, is a basic evaluative criteria in the poetics of the period, in Latin America as in the United States.74 Moreover, many novels are structured precisely in terms of a contrast and struggle between the vices and virtues of different characters. In nineteenth-century Latin American writings about the novel, it is repeatedly stated that the novel, in order to contribute to the processes of subject or citizen formation and national foundation, should represent vices and virtues, punishing the first and rewarding the second.75 In Blest Gana’s words, they have to: 72 Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, 53–4. 73 The role of strictly rational argumentation in the public sphere may have been overstated. Lempérière notes that Ancient Regime newspapers in Spain and the Americas appealed more to ‘la utilidad y la moral’ [utility and morality] than to reason (70–1); and by the mid-nineteenth century, sentimentality has taken a central role in the public sphere. Lempérière, ‘República y publicidad a finales del Antiguo Régimen (Nueva España)’, 70–1. 74 See Nina Baym, Novels, Readers and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 75 E.g., Bartolomé Mitre, ‘Prólogo a Soledad’, in Norma Klahn and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos 1 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1847]

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

253

‘combatir los vicios […] y encomiar […] las virtudes’ [attack vices (…) and flatter (…) virtues].76 Or, as Altamirano puts it: ‘nosotros deseamos la moral ante todo, porque fuera de ella nada vemos útil’ [we want morality above all, because outside morality we do not see anything useful].77 The only (partial) exception to this Manichean axiological thinking before the end of the century that I am aware of is an essay entitled ‘Las novelas’ (1856) in which Sarmiento mocks the exaggerated moralistic tone of many of his fellow intellectuals: ‘Los que hablan de corrupción por la novela, no saben lo que dicen, por más que sean muchos los que lo digan y vociferen’ [Those who speak of the corrupting influence of the novel do not know what they are saying, even though they may be many and they may shout it].78 He does, however, agree with the others about the novel’s ‘usefulness’, its didactic and progressive effects (‘[las] novelas han popularizado la lectura que generaliza la civilización’ [novels have popularized reading, which makes civilization universal]),79 but he does so in terms that point directly to the literary surplus of the novel to which Altamirano alluded: ‘El principal argumento contra las novelas es que exaltan las pasiones. La verdad es que educan la facultad de sentir, por lo general embotada’ [The main argument against novels is that they exalt passions. The truth is that they educate the faculty of the senses, generally numbed].80 In other words, Sarmiento proposes that novels educate or partake in the constitution of subjects, precisely on account of their melodramatic ‘excesses’ (see Brooks) and not in spite of them.

1991), 43–5; Matto de Turner and Clorinda Matto de Turner, ‘Proemio a Aves sin nido’, in Klahn and Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos 1, 43–5; Matto de Turner and Clorinda Matto de Turner, ‘Proemio a Aves sin nido’, in Klahn and Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos 1, 161–2. 76 Blest Gana, ‘Literatura chilena: algunas consideraciones sobre ella’, 55. 77 Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, 54; my emphasis. 78 Sarmiento, ‘Las novelas’, 24. 79 Ibid., 24. 80 Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, 25.

254

Fernando Unzueta

As part of their foundational projects, nineteenth-century Latin American novels promote bourgeois individualism and insert subjects in family and national structures as if they were the only imaginable modalities of social and political organization. As Habermas perceptively noted, ‘the public sphere in the world of letters’, and sentimental novels in particular, are key ingredients in the constitution of bourgeois subjectivities associated with family intimacy.81 Sentimental novels, in particular, educate, as Sarmiento noted, the subjects’ ‘facultad de sentir’, their ideas, passion and imagination. It is a matter of changing the subjectivity of persons, or, in the language of the period, their ‘character’, ‘hearts’ or ‘spirit’. While many different types of discourses and institutions are concerned with the promotion of buenas costumbres [good manners] and with the oversight of the behaviour of individuals, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, literature in general and the novel in particular are conceived as the ideal medium for the creation and transformation of feelings.82 In the same essay in which Altamirano warns of the dangers of the novels’ abilities to ‘seduce’, he also suggests that ‘los sentimientos del corazón […] fácilmente pueden ser conducidos al bien individual y a la felicidad pública’ [feelings of the heart (…) can easily be directed toward individual good and toward public happiness].83 Indeed, novels deploy a ‘seducción justificada’ [justified seduction] as a means to educate individuals and to promote social values, always under strict codes of morality.84 81 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 159. Corral also alludes to the novel’s role in the constitution of subjectivity. Corral, ‘Hacia una poética hispanoamericana de la novela decimonónica (I): el texto’. 82 Calvo makes a similar argument for poetry. Poetry shapes men’s ‘hearts’ (forma su ‘corazón’), and by reading poetry, men learn to ‘feel’. Moreover, poetry is essential in instilling the patriotic values that move men to action. See M.E. C[alvo], ‘Patria y poesía’, La Colmena Literaria 2 (1874), 1–2. 83 Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, 54. 84 I take the expression ‘seducción justificada’ from Poblete. He also notes similar statements made by Alberdi in his periodical La Moda (1837) and quotes from Garrels’ article (‘El Facundo como folletín’) parts of the prologue to the Chilean newspaper edition (1844–5) of Sue’s Los misterios de París. Poblete, ‘La construción social de la lectura y la novela nacional: el caso chileno’, 94–5.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

255

The key is, as Altamirano would argue, ‘reunir el encanto a la moral’ [to merge enchantment/seduction with morality].85 Not just to bring the novel’s seductive powers under control, as the disciplinary approach to subject construction would suggest, but to use them in their moralizing and nation-building projects. As stated in the Chilean prologue of a Eugène Sue folletín, sentimental novels, these ‘libros exagerados’ [exaggerated books], in their ‘apparent superficiality’, precisely because of their ‘hipérboles’ [hyperboles], ‘forman, sin sentirlo, una conciencia social’ [form, without noticing it, a social conscience].86 Similarly, when Bartolomé Mitre proposes that novels inflict ‘profundas meditaciones o saludables escarmientos’ [profound meditations or healthful punishments],87 he is alluding to two aspects of subject formation. While the ‘escarmientos’ clearly point to a disciplinary dimension, the ‘meditaciones’ or, in broader terms, introspection and selfreflexivity, regularly associated with feelings and passions, attest to the production of deep and frequently contradictory romantic subjectivities. Latin American novels commonly include explicitly disciplinary aspects, but they also show a tendency toward a sentimental type of subject modification. National novels in Latin America then, most of which interlace love stories with patriotic histories and national projects,88 deploy sentimental arguments in the public sphere to promote their foundational projects and ‘public happiness’ or the public good. Transformations in subjectivities, the process of characters becoming (socially contextualized) subjects within the fictional worlds of their novels, have consequences in terms of actions. In marked contrast with the often isolated and solipsistic subjects produced in Europe, in Latin America, the changes in the protagonists as subjects tend to accentuate their roles as historical agents and to contribute to the novels’ foundational projects.

85 Altamirano, Revistas literarias de México, 55. 86 In Garrels, ‘El Facundo como folletín’, 437. 87 Mitre, ‘Prólogo a Soledad’, 43. 88 See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

256

Fernando Unzueta

Many of the characters follow in their behaviour, ideas, imagination and feelings models set by literary or historical figures, or by other types of programmatic texts. Very often the novels contain internal examples of this type of subject formation; that is, they represent characters guiding their lives and being seduced by the ideas proposed in the poetic, political, ideological or aesthetic programs of the authors, or in the narrated lives of other characters or persons. There are countless examples. In Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento the reformed protagonist tells the story of his stray life in terms of the bad models he followed and the virtuous advice he ignored; he also claims to write his story for his children, warning them not to imitate his early experiences. The protagonist of Mitre’s Soledad joins the troops fighting for independence, after hearing about the heroic deeds of other patriots. In Martín Rivas, the narrator insists that doña Francisca and Edelmira act, feel and talk as they do because of their readings of romantic poetry, novels or folletines. Martín himself is perceived as a novel-like hero, and he models his life on the myth or master narrative of the self-made individual. This is also a novel in which several issues related to the public sphere play a central role.

An Exemplary Text: Martín Rivas and the Public Sphere Alberto Blest Gana’s Martín Rivas was published in 1862 with the subtitle Novela de costumbres politico-sociales [Novel of political and social customs/manners]. This subtitle alludes directly to the type of novel Blest Gana thought needed to be written in the country, as described in his already cited essay ‘Literatura chilena’ [Chilena literature], read a year earlier (1861) on the occasion of his incorporation into the University of Chile’s ‘Facultad de Humanidades’ [College of Humanities]. While other literary forms could also contribute to the betterment of society, he argued that the ‘novela de costumbres’ [novel of customs/manners], more than other genres or types of novels, could become ‘verdaderamente nacional’

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

257

[truly national].89 Blest Gana develops or puts into practice the poetics of the novel he expounds in the essay ‘Literatura’ in Martín Rivas, a work considered Chile’s ‘national novel’ as a result of its canonization by critics and literary historians and due to the fact that it became institutionalized as required reading in the school system.90 Martín Rivas was published serially, as a folletín, in the liberal newspaper La Voz de Chile in 1862.91 Blest Gana’s efforts to promote novels of national manners, in this context, were meant to ‘nationalize’ a transnational genre and make it useful for nation-building purposes.92 Part of the appeal of the novel is its broad representation of different social classes in the spaces where they live and interact, including public spaces. Representations of patriotic celebrations, a central element of public life in Latin America, are well integrated into the novel’s plot both in terms of their realistic depiction as public events where the main characters take centre stage in parks and plazas, and as a locus of reflection about how national unity is articulated in these events. The novel tells the story of Martín Rivas, a provincial, young man arriving in Santiago and finding his way in a new world where modern ideas as well as new social and economic practices are clashing with more traditional norms. Through him we are exposed to the habits and ways of socializing of two main groups: an upper-class family, with whom he stays, and their relations; and a lower-middle-class family, with whom he and other (male) members of the upper-classes have some contact in popular and informal gatherings. 89 Blest Gana, ‘Literatura chilena’, 55. 90 Guillermo Araya’s assessment is typical. He notes that critics have ‘unanimously’ considered Blest Gana as ‘el mejor novelista que ha producido Chile hasta hoy’ [the best novelist Chile has produced until now] and that Martín Rivas has been read by all Chileans who have attended school. Guillermo Araya, ‘Introducción’, Alberto Blest Gana, Martín Rivas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), 11–56: 22. 91 Ibid., 38–40. Concha discusses the ideological relations between Martín Rivas and La Voz. Jaime Concha, ‘Prólogo’, in Alberto Blest Gana, Martín Rivas (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977), ix–xl: xxiii–xxiv. 92 See Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 17, 204; Poblete, Literatura chilena del siglo XIX, 19–96.

258

Fernando Unzueta

Edelmira, a sympathetic character of limited economic means, is described in the following terms: ‘es una niña suave y romántica como una heroína de algunas novelas de las que ha leído en folletines de periódicos que la presta un tendero aficionado a las letras’ [she is a soft and romantic young woman, like a heroine of one of those novels she has read in the newspaper’s folletines that she borrows from a shop-owner who likes books].93 Besides supporting the idea that, like other characters, Edelmira sees her life through the lens of romantic literature, this quote highlights the role of newspapers and their wide distribution in society. Rather than buying novels in book form, or her own copies of newspapers, she borrows the folletines from a ‘lettered’ corner-store owner. Later on in the novel, we are again reminded that Edelmira read these folletines ‘avidly’, and that she borrowed them from a family friend.94 Don Dámaso Encina, the head of the upper class family in whose salon a lot of the conversations about literature and politics take place, always asks for and reads the days’ newspapers.95 His political ideas are directly related to the editorials and commentaries of the newspapers he reads. Don Dámaso is liberal and supports the opposition after reading opinion pieces from liberal newspapers, and he becomes conservative and defends the government’s authoritarian tendencies after reading official newspapers.96 The novel goes on to criticize the political frivolity of the members of the economic elite, like don Dámaso, and caricatures their reactions to these editorials. Nevertheless, it also makes it clear that there is a lively political debate about topics relevant to the nation in the different papers, and that these opinion pieces play a role in forming public opinion. The reading of political opinions in newspapers has an echo chamber in the tertulias or social gatherings of the well-to-do. They are further discussed, supported or criticized by the participants of the gatherings in the Encina household. As Juan Poblete has noted, these characters are playing out the Habermasian

93 94 95 96

Blest Gana, Martín Rivas (Madrid: Cátedra, [1862] 1983), 123. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 64, 73, 79, et passim. Ibid., 73, 371.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

259

model of the public sphere by transforming ‘discusiones literarias en políticas y viceversa, en el espacio privilegiado de la sociedad civil: el salon de la casa burguesa’ [literary discussions into political ones and vice-versa, in the privileged space of civil society, the salon of a bourgeois house].97 The rational discussion of ideas, however, is not always the norm. Some members of the elite express rather ‘authoritarian opinions’, often out of political ‘convenience’. For instance, some felt the liberal political opposition should not have its own (opposition) press. The free press, therefore, was not a given, nor a value accepted by all members of society. ‘Public opinion’, they believed, was a stupid idea (‘una majadería’), particularly when those without economic resources (‘sin tener casa, ni hacienda, ni capitales a interés’ [without a house, money or investments]) tried to participate in public conversations.98 Not surprisingly, these conservative voices mock the idea that the poor are ‘citizens like us’; those who are ‘hungry’ or ‘penniless’, they claim, do not deserve to be citizens – at least not active citizens, with full political rights.99 Certain participants in these tertulias do not just want to deny political participation to the poor, they also want to limit the participation of women: ‘Mira, hija, las mujeres no deben hablar de política’ [Look, dear, women should not talk about politics].100 These opinions, however, do not go unchallenged in the novel: Doña Francisca Encina, su mujer, había leído algunos libros y pretendía pensar pos sí sola, violando así los principios sociales de su marido [don Fidel], que miraba todo libro como inútil, cuando no como pernicioso. En su cualidad de letrada, doña Francisca era liberal en política y fomentaba esta tendencia en su hermano [don Dámaso], a quien don Fidel y don Simón no habían aún podido conquistar enteramente para el partido del orden.101

97 Poblete, Literatura chilena del siglo XIX, 87. 98 Blest Gana, Martín Rivas, 89. 99 Ibid., 91. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 89–90.

260

Fernando Unzueta [Doña Francisca Encina, his wife, had read some books and pretended to think by herself, thus violating the social principles of her husband (don Fidel), who considered all books useless, if not pernicious. In her condition as a lettered woman, doña Francisca was liberal in politics and promoted this tendency in her brother (don Dámaso), whom don Fidel and don Simón had not yet been able to entirely persuade to support the party of order.]

Political ideas, whether liberal or conservative (those supporting the party of ‘order’), are communicated – like literature – through books and newspapers, but they also influence individuals as a result of personal discussions that take place in private settings, like salons or bedrooms. Throughout the novel, the written word is embodied orally in people’s opinions. There is a fluid relationship between newspapers, political activities and associations, and private discussions. Besides describing the tertulias of the upper class, Martín Rivas goes into some detail outlining the importance of the Sociedad de la Igualdad [Society for Equality], a mid-century civic and political organization that brought together artisans and intellectuals, and promoted substantial democratic reforms in a rather traditional society. According to the narrator, ‘la Sociedad contaba con más de ochocientos miembros y ponía en discusión graves cuestiones de sociabilidad y de política. Con esto se despertó poco a poco una nueva vida en la inerte población de Santiago, y la política llegó a ser el tópico de todas las conversaciones’ [the Society had more than eight hundred members and discussed serious questions about sociability and politics. With this the inert population of Santiago gradually woke up to a new life, and politics came to be the topic of all conversations].102 The key point here is that the political ideas that take place in this organization transcend its walls and permeate the whole of society according to the novel: they are taken up in Congress, in tertulias, and within families, often dividing them. After the government represses this organization, the level of political debate in civil society increases even more: ‘Con el atentado del 19 contra la Sociedad de la Igualdad, la política ocupaba la atención de todas las tertulias, en las que se sucedían las más acaloradas discusiones’ 102 Ibid., 114.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

261

[With the event of the nineteenth against the Society for Equality, politics occupied the attention of all the tertulias, and the most heated discussions took place in them].103 Ideas and opinions circulate quickly between print (books and newspapers) and different physical spaces (civic associations and private salons or settings). The novel’s main characters join this group and become part of the opposition that fights against the government. They continue to discuss their liberal ideas in a ‘secret society’, after the Sociedad was outlawed,104 and eventually participate in a ‘revolution’ against the established order. This failed revolt is described in press reports that were published the day after in order to track the events.105 It also highlights how the ‘news’ of the ongoing event can spread throughout the city via word-of-mouth communication.106 These oral or traditional communication circuits interact with institutions of the bourgeois public sphere and tend to unite otherwise distinct publics, social classes and political tendencies, and so do rumour and gossip: ‘En nuestra buena capital, toda especie circula con rapidez asombrosa y pasa de boca en boca recorriendo los diversos círculos y jerarquías de nuestra sociedad’ [In our good capital city, every spice/bit of news circulates with amazing speed and moves from mouth to mouth travelling the diverse hierarchies and (social) circles of our society].107 While the novel contrasts two radically different ways of socializing and carrying public conversations, it suggests, perhaps in an effort to symbolically provide an element of national unity in an otherwise highly stratified society, the existence of an oral network of communication encompassing all classes. In sum, Martín Rivas illustrates how strongly Latin American novels of the mid-nineteenth century confirm Habermas’ ideas about the public sphere, with respect to its means of production and distribution as well as its contents. At the same time, the novel also puts into question some of the ideal presuppositions of Habermas’ model. As noted, egalitarian 103 104 105 106 107

Ibid., 150. Ibid., 387. Ibid., 397. Ibid., 398. Ibid., 290.

262

Fernando Unzueta

participation of all in the public sphere is not necessarily the norm, particularly with regard to women and popular sectors of society; discussions and political decisions are not always rational even when they reflect public opinion; rumour and gossip, as well as other traditional forms of communication remain vital components of civic society; and, in a complex and hierarchical society, diverse forms of sociability and different communication networks challenge the notion of the existence of only one public sphere.

Transformations Latin American novels in the nineteenth century represented and embodied public and private spaces, both discursive and symbolic, in and through which subject formation occurs. They also provided a public arena for the discussion of society’s problems and the common good, one that is wider and more open than most alternative forums of the period. Nowadays, other media, using different means, articulate these spaces, and no longer, at least not predominantly so, novels. This last observation has to do with the increasing modernization and institutionalization of literature, mentioned at the beginning of this essay. These phenomena can be illustrated by considering two articles published in the Bolivian periodical press, and by looking at the prologue of a late nineteenth-century novel. The first article, entitled ‘La educación’ (1857), like Blest Gana and Altamirano’s essays, accepts the formative role of literature with regard to the ‘costumbres y hábitos’ [customs/manners and habits] of young people: No hai un principio superior que regle sus movimientos. Desapareciendo las verdades relijiosas ni aun le quedan las mácsimas de la honradez exterior y decencia social. La fuente de su filosofía, de su literatura, de su religion, de su historia, son las novelas.108

108 ‘La educación’, La Lira 2 (8 March 1857), 1–2.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

263

[There is no superior principle ruling their movements. With the disappearance of religious truths they are left even without the maxims of exterior honesty and social decency. Novels are the source of their philosophy, their literature, their religion, their history.]

According to this quote, the novel’s impact on a person’s mind-set, in his or her (partial) configuration as a subject, is particularly significant in the ‘modern’ period of growing secularization and questioning of previously unchanging truths and structures. While some decried the moral risks posed by the power of literature, others celebrated the potential for the expansion of ‘civilization’ that the novel provided. The last decades of the century, however, witnessed a narrowing of the literary field. In this new context, an 1882 article criticizes a novelist’s ‘bad taste’, even though it acknowledges that his work praises ‘virtues’ and condemns ‘vices’.109 The most notable aspect of this essay’s disdain for turning literature into a nation-building morality play is, arguably, the fact that it was published in a family journal entitled El Album del Hogar: Lecturas para la Familia [The Home Album: Readings for the Family].110 Similarly, when José Martí, the Cuban patriot and poet, published a serial novel titled Amistad funesta [Doomed Friendship] (later known simply as Lucía Jerez) in the New York bi-monthly publication El Latino-Americano in 1885, novels no longer seemed to be the ideal medium to promote discussions about important social concerns. He belittles his own work, referring to it as a ‘noveluca’ [mere novel] and ‘inútil’ [useless], written in his spare time to earn a few extra dollars at the behest of an editor not interested in a profound work of fiction, one that could ‘levantar el espíritu público’ [lift the public spirit].111 Martí further notes that the editors believe novels should not include ‘nada serio’ [anything serious] because that would ‘bore the readers’. The genre itself, therefore, has changed and is now associated

109 See Francisco Iraizós, ‘Péres Escrich, o sea la calamidad doméstica’, El Album del Hogar 1/2 (1882), 1–3. 110 It is not coincidental that Iraizós would later on write about modernismo. See his ‘El modernismo en América’, La Revista de Bolivia 1.8 (1898), 118–20. 111 José Martí, ‘Prólogo’, Lucía Jerez (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000 [1885]), 109–10: 110.

264

Fernando Unzueta

with ‘puro cuento’ [pure fiction] and ‘los goces de la creación artística’ [the pleasures of artistic creation]. In its more popular (serial) forms, the novel is no longer part of foundational projects. Modern novels can be ‘profound’ and ‘useful’, but apparently those were not the type of novels solicited for serial publications.112 Literature’s increased autonomy, and the departure from the previously dominant attitudes toward literature, would distance the novel, at least certain types of novels, both from the public sphere and from a literature oriented toward the masses. More specifically, popular novels, as those criticized by Martí, like the new (turn-of-the-century) serial publications, no longer belong to the same discursive space as the canonical modernista or naturalista novels. The division between serious and popular literature has taken shape. Toward the end of the century, many developments contribute to make literature play a less central role in society. These include larger readerships with market-oriented publications, broader social participation by different groups in political discussions, and the greater separation between literature and society that came about with the institutionalization of literature and the overall modernization of society.113 This institutionalization took place through the publication of specialized journals and the differentiation between canonical and popular literature, the professionalization of writers, and the academic incorporation of the field and some of its practitioners. All these factors led to the loss of the social or political aura of literature in a world dominated by mass media and the increased consumption of commodities. The lettered city became much more diverse and democratic, assigning authors and politicians more specialized roles, and thus marginalizing the traditional letrados. These changes can be related to the transformations also perceived by Habermas: with the rise of mass media came the radical decline of the bourgeois public sphere.114 In Latin America, the

112 Ibid, 110. 113 See Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. 114 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 142.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

265

increased institutionalization of literature occurred simultaneously with the rise of mass media and the marginalization of a type of literature that flourished within a public sphere focused on nation building. While broad political participation occurred later on, one can argue that the golden age of the public sphere in Latin America, at least a normative one, where newspapers and literature played an important role, took place between the 1840s and 1870s. The poetics of the novel of this period highlights the genre’s participation in society in terms that parallel Habermas’ ideas about the public sphere. The main difference noted between his concept and the ideals and practices of Latin American national novels is that the latter openly advocate and celebrate their nation-building role. They also question the limits of the public sphere, the existence of (only) one such sphere, and the distinctions between high and popular cultures. More broadly, these novels thrived in the market-oriented culture of newspapers, where authors and politicians were often one and the same, and where the literary and political public spheres coexisted in the same lettered circles. Finally, just as the normative character of the public sphere concept has been highlighted, the ideals and hopes for the novel’s impact in society can be seen as an aspirational project more than a historical reality. Nevertheless, in spite of the limitations of this project, novels tend to have a much stronger and longer-lasting impact than ephemeral newspapers and most other printed materials or forms of communications that were part of the public sphere. National novels like El Periquillo Sarniento, Martín Rivas and many others have become part of their respective country’s cultural and literary history and national heritage. Many are re-visited in the form of theater, radio, TV or film adaptations, and most have become required reading in their nations’ schools. In other words, many of the social ideas, ideals and values contained in these novels continued to be discussed in classrooms and private homes (and occasionally in public forums, by politicians) for decades after their publication, and some of them still help shape Latin America’s public and private spheres today.

266

Fernando Unzueta

Bibliography Achugar, Hugo, ‘Parnasos fundacionales, letra, nación y estado en el siglo XIX’, Revista Iberoamericana 63/178–9 (1997), 13–31. Altamirano, Ignacio M., Revistas literarias de México, in Escritos de literatura y arte. Obras completas XII (Mexico City: SEP, [1868] 1988). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, [1983] 1991). Araya, Guillermo, ‘Introducción’, Alberto Blest Gana, Martín Rivas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), 11–56. Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Baym, Nina, Novels, Readers and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Bello, Andrés, ‘“Bosquejo histórico de la constitución del gobierno de Chile” por don José Victorino Lastarria’, in Temas de historia y geografía. Obras completas de Andrés Bello 23 (Caracas: La Casa de Bello, [1848] 1981), 219–27. Benhabib, Seyla, ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 73–98. Blest Gana, Alberto, ‘Literatura chilena: algunas consideraciones sobre ella’, in Norma Klahn and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1861] 1991), 46–58. , Martín Rivas (Madrid: Cátedra, [1862] 1983). Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). C[alvo], M.E., ‘Patria y poesía’, La Colmena Literaria 2 (1874), 1–2. Caballero, José Agustín, ‘Carta de un amigo sobre las tareas literarias’, in Cintio Vitier, ed., La crítica literaria y estética en el siglo XIX cubano (La Habana: Biblioteca Nacional ‘José Martí’, [1794] 1968), 53–5. Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Chasteen, John Charles, ‘Introduction: Beyond Imagined Communities’, in Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, eds, Beyond Imagined Communities. Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2003), ix–xxv. Concha, Jaime, ‘Prólogo’, Alberto Blest Gana, Martín Rivas (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977), ix–xl.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

267

Cornejo Polar, Antonio, ‘La literatura hispanoamericana del siglo XIX: continuidad y ruptura’, in Beatriz González Stephan et al., comps, Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX. Cultura y sociedad en América Latina (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1995), 11–23. Corral, Wilfrido, ‘Hacia una poética hispanoamericana de la novela decimonónica (I): el texto’, in Beatriz González et al., eds, Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1994), 307–30. ‘La educación’, La Lira 2 (8 March 1857), 1–2. Eley, Geoff, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 289–339. Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, ‘Apología de El Periquillo Sarniento’, in Norma Klahn and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1819] 1991), 15–22. , El Periquillo Sarniento (Mexico City: Porrúa, [1816] 1987). , Don Catrín de la Fachenda (Mexico City: Porrúa, [1832] 1996). Flores, Enrique, ‘El loro de Lizardi. Lectura en voz alta del Periquillo Sarniento’, Literatura Mexicana 3/1 (1992), 7–39. Forment, Carlos A., Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900. Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Garrels, Elizabeth, ‘El Facundo como folletín’, Revista Iberoamericana 54/143 (1988), 419–47. González Stephan, Beatriz, La historiografía literaria del liberalismo hispanoamericano del siglo XIX (La Habana: Ediciones Casa de las Américas, 1987). Guerra, François-Xavier, ‘Forms of Communication, Political Spaces, and Cultural Identities in the Creation of Spanish American Nations’, in Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, eds, Beyond Imagined Communities. Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2003), 3–32. Guerra, François-Xavier and Annick Lempérière, ‘Introducción’, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica. Ambigüedades y problemas. Siglos XVIII-XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), 5–21. , eds, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica. Ambigüedades y problemas. Siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998). Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Henríquez, Camilo, ‘De la influencia de los escritos luminosos sobre la suerte de la humanidad’, in José Promis, ed., Testimonios y documentos de la literatura chilena (1842–1975) (Santiago: Editorial Nascimiento, [1812] 1977), 69–72.

268

Fernando Unzueta

Iraizós, Francisco, ‘Péres Escrich, o sea la calamidad doméstica’, El Album del Hogar 1/2 (1882), 1–3. , ‘El modernismo en América’, La Revista de Bolivia 1.8 (1898), 118–20. Klahn, Norma, and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos I (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991). Lempérière, Annick, ‘República y publicidad a finales del Antiguo Régimen (Nueva España)’, in François-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière, eds, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica. Ambigüedades y problemas. Siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), 54–79. Martí, José, ‘Prólogo’, Lucía Jerez (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000 [1885]), 109–10. Martín-Barbero, Jesús, De los medios a las mediaciones. Comunicación, cultura y hege­ monía (Mexico City: Ediciones G. Gili, 1987). Masiello, Francine, ‘Introducción’, in Francine Masiello, comp., La mujer y el espacio público (Buenos Aires: Feminaria, 1994), 7–19. Matto de Turner, Clorinda, ‘Proemio a Aves sin nido’, in Norma Klahn and Wilfrido H. Corral, comps, Los novelistas como críticos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1889] 1991), 1: 161–2. Miller, Nicola, ‘The Historiography of Nationalism and National Identity in Latin America’, Nations and Nationalism 12/2 (2006), 201–21. Mitre, Bartolomé, ‘Prólogo a Soledad’, in Norma Klahn and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1847] 1991), 1: 43–5. Perales Ojeda, Alicia, Asociaciones literarias mexicanas. Siglo XIX (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1957). Piccato, Pablo, ‘Public Sphere in Latin America: A Map of the Historiography’, Social History 35/2 (2010), 164–92. Poblete, Juan, ‘La construción social de la lectura y la novela nacional: el caso chileno’, Latin American Research Review 34/2 (1999), 75–108. , Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras autoriales (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2003). Rama, Angel, La ciudad letrada (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1984). Ramos, Julio, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. Literatura y política en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). Ryan, Mary P., ‘Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 259–88. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, ‘Nuestro pecado de los folletines’, Obras de D. F. Sarmiento (Buenos Aires: Gobierno Argentino, [1845] 1883–1900), 2: 314–17.

National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere

269

, ‘Las novelas’ in Norma Klahn and Wilfrido H. Corral, eds, Los novelistas como críticos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1856] 1991), 1:23–6. Silva, Renán, ‘Prácticas de lectura, ámbitos privados y formación de un espacio public modern. Nueva Granada a finales del Antiguo Régimen’, in François-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière, eds, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica. Ambigüedades y problemas. Siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), 80–106. Sommer, Doris, Foundational Fictions. The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Unzueta, Fernando, ‘Periódicos e historias literarias’, Estudios 6/11 (1998), 161–78. , ‘Periódicos y formación nacional: Bolivia en sus primeros años’, Latin American Research Review 35/2 (2000), 35–72. , ‘The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Toward a Public Sphere or a Mass Media?’, in Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra Castillo, eds, Latin American Literature and Mass Media (New York and London: Garland/Hispanic Issues, 2001), 21–40. , ‘Soledad o el romance nacional como folletín: proyectos nacionales y relaciones intertextuales’, Revista Iberoamericana 72/214 (2006), 243–54. Uribe-Urán, Víctor M., ‘The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America During the Age of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42/2 (2000), 425–57. Vogeley, Nancy, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001). Wright, Amy, ‘Novels, Newspapers, and Nation. The Beginnings of Serial Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Mexico’, in William G. Acree Jr. and Juan Carlos González Espitia, eds, Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), 59–78.

Ignacio Corona

Gendering the Public Sphere: Literary Journalism by Women in Mexico and Brazil1

I do not deny the important role that biology plays in the makeup of the human being, but I refuse to accept the fact that our glands determine our destiny. — rosario castellanos, ‘Nivel’ The woman is, according to the classics, a mutilated man. — rosario castellanos, Mujer que sabe latín …

Writing around the same period for their countries’ foremost daily newspapers, Rosario Castellanos and Clarice Lispector played a subtle, yet pivotal role in the cultural transformation of the press in Mexico and Brazil, respectively.2 While they had published in a broad range of periodicals since the late 1940s, their journalistic work achieved particular relevance in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By then, they were undisputedly regarded as the leading female authors in their national literary scenes. In spite of resorting to the rhetorical trope of modestia [modesty] and occasionally engaging in self-deprecating humour in their public writing, their intellectual stature exceeded the editorial pages, a predominantly male textual space since the founding of the first newspapers in the region. Both authors solidified 1 2

I thank Lisa Voigt and May Mergenthaler for their useful comments on previous versions of this essay. Rosario Castellanos was born in Mexico City, on May 25, 1925, but raised in Comitán, Chiapas. She died in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 7 August 1974. Clarice Lispector was born in Chechelnyk, Ukraine, on 10 December 1920, and died in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 9 December 1977.

272

Ignacio Corona

their prominence not only by addressing issues and concerns within and outside of the cultural sphere but also by developing personal and professional connections with the political establishment and important cultural institutions dependent on the State. Their articles, short essays and chronicles for Mexico City’s Excélsior and Rio de Janeiro’s Jornal do Brasil, newspapers of national, not only regional circulation, echo some of the international movements for social equality and civil rights taking place at the time, including the women’s liberation movement. In her path-breaking collection of essays on women’s issues and women writers, Mujer que sabe latín …,3 Castellanos considers Lispector one of the best writers in the Portuguese language. However, in their writings, even in the enthusiastic chronicles Castellanos wrote about her travel to Brazil,4 there is no record that they ever met or corresponded with each other. While their literary journalism substantially differs in tone, form and writing style, it is my contention that they were using similar communicative strategies oriented toward what I call the ‘gendering’ of the public sphere in their respective national contexts. An in-depth discussion of such a process implies that the category of gender is assumed not as contingent or accessory, but as structurally constitutive of the public sphere.5 Three premises guide my investigation on how both authors embark on that process of ‘gendering’ publicness: 1) As an essential component of the public sphere, the press is a social institution in which modernity and modernization unfold, and in which the discourse of modernity, applied to social and political organization, is articulated, discussed and performed. 2) Gendering the public sphere through women’s use of print media amounts to a self-conscious modernizing strategy in cultural contexts in which the 3 4 5

This title comes from the old Spanish proverb: ‘La mujer que sabe latín, ni tiene marido, ni tiene buen fin’ [A woman who knows Latin will find neither a husband nor a happy end]. Which Castellanos undertook at a time when Mexican intellectuals refrained from traveling to this South American country as a protest against its military dictatorship. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 421–61: 428.

Gendering the Public Sphere

273

public has long been regarded as a male domain. 3) Gendering involves both active and strategic participation of women and public representation of women’s issues in the press and in print media in general.

Rosario Castellanos and Clarice Lispector as Cultural Mediators and Cultural Destabilizers Castellanos’ and Lispector’s journalistic writings about recent international events or news convey an acute sense of contemporaneity, which is well in line with the Latin American tradition of cultural mediation by artists, diplomats and intellectuals who, since the nineteenth century, chronicled and interpreted events from abroad for their newspaper readers back home. Often, such an interpretation unveils a comparative social critique with a twofold target, such as in Castellanos’ 1965 article for Excélsior ‘Discrimination in the United States and Chiapas’, in which she recognizes that racial discrimination is not only a problem abroad but a domestic one as well.6 At the same time, their literary journalism is inextricably linked to sociological vectors and trends traversing the societies of Latin America’s two most populous countries. The urban-rural population ratio, for instance, was undergoing a radical transformation due to continuous internal migration, which would soon situate Mexico City and São Paulo among the world’s five largest metropolises. In their own life histories, Castellanos and Lispector actually personified this temporal-spatial trajectory, as both had moved from small province towns to bustling metropolises (Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro), a few decades earlier. If such societal changes offered ample opportunities for immediate reflection on the newspaper pages, they also provided a rich and complex background to be transformed into literary material, as in Lispector’s latest fiction. 6

This chronicle was subsequently republished in El uso de la palabra [The Use of the Word] (Mexico City: Excélsior, 1975).

274

Ignacio Corona

Over a three-decade span, these sociological changes inevitably provoked cultural tensions in the social body. These tensions appear to be structurally related to the emergence of new social mores, the destabilization of the traditional private-public divide and the erosion of the dominant value structures in the world’s two largest Catholic societies. What could be regarded as inacceptable public behaviour in small-town Mexico was more tolerated in the cities, as if the private sphere expanded and offered individuals a major degree of self-realization. Clearly, gender issues and the public performance of gender played a significant role in that panorama. This expansion of the private in the post-migratory situation should also be placed in an urban context in which the ubiquitous presence of ‘the public’ as synonymous with the State is more pervasive and hegemonic than in the countryside. Amid this changing cultural scenario, individualism was increasingly seen as colliding with the ideologies that affirmed small communities and patriarchal family units as de facto reproducing the national order. From a historical perspective, this is the period that corresponds to the decline of the so-called Mexican Miracle and the end of the postEstado Novo eras, which had marked the peak of the State-led modernization projects. While the economic policies and models that had driven industrialization and economic growth had not been able to reverse the profound inequalities characteristic of postcolonial societies, their middleclasses had nonetheless grown at unprecedented levels. Representing the ideals of such a modernization, the Mexican middle-class had benefited from economic subsidies, mass public education and, prior to the 1970s, increased rates of employment in the private and public sectors.7 And while middle-class participation in considerably larger domestic consumer markets was conditioned by import substitution policies, especially in the Mexican case, this social class in general was keenly interested in adopting international trends and styles and a cosmopolitan lifestyle. 7

The latter had engrossed a sizable bureaucracy, thanks in part to the significant involvement of the government in the national economy within the so-called mixed regime. For intellectuals like Rosario Castellanos, positions were available in the administration or in state funded institutions, such as the Instituto Nacional Indigenista [National Indigenous Institute].

Gendering the Public Sphere

275

This segment of the population also provided the bulk of the new reading public, which made both authors’ journalistic work germane and timely. Within this segment, female readership increased as well, as manifested in subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, and in the growing number of publications specifically catering to a female readership. These publications included both the successors of those first disseminated throughout the continent toward the end of the nineteenth century and the Spanish editions of North American publications (e.g., the Hearst Magazines). If publication indices of women authors and increasing enrolment of women in higher education during this period can be considered homologous sociological indicators, the female audience was transforming itself into a more participative public. In any event, female readership in quantitative and qualitative terms was, as never before, a force to reckon with in the public sphere. Castellanos and Lispector were keenly aware of this fact. Responsive to their male and female readers’ opinions, they often engaged in both a reactive and a dialogical discourse through their journalistic writing. Moreover, in their own writing the authors implicitly differentiated between contributing to periodicals from a marginal position – as gendered, that is, as public but still private8 – and ‘public writing’ in newspapers of national circulation, whether or not it thematically dealt with private matters, that is, as ‘private but public’. A case in point, Lispector had contributed under several pen names, including Tereza Quadros, Helen Palmer and Ilka Soares, to women’s magazines or similarly focused traditional sections in newspapers and other publications. In fact, the columns that Clarice Lispector wrote for dailies like Comício, Correio da Manhã [Morning Post] and Diário da noite [Evening News], were considered traditionally ‘feminine’, such as the column ‘Só para mulheres’ [Only for Women] in Correio do Povo [People’s Post].9 As I will explain later on, in Lispector’s writing femininity was 8 9

Regardless of whether they wrote in order to receive remuneration, to support a given editorial project ideologically or politically, or to critically engage with the tradition of ‘feminine writing’. Aparecida M. Nunes, Clarice Lispector Jornalista (São Paulo: Editora Senac, 2006), 24–5.

276

Ignacio Corona

being addressed and contested, performed and ironized within a complex communicative strategy to advance a personal reflection on the ways in which women were interpellated, constructed discursively and positioned within the modernization project and the consumer society. However, her column for the Jornal do Brasil, displaying her proper name and printed outside of the newspaper’s gender specific sections, represented an entirely different relationship between gender and authorship. This could also be interpreted as a media correlate of the aforementioned transformation of the private-public divide. In effect, such an authoritative presence of a woman author in the editorial section of newspapers implicitly challenged the traditional conception of this section as yet another male-dominated public space. The media in Brazil and Mexico actually responded faster to the process of ‘gendering’ the reading or viewing public than the two countries’ political establishments. Consequently, in subsequent years more women began to participate in positions of power in media organizations than in public office. Another element relevant to mention from the outset, when discussing a period marked by the geopolitics of the Cold War, is that of the authoritarian regimes in Latin America – the military dictatorship in Brazil and the semi-authoritarian regime in Mexico, where the PRI10 had monopolized political power since 1929, which directly impacted these countries’ media, civil rights and liberties. Since the critical representation of patriarchy and male authority was one of the most remarkable aspects of Castellanos’ and Lispector’s literature and journalism, such a political conjuncture could hardly be ignored – even though someone like Castellanos counted on the support of Excélsior’s exemplary journalistic independence for the period in question. In effect, a patriarchal ideology could not be disentangled from authoritarianism, and in this political context, the latter could be considered an extreme manifestation of the former.11 Strict supervision of the 10 Institutionalized Revolution Party, founded in 1929 as the Party of the Mexican Revolution. 11 Authoritarianism in these two countries was challenged by social and political movements and small-scale rural and urban insurgencies, which in turn intensified the national manifestations of the Dirty War that would ended up engulfing most of

Gendering the Public Sphere

277

media and of public political demonstrations was a crucial element of the governmental strategy for social control. In the Mexican case, journalistic practices of self-censorship unwillingly complemented the surveillance by the Secretary of the Interior, in charge of the security of the State, which included approving the content of media and cultural productions, such as films and broadcasts. Set against this shifting background of uneven or unfinished modernization, the journalistic writings of Castellanos and Lispector can be seen as responding to some of its factors, processes and conditions, at a moment when the media were beginning to become more aware of their own practices of social or gender exclusion. From this perspective, these writings can be interpreted as opposing the ‘exclusionary’ practices of the press that mirror those of the public sphere in general.12 They can also be read as fully participant in the communicative processes of informing and forming public opinion and as challenging gender neutrality, which was supposed to characterize the exchange of information throughout the national public sphere and was idealized as being above social or cultural particularities, but which, in fact, was hiding an actual gender bias.13 The consideration of gender is one of the most often discussed shortcomings or blind spots in Habermas’ conceptualization of the public sphere, which has been examined by Carol Pateman, Joan Landes, Nancy Fraser,

12 13

Latin America during this period. Among intellectuals, it became a pressing and difficult matter to make public a position for or against the ruling regimes. Resistance to public political commitment would become a matter of contention among the local intellectuals, provoking divisions and pitting groups against each other or against particular authors. An example of this on a continental scale was the Heberto Padilla affair in Cuba, which would divide Latin American intellectuals regarding State censorship, the Cuban Revolution and the social role of intellectuals. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 109–42: 113. On occasion, this is textually accomplished by making evident a default masculine reader in the tradition of Hispanic journalistic writing simply by inserting a parenthetical feminine reader, like in Castellanos’ chronicle ‘A Tree Grows in Tel Aviv’: ‘Caro lector (lectora): usted me conoce bien’ [Dear (‘male’) reader (female reader): you know me well]. (usos 236)

278

Ignacio Corona

Seyla Benhabib and many others. In ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, an essay that appeared almost thirty years after the 1962 publication of Der Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit [The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere], Habermas himself recognized, ‘[t]he exclusion of women from this world dominated by men now looks different than it appeared to me at the time’, and ‘the growing feminist literature has sensitized our awareness to the patriarchal character of the public sphere itself.’14 By the same token, in turning to the Latin American context, firstly it is necessary to discuss the conceptual modifications or adjustments that must be made and the historical specificity that must be taken into account in order to do justice to the heuristic power of Habermas’ ‘useful fiction’ (to borrow Hayden White’s term) of an all-inclusive public sphere. And secondly, it is also necessary to examine the link between gender roles in the public sphere and official modernization projects,15 on the one hand, and the actual reality of modernity in the specific cases of Mexico and Brazil that underlies both authors’ literary journalism, on the other. I will examine these two issues in reverse order by discussing first the status of modernity in the aforementioned region in a brief historical perspective, and then by examining how Lispector’s and Castellanos’ respective work inscribes itself into the public sphere by destabilizing specific dominant discursive practices, ‘performing’ gender as a category of analysis and criticizing the supposed gender neutrality of universal concepts and values.

14 15

Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, 427. One example of this linkage between gender and specific tasks for the new nation after the Mexican Revolution is that of early childhood education, often seen as a feminine job. Post-revolutionary governments would praise the dedication of young women to the education of the new generations in the country’s massive literacy campaigns. This is precisely the subject of the classic film ‘Río escondido’ (1948), directed by Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández, in which Mexican film star María Félix personifies a rural teacher, who ended up sacrificing her life to the cause of public education, against the opposition of the local structures of power.

Gendering the Public Sphere

279

Latin American Modernity and the Public Sphere If Latin America was not itself the main object of reflection of Habermas’ well-known essay ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, it might as well have been. As a matter of fact, although the nations that comprise the region were founded upon visions of modernity, Latin America’s history could best be described as what critic Nicola Miller calls ‘a permanent struggle between modernization and resistance to it’.16 This paradox could be explained by ‘the tendency to resist models of modernity imposed from without, but also for an enduring capacity – against all odds – to generate affirmative visions of modernity from within.’17 A striking example of the latter could well be that provided by the turn-of-the-century poet Rubén Darío, for whom Latin America represented nothing less than ‘the future of the world’.18 The Nicaraguan Darío was the leader of the (all-male) modernista movement, hailed as Spanish America’s first literary movement. The modernistas themselves were not exempt from ideological paradoxes either. Having introduced the discourse of cosmopolitanism and literary modernism, and – in full postcolonial fashion – having declared the region’s cultural independence from Spain, they ardently defended the Hispanic cultural legacy in the region after the brief Spanish-American war of 1898, which formally ended Spain’s four centuries-old empire in the Americas. A myriad of other examples of this paradoxical modernity could be found in a region mostly characterized by its strategies of ‘entering and leaving modernity’, in the words of cultural anthropologist Néstor García Canclini.19 In that regard, the key question is, of course, to what extent Habermas’ theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between modernity, capitalism and the public sphere can be transferred to the Latin Nicola Miller, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900–1930 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 13. 19 Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 16

280

Ignacio Corona

American context. Even a cursory examination of the region’s history may question the argument that similar conditions to those of the ideal liberal-bourgeois culture in which the German philosopher located the emergence of the public sphere were ever present. And yet, in the specific conditions of modernity in Latin America, the historic relevance of the concept of the public and, consequently, that of the public sphere, should not simply be considered an exercise in futility.20 The enduring legacies of colonialism, which even up to this day characterize it as the region with the world’s most unequal wealth distribution, and the hierarchical structuring of these societies along socioeconomic and even ethnocultural terms, require a consideration of its historic specificity. In assessing the relevance of the conceptual framework of the public sphere to the Latin American reality, it is first necessary to emphasize the structural connection between modernity and colonialism. A case in point is the very language of social communication, which was seemingly invisible to the formulation of the public sphere concept, even conceding the existence of regional or dialect variations of European languages in the late eighteenth century. In dealing with the public and not with the publics, such a concept is logically predicated on a common language and not on the cultural peculiarities of multilingual societies. Even if several languages are present in conditions of a relative power equilibrium, it is the language of the majority that is the exclusive vehicle for rational discussion and elaboration of societal normative frameworks (i.e., civil codes, laws or constitutions). In the Latin American colonial societies of the period, and even in the sovereign states of today, the relationship between language and the public sphere is hardly a non-issue. In most colonies, the language of the majority is not necessarily the same as the dominant language. Colonial languages – namely Spanish, Portuguese and French as imperial languages imposed on the region – are always the manifestation of power asymmetries and a social imposition of a certain worldview and not a neutral vehicle of communication in the 20 In this regard see Fernando Unzueta’s relevant study on the emergence of the public sphere in the region as inextricably related to the emergence of national literary canons in this same volume. Fernando Unzueta, ‘National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere in Latin America.’

Gendering the Public Sphere

281

public sphere. This is the subject of Castellanos’ article ‘Language as an Instrument of Domination’ published in 1973.21 Beyond a whole host of language-related social and cultural issues, there is a different conceptualization of modernity at stake. In effect, Latin American critics Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo, among others, set the beginning of modernity two centuries earlier than European thinkers usually admit – Habermas among them. This is to remind us that there cannot be a European modernity without its ‘darker side’, that is, colonialism, with its sequel of -isms, such as ethnocentrism, internal racism and Eurocentrism, which so profoundly impacted notions of citizenship and civility and the actual organization of colonial societies. This could be summarized in Mignolo’s famous dictum: ‘there is no modernity without coloniality [and] coloniality is constitutive of modernity.’22 This impact of colonialism has been long-lasting, manifesting itself not only in the political or economic forms of neo-colonialism since the end of the nineteenth century, but also in the contemporary expressions of what Quijano calls the ‘coloniality of power’. 23 With this concept, Quijano alludes to the reproduction of the colonial asymmetries of power and the hegemonic subordination of all epistemologies to Western models of production of knowledge in which the distinction between epistemology and hermeneutics was decisive. Such

21 22 23

Maureen Ahern, ed., A Rosario Castellanos Reader (Austin: University Texas Press, 1988), 250–3. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 43. It is important to note that in this conception of coloniality, the category of gender is not explicitly addressed, which undermines some of its critical and emancipatory potential by ignoring, and inadvertently reproducing, other forms of oppression. In that regard, it has not yet contributed to the analysis of intersectionality. As some feminist critics, such as María Lugones, have observed: ‘[t]he reason to historicize gender formation is that without this history, we keep on centering our analysis on the patriarchy; that is, on a binary, hierarchical, oppressive gender formation that rests on male supremacy without any clear understanding of the mechanisms by which heterosexuality, capitalism and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other.’ María Lugones, ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System’, Hypatia 22/1 (2007), 186–209: 187.

282

Ignacio Corona

a subordination of knowledges was not innocuous, since it involved the subjugation of peoples, or the creation of the conditions for such a process. Clearly, the idea of universality that underlies the notion of modernity annuls the possibility of coexisting alternative modernities and favours a hegemonic and centred modernity. If modernity were subsumed to modernization, the Latin American experience would necessarily be perceived as ‘trailing back following a hegemonic [European] model of universal history’, rather than being merely different to that of Europe or the United States.24 Where may that difference lie? Throughout history, the Latin American cultural scenario has offered alternatives to ‘the boundaries and exclusions of technocratic Western modernity’ in the form of hybridity and heterogeneity.25 The traditional features that comprise the European experience of modernity may or may not be present.26 Few would disagree, for instance, that the processes of state bureaucratization were practically reinvented by several Latin American regimes throughout the twentieth century, but the commitment to ‘the impersonality of the law’ would remain a chimera in most countries up to the present. In that mixed track record, the configuration of the public sphere would have to be examined in national contexts in which open dissent and public challenge were thwarted almost by default and often harshly punished, rather than stimulated by the different political regimes in power, from cacicazgos [chiefdoms] and caudillajes [local political bossism] to dictatorships. The emergence of the Latin American public sphere also faced another legacy of the colonial system, a socio-ethnic pyramid in which access to the public and effective exercise of individual rights and freedoms were granted 24 Nicola Miller, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America, 2. 25 Ibid. 26 Characteristics such as ‘capital formation and the emergence of capitalist relations of production; industrialization and urbanization; the privileging of empirical science and its associated technology as the prime source of knowledge; state bureaucratization; secularization; commitment to the impersonality of the law; the promotion of individualism; the separation of the public and private spheres; and the advent of mass politics’ (ibid., 4).

Gendering the Public Sphere

283

only to a minority of the population. Some instances of public fora and opinion, political clubs or hybrid religious-political clubs, civic organizations, not to mention bulletins and newspapers, that is, some structural conditions of a public sphere existed throughout the nineteenth century, but more frequently than not they were besieged and confronted. The most important fact, however, was not the size of the public sphere – which even Habermas recognized as small in the case of Germany – but the prevailing conditions that limited social mobility and access to education and the printed word for the majority of the population. For instance, the last census carried out before the Mexican Revolution of 1910 revealed that only about 10 per cent of the population in the world’s largest Spanishspeaking country was literate. Clearly, such structural conditions could not represent a fertile ground for free and rational debate and it was almost impossible for a full-fledged public sphere in the classic sense to flourish. If a literate culture is an ideal but not a necessary condition for the emergence of a public sphere, then a vibrant oral multilingual culture at work, in the streets, in spaces of conviviality, in the everyday life of towns and villages in most Latin American societies would constitute the collaborative space for collective deliberation and communicative action, as processes less dependent on formal or institutional channels of communication.27 The aforementioned conditions of oppression and numerous instances of silencing and censorship, even a culture of terror and repression at different junctures, constituted a pernicious historic counterbalance to the freedom presupposed in the male liberal-bourgeois lifestyle. That does not mean, however, that a political culture did not exist, that public opinion on matters of collective interest were not present, or that among the elites and the middle-class there was not a correspondingly small (albeit 27

It seems to me, however, that a literate culture is a cognitive basis that allows political subjects the ability to think through abstract propositions which cannot be adequately substituted for. And yet it can be argued that complex forms of deliberation in oral-based cultures in the past have operated efficiently without the mediation of an abstract-concept ideology, even recurring to a figurative language whose tropes represented a vehicle to merge the rational and the affective-emotional in relation to the socio-political.

284

Ignacio Corona

evidently not representative) public sphere. For the most part of the Latin American nineteenth century, the project of nation-building tended to reproduce many of the features of the colonial system and was laden with a traditionalist culture anchored in a landowning oligarchy operating in alliance with the traditional columns left by the colonial system, the Church and the military.28 When the region as a whole was incorporated into the expanding global capitalist market by the end of that century, mostly as a vast source of raw materials and cheap labour and as growing market for exports, the gains of modernity seemed to be the prerogative of the urban elites and the emerging middle-class. The voices that participated in the public sphere came from these groups, even though they represented a tiny minority. It is necessary to recognize that in the aforementioned social conditions, the ascent of this minority to the realm of the public meant a simultaneous process of repression of other groups, whose voices would be marginal as subalterns to the dominant social and political order. When for all practical purposes only a minority of the population fully benefits and participates in the public sphere, what is representative becomes a thorny issue. In effect, it is possible to talk about the public sphere only when the private – the groups of citizens independent from the State or the economy – becomes public: ‘it is the arena in which civil society informs itself and exchanges ideas and opinions with other social actors “representing” the two remaining realms: those of the State and the economy.’29 The Habermasian conception of the public sphere appears as depending on that movement from the private to the public but on a significant, if not a massive scale. Significant, because it may ideally be able to move the State, ‘civil society generates the public sphere in which different 28

29

With the heir of the Portuguese empire, Dom Pedro I, deciding to remain in Brazil rather than returning to Portugal and claiming the throne, the Brazilian monarchical system differed from its Spanish-speaking neighbors until the country changed the monarchical system without the costly civil wars that plagued the region. Slavko Splichal, ‘Eclipse of “The Public”. From the Public to (Transnational) Public Sphere. Conceptual Shifts in the Twentieth Century’, in Jostein Gripsrud and Hallvard Moe, eds, The Digital Public Sphere: Challenges for Media Policy (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2010), 23–40: 29.

Gendering the Public Sphere

285

social actors express their opinions, while citizens can make the exercise of power by those actors more accountable. Through public discussion and persuasion, civil society influences the regulative forces of the State and corporate institutions.’30 But when the public continues to be private simply because it is the expression and the business of a tiny minority, the healthy paradox of the private becoming public behind the notion of the public sphere does not materialize. In the first decades of the twentieth century, with several capital cities becoming scenarios of an emerging mass culture in Latin America, many more opportunities for public assembly, debate and organization sprang up everywhere, as migrants from Europe and Asia arrived and rural populations moved to the cities. The social question began to be discussed in periodicals by a growing literate class as well as in plazas and in the streets where daily business offered direct contact without the mediating power structures or the isolationism that plagued rural life.31 However, these developments were in many cases eclipsed by the rise of populist regimes turned authoritarian that subjected the public sphere to the State’s monopolistic and discretional practices and a selective use of force over rational communication and consensual agreement that may have characterized more robust democracies and horizontal societies. For the most part, indigenous populations and other groups were not only excluded from the public sphere but more often than not seen as an obstacle to modernization. If their voice was not made heard through State interpreters, Church representatives or sympathetic cultural mediators, it was not part of the national public sphere. In many places, the public sphere might seem like an after-effect or complement to the modernization of society, which included the adoption of European models of reason and at least the possibility of individual liberties in a democratic culture, especially the freedom of expression. It will be important to examine the cases in which – beyond a public sphere crafted in the aforementioned ways – specific historical junctures made possible, for brief

30 Ibid., 31. 31 Miller, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America, 6.

286

Ignacio Corona

periods, the emergence of competing public spheres in different countries and at different times in their postcolonial history.

The Press and the Public Intellectual: A Personal Transformation In Habermas’ theorization, the press appears as one of the fundamental institutions that emancipated the public from the entanglement of the familial and property relations and that ‘challenged the interpretive monopoly of church and the state’.32 It is important to examine the premises of Habermas’ emphasis on the role of the press. Prior to his notion of the public sphere, the conceptualization of the public in political science, journalism and eventually media studies was basically comprised of the ideas printed in the press. Even in the late 1960s, the newspaper was still the materialization of the public: ‘[e]ver since Bentham, first the press and later other media were considered constitutive of the public.’33 It was obviously a mediated public-ness, as ‘the operation of traditional, non-interactive press and broadcast media’ relied on an implicitly representational mode in which the individual voices of the commentators acted as representatives of actually existing currents of public opinion.’34 I see the work of Lispector and Castellanos as two of such public voices influencing their readers’ opinion in the newspaper. While the Latin American press has not been the ideal disinterested space free from political pressures – including state induced self-censorship

Miriam Hansen, ‘Foreword’, in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvii. 33 Splichal, ‘Eclipse of “The Public”’, 31–2. 34 Ibid., 32. 32

Gendering the Public Sphere

287

and economic self-interest – it has nonetheless been crucial to the constitution of a local public sphere. With all of its imperfections, there is no substitute for the rational discourse in the public forum created by diverse forms of print media since the Independence period. And yet, the press is not a substitute for the public sphere in the sense that Negt and Kluge define it: ‘the site where struggles are decided by other means than war.’35 Throughout history, regional newspapers and their forerunners played partisan politics and provided ample evidence of the fact that their framing and manipulation of information amounted to declarations of war. What is undeniable is that the notoriety achieved by intellectuals in the Latin American context could not be explained without the showcase offered by newspapers and the legacy of the ‘lettered city’, a term coined by the Uruguayan critic Angel Rama to refer to the intrinsic relationship between the lettered culture and state power at work in the administration of the colonial system and the very foundation of colonial cities. Because of this association of lettered culture and political power, the figure of the intellectual has come to perform more than a symbolical role in the region. Even today, those who ascend to the status of public intellectuals possess an amount of symbolic capital only comparable to that of high-ranking officials or top politicians with respect to evaluating the res publica. At times, their opinion may have more than an individual value as private citizens to achieve a kind of institutional value. Hence, when in the 1960s the aforementioned premier dailies from Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro extended a journalistic carte blanche to Castellanos and Lispector respectively, what the latter were offered was the possibility of transcending their status as literary figures for a minority. They could become public intellectuals and count among their readership both the public and the private elites. In return, the newspapers obtained the intellectual prestige of enrolling the premier female authors of the time, as recognized by their countries’ literary establishments. A year after Habermas introduced his concept of the public sphere, Castellanos began writing for Excélsior. Subsequently, after teaching in the 35

Hansen, ‘Foreword’, ix.

288

Ignacio Corona

United States,36 she accepted Julio Scherer’s invitation to write again for the newspaper in 1968. This time, Scherer was already the general director of Excélsior and had led it to become one of the world’s best dailies of the period. In a 1972 essay, ‘The Writer as Journalist’, Castellanos recounted the extreme uneasiness [‘pánico’] she had experienced when she had been first invited by Scherer in 1963. Used to writing literature in an intimate dialogue with herself, she did not know how to deal with the process of ‘coming out’ as a (female) writing and speaking subject in the public sphere: ¿Cómo voy a presentarme por primera vez? ¿Pedante? Muy bien, me encantaría serlo y presumir que mis insomnios se deben a que cierto pasaje de Aristóteles… ¿Cuál pasaje? Si me tomo la molestia de buscarlo tengo tan mala pata que seguramente es el único que se considera equívoco. Ni modo. Hasta para hacer el ridículo se necesita preparación especial. ¿Solemne? Oh, no. Ese es el monopolio del estado de ánimo poético. Espontaneidad. Eso nunca falla. Y mi primer artículo fue tan espontáneo que parecía grabado a cincel en una piedra volcánica […] Julio me tuvo paciencia y acabé por agarrar el paso y ahora me siento de lo más cómodo platicando con usted de esto y de aquello y de lo de más allá. Y comentamos los acontecimientos e intercambiamos puntos de vista y, ¿lo ve usted?, somos amigos, antes puntuales ahora intermitentes, pero siempre amigos.37 [How am I going to present myself ? Pedantic? Very well, I would love to be that way and boast that my insomnia is because of a given excerpt by Aristotle… Which excerpt? If I bother to look for it, I have such bad luck that it would undoubtedly the only one considered equivocal. Oh well. Even to make a fool of oneself a special preparation is necessary. Solemn? Oh, no, not that. That is the monopoly of the poetic mood. Spontaneity. That never fails. And my first article was so spontaneous that it seemed to have been chiselled on volcanic rock. […] Julio was patient with me and I finally got the idea. Now, I feel quite at ease conversing with you on this and on that, and on that too. And we comment on the events and exchange our points of view and, do you see? We are friends, constant in the past, now intermittent, but always friends.]38

36 37 38

This hiatus followed her resignation as Director of Information Services at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) in protest against the government manipulated destitution of the university president Dr. Ignacio Chávez. Rosario Castellanos, El uso de la palabra (Mexico City: Excélsior, 1975), 16–17. My translation.

Gendering the Public Sphere

289

Similarly, Lispector wrote about her experience after she accepted the invitation of Jornal do Brasil’s editor-in-Chief, Alberto Dines, and how she gradually overcame her initial hesitation and discomfort, when writing to be read almost immediately afterwards: Quando combinei com o jornal escrever aqui aos sábados, logo em seguida morri de medo. Um amigo que tem voz forte, convincente e carinhosa, praticamente intimou-me a não ter medo. Disse: escreva qualquer coisa que lhe passe pela cabeça, mesmo tolice, porque coisas sérias você já escreveu, e todos os seus leitores hão de entender que sua crônica semanal é um modo honesto de ganhar dinheiro. No entanto, por uma questão de honestidade para com o jornal, que é bom, eu não quis escrever tolices. As que escrevi, e imagino quantas, foi sem perceber.39 [When I agreed with the newspaper to write here on Saturdays, I immediately got very scared. A (male) friend of mine, who has a strong, reassuring and affectionate voice, practically admonished me not to be afraid. He said: write about anything you can think of, even if they are trivialities, because you have already written about serious stuff. And all your readers will understand that your weekly chronicle is an honest way to earn money. However, for a matter of honesty toward the newspaper, which is a good one, I didn’t want to write trivialities. Those that I did write, and I imagine there were many, were unintentional].

Just like Castellanos before her, Lispector ironically relies on the moral support provided by the male authority in her effort to step out into the public space. But in addition to her expressed feelings of modesty and a certain personal inadequacy in transforming herself into a public author, Lispector was also concerned about the chronicle’s peculiar discourse, the key genre of Latin American literary journalism. As Giovanni Pontiero has correctly stated in his introduction to the English translation of Lispector’s chronicles, [t]he general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or weekly columns in the European or US press. Lispector confessed she did not find it easy to adapt to the genre. She inquired: Is the chronicle a story?

39

Clarice Lispector, A descoberta do mundo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 1984), 113.

290

Ignacio Corona A conversation? The revelation of one’s thoughts? She questioned the wisdom of tackling a genre which to some extent was alien to her introspective nature.40

Once again, this transition from the private to the public sphere was experienced in very personal and emotional terms: a journey from fear to comfort. That is why in order to understand her contribution as well as Castellanos’ in advancing the gendering of the press, it is necessary to pay attention once more to the mediating role of newspapers at the time as well as to the two authors’ approach to certain themes, such as the plight of women in society and, more importantly, to the discursive performance of their own subjectivity, as we will see in the next section. Throughout their decades of journalistic writing, but more recurrently since the early 1960’s, Castellanos and Lispector made evident their realization that their nation’s modernization project not only implied a material renewal, the revamping of economic structures, political goals of democratization and social mobility, and visions of a grandiose national future.41 Through their depiction of women’s struggles for recognition, both establish a reciprocal relationship between their countries’ modernization and the struggle for gender equality. If in the case of Mexico, the most recent constitution (1917), written during the decade-long Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, had reaffirmed the notions of gender equality and included progressive legislation for the improvement of women’s lives, a gap between the law and the actual practice remained embedded in traditionalism, particularly in the countryside. In Mexico, women’s suffrage, for instance, was only granted in 1953, while in Brazil, it had already been established in 1932. In this context, Castellanos’ master’s thesis in philosophy, ‘Sobre cultura femenina’ [On Feminine Culture] (1950), in which she powerfully

40 Giovanni Pontiero, ‘Preface’, in Clarice Lispector, Selected Crônicas, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: New Directions, 1992), vii–x: vii. 41 For both countries, the discourse of modernity imposed by the ruling elites was linked to a certain mythology of the past as well as to a national invention of the future. Even Brazil’s adopted motto as ‘the country of the future’, from Stefan Zweig’s book Brasilien, ein Land der Zukunft (1941), is frequently repeated in the media, up to this day.

Gendering the Public Sphere

291

argues in favour of the intellectual rights of women (not unlike Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe a year earlier), constitutes a timely document whose ideal public would be the Congress of the Union much more than her university committee. The gradual revelation of the inner workings of patriarchy that had been kept private since the modern separation of the two spheres of social life was the most important goal in Castellanos’ and Lispector’s roles as public intellectuals. Through their essays, chronicles and articles, coincidentally both published on Saturdays, Castellanos and Lispector were exploring the roots and the modern separation of the two realms of social life. Indeed the repression of women’s voices as gendered occurred simultaneously with the constitution of the public sphere in Latin America and pretty much everywhere else. That is why Habermas himself spoke of structural conditions in his review of the concept in his ‘Further Reflections…’ essay. Particularly in their chronicle writing, Castellanos and Lispector operated within the genre’s typical discursive structure by weaving reflections into their narrative of seemingly mundane or unimportant events. In her column of November 18, 1967, entitled ‘Um encontro perfeito’ [A perfect encounter], Lispector recounts how a pleasant conversation she was having with a female friend, a painter and art critic from São Paulo, had to be abruptly interrupted by her friend’s urgency to return home, on the request of her husband Antunes who was going to ‘ficar furioso’ [get furious]. Lispector describes how at that moment their conversation took a sudden thematic turn: ‘Falamos então no problema de ser dona-de-casa, exatamente no momento em que se está em pesquisa em matéria de arte. Como conciliar? Mas mulher termina conciliando, é o jeito.’ [We talked then about the problem of being a housewife, right at the moment in which we were inquiring about art. How to reconcile one thing with the other? But women end up reconciling, that’s our way!]42 While Lispector thematically reveals patriarchal ideology at work in the most private spaces of socialization, far from an

42 Lispector, A descoberta do mundo, 46.

292

Ignacio Corona

expression of disgruntlement, the passage on the surface does not convey more than a certain resignation.43 By contrast, some of Castellanos’ chronicles and essays could be interpreted as displaying a more aggressive stance and sometimes as having a pedagogic intention, hidden under a critical and satirical cover: You, madam, self-sacrificing little Mexican woman, or you, self-sacrificing little Mexican woman on the road to emancipation: what have you done in the last few months on your behalf ? I can imagine the obvious answer: you have reviewed Simone de Beauvoir’s now classic text, either to disagree or support your own arguments or, plainly and simply, to become informed. You have kept abreast of the books that are published, one after the other, in the United States: Betty Friedan’s exhaustive descriptions, Kate Millet’s aggressiveness, and Germaine Greer’s lucid scholarship. Of course you closely follow the events that document the existence of Women’s Lib. Of course you pretend not to understand when you learned about the symbolic act of burning underwear, because this lent itself to any number of good jokes. You held onto your own, vaguely recalling the Spaniard’s cry under the reign of Ferdinand the VII: ‘Long live chains!’ and it never occurred to you that it applied in the least to the situation that concerns us now.44

Castellanos’ direct interpellation of the female reader, with her irreverent binary classification, is followed by an implicit distinction between gathering information and reflection – or self-reflection – that concerns every type of reader. Originally published in Excélsior on July 20, 1972, the chronicle goes on to analyse a curious case of opposition to Women’s Lib in Japan (Women’s Love Movement), presenting it with a parenthetical advice to the reader: ‘(Sometimes it is a good idea to step into a fun house and see our reflections in the distorted mirrors).’45 This chronicle provides a good example of the arsenal of literary and rhetorical strategies used by Castellanos in her self-imposed duty of

43 It could be argued that Lispector’s fictional narrative offers a greater potential for subverting and destabilizing the societal arrangements of such an ideology than her literary journalism, which is defined by implicit ‘public’ limits. 44 Ahern, A Rosario Castellanos Reader, 264. 45 Ibid., 266.

Gendering the Public Sphere

293

raising awareness through the established channels of social communication traversing and composing the public sphere. For her and for Lispector, as self-conscious public intellectuals, public discourse mattered. Amid an escalade of confrontations between the students and the police force in Mexico City, and roughly two months prior to the fateful afternoon in which the Mexican army opened fire on hundreds of students at a peaceful rally at the Tlatelolco Plaza, on 31 August 1968, Castellanos had written in her weekly column an article entitled ‘Función del diálogo: catarsis y esclarecimiento’ [Function of the Dialogue: Catharsis and Elucidation] on 31 August 1968. In a heartfelt call for a peaceful resolution of the conflict, she approaches the role of public dialogue in solving social or political differences from a humanistic perspective: ‘as soon as a fact is formulated in words it is susceptible of being recognized, understood, shared, assimilated […]; only in that way can life remain at a human level in which violence is defeated by reason.’46 While the events that culminated in the massacre and the subsequent witch-hunt of the student movement participants and supporters indicate that the dialogue that Castellanos demanded from both the students and the government did not happen, her public call from the pages of the newspaper remains as a testament of her faith in the role of public discourse. Both Castellanos and Lispector were fully optimistic about the modernizing role played by the press in informing and forming public opinion. Logically, the public had a role in determining the public sphere – as this sphere is but the expression of groups and individuals. Since the daily press is an essential element for the constitution of a public forum, the absence of the voices of women constitutes, in turn, a roadblock to modernity. Lispector confessed that when she started to write for the regional newspaper A Noite [The Evening] in the 1940s, she was the only woman doing so.47 Seen from this perspective, ‘gendering’ the press and, by extension, the public sphere was a ‘corrective mechanism’

46 Rosario Castellanos, Mujer de palabras, 2 vols (Mexico City: Conaculta, 2003), vol. II, 161–4. 47 Nunes, Clarice Lispector Jornalista (São Paulo: Editora Senac, 2006), 64.

294

Ignacio Corona

that would reform rather than revolutionize or provoke a radical rupture with the official project of modernization. Indeed, her journalistic work is not iconoclastic or even enunciated from a subversive position. It is a selfreflexive and corrective ‘device’ to be incorporated into the modernizing ideals of the government and the country’s elites. Neither Lispector nor Castellanos formulate public policy anywhere in their non-fictional writing; they leave that to the political establishment. And yet, they assume a consistent position regarding the fact that only through the promotion of women’s rights and gender equality their societies could be considered to be on a path toward true modernization. In Castellanos’ case, this position encompasses her concern for the plight of Mexico’s indigenous communities, left practically voiceless in the national public sphere. In fact, she collaborated with the modernizing project of the post-revolutionary regime to promote the incorporation and advancement of the indigenous populations through the aforementioned National Indigenous Institute. By belonging to the PRI political behemoth, she performed several political duties that have been extensively documented by her biographers.48 Her critique of the unfinished project of Mexican modernization was thought of as a corrective, not as driven by visions of an alternative modernity or even the formation of counter publics. This may help to explain her paradoxically uneasy relationship with militant feminism, which also resembles Lispector’s ironical stance regarding feminist discourse. Castellanos’ critique of the patriarchal order and the male-dominated public sphere was nonetheless in agreement with the ideals of communicative reason – more specifically moral-practical reason – as well as in favour of women’s inclusion in the public sphere. This critique included a call for the rewriting of intellectual histories, for wider access to public education and for socio-economic progress toward a modern and cosmopolitan culture that could be understood as being both universal and Mexican. In all of these counts, her understanding of modernization coincided with the official one, conceived within nationalist parameters.

48 She was the Mexican ambassador to Israel until her untimely death in Tel Aviv in 1974 as a result of a domestic accident.

Gendering the Public Sphere

295

Lispector, for her part, was concerned with the representation and empowerment of constituencies (especially women and migrants) hitherto excluded from public and political decision-making, but she was not quite interested in advancing a notion of counter publics, despite her literary critique of the hegemonic characterization of the public sphere as grounded in a gender-blind society. As the travelling wife of a Brazilian diplomat for almost two decades and therefore directly supported by the government, the Ukrainian-born Lispector might not have been in an ideal position or politically inclined to do so. Her sense of social advocacy was rather discretely inserted into her fictional narrative, amidst her existentialist, philosophical and properly artistic concerns. Likewise, in spite of her profound pride of her Jewish roots, she completely endorsed the official grand narrative of cultural and ethnic mestizaje, which in Brazil, like in Mexico after the 1910 Revolution, was seen as a counter-colonial strategy, conveying notions of ethnic and even social class harmony.

Performing Subjectivity in the Public Sphere For all of their shared views and intellectual positions, Castellanos’ and Lispector’s writings could not be more different. The subtle, ambiguous, experimental, fragmentary, dense and subjectivist literary style of the latter contrasts with the former’s more straightforward and incisive prose that delves into mundane affairs and traditional humanistic discourse, often tinged with colloquialism, irony and sarcasm. For this reason, Castellanos’ skill at producing a witty, gender-conscious discourse was interpreted as pertaining to a constant gender warfare, of which the epigraphs for this chapter could be considered representative. When examining their literary journalism, more than their style per se, it is important to consider Castellanos’ and Lispector’s contributions to the formation of a social imaginary in their respective national contexts, their critique of their countries’ problematic

296

Ignacio Corona

paths to modernization and, last but not least, their performance of subjectivity in the public sphere. To better understand the latter, I will return to the concept of experience introduced by Negt and Kluge in their classic Public Sphere and Experience (1972), which describes the dialectic between the bourgeois and the proletarian public sphere. Negt and Kluge were the first ones to propose a theoretical alternative to some of the perceived shortcomings of Habermas’ concept of the public sphere. For them, ‘the interdependent relationship between that which is private and the public sphere also applies to the way in which language, modes of social intercourse, and the public context come into being socially and publicly.’49 Such a proposition cannot be made without implying the totality of the subjective experience, which invariably entails both rational – the focus of the Habermasian model – and irrational or emotional aspects. Emotions infuse social or intersubjective communication, as they are present in the mere act of decoding oral or written messages. To that extent, an ‘emotional politics’, underlying communication, is always present in the public sphere. If the unavoidably unstable horizon of emotional or affective politics permeates the public sphere, can it be an integral part of the public sphere as a master organizer of collective experience? Considering how the politics of fear, for instance, permeate social communication and the public sphere as a whole at any given moment, producing a multiplicity of manifestations – panic in the stock market, State repression against specific groups, violent upheavals or individual acts of violence, etc. – one may wonder, like many discourse analysts do, whether it is actually possible to disentangle communicative reason from both the unavoidable subjectivity of people’s points of view and the baggage of contextual or lived individual or collective histories that constantly feed social communication and public opinion. This is indeed one of the most complex aspects of the public sphere and its supposed

49 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel and Assenka Oksiloff, foreword Miriam Hansen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 4.

Gendering the Public Sphere

297

rational and communicative discourse: its relationship to the subjective and emotional aspects of social interaction. In reading the literary journalism of Castellanos and Lispector informed by these concerns, the question is how the experience of the public sphere organizes subjective experience, and how both experiences relate to each other. What Castellanos and Lispector contribute to the modern discourse of social communication is the possibility of performing subjectivity in a medium – the modern press – founded upon ideals of rationality and objectivity and subject to strict rules and regulations. At times, such a performance may present itself as a mere affirmation of the sheer power of ‘writing in public’ by means of texts as intriguing as ‘Yes’, which merely consists of an unframed dialogue: I told a [female] friend: – Life always asked too much from me. She said: – But remember that you also asked too much from life. Yes.50

This verbal exchange was the extent of Lispector’s column for Jornal do Brasil on Saturday 21 October 1967. ‘Yes’ was written in what Roland Barthes would call a ‘writerly’ fashion. The text openly defies notions of closure, demanding from the readers an active construction of meaning. Clearly, through the ambiguity of the meaning and genre of her work, Lispector also explored the limits of expression and of authority over her writing. At other times, that subjectivity finds itself within a matrix of (private) historicity in which the writer’s sense of her Self – and that of the Others – is confronted with the limits of communication and the issues of (public) subalternity, objectification and power, which so poignantly would appear in her last novel A hora da estrela [The Hour of the Star], published posthumously in 1977. Her chronicle ‘A mineira calada’ [The Quiet Girl from Minas (Gerais)] from 25 November 1967 narrates an encounter indirectly made possible by Brazil’s unequal economic development. Lispector begins 50 Lispector, Selected Crônicas, 39.

298

Ignacio Corona

by describing Aninha, a rural immigrant who was a domestic employee at her house in Rio. The author-narrator (the chronicler) focuses on her extremely introverted personality and confides to the reader that she even thought of giving her the nickname ‘Aparecida’: ‘E que ela é uma aparição muda’ [It’s because she is like a mute ghostly apparition]. One morning, Lispector was embroidering in one corner of her living room, while Aninha was cleaning in the other. Out of the blue, this supposedly speechless and uneducated young woman asked the famous author in a low tone of voice: ‘A senhora escreve livros?’ [Does the lady write books?].51 Taken by surprise at the unexpected question, the author-narrator (the self of the chronicle) responds in the affirmative. Then, she describes how the young woman, without stopping what she was doing, asked her if she could borrow one of her books. Lispector said that she [Aninha] may not like her books because they were difficult. In an even lower tone of voice that indicated resignation, the woman only dared to add: ‘I like complicated things. I don’t like sweetened things.’52 While the author-narrator seemingly fails to understand the cultural significance of this unexpected attempt at communication by someone from a much lower social status, a subaltern in Gayatri C. Spivak’s terms, the chronicle clearly succeeds in placing the exchange at the private-public divide and in representing the boundaries of subjectivity, language and communication, or lack thereof. This brief exchange also highlights the importance of who is speaking and who has the possibility of performing her (or his) subjectivity in the public sphere. Castellanos, for her part, even in her position as the Mexican ambassador to Israel, wrote to the readers of Excélsior about her domestic arrangements abroad, the education of her young son Gabriel and about how her indigenous maid of many years one day decided, in full use of her sovereign will, to resign in order to finally travel home with her savings and take care of her Náhuatl-speaking father, back in Mexico.

51 52

Ibid., 47–8. Ibid., 48.

Gendering the Public Sphere

299

Lispector’s and Castellanos’ reflections on world affairs and on culture in their literary journalism systematically alternate with narrative disclosures of their own private lives. The referential gives way to the self-referential, and their subjectivity oscillates back and forth in a kind of double writing process. Since French theorists such as Èmile Benveniste, Jacques Lacan and others called attention to the notion of ‘subject of enunciation’, it may not be enough to imagine an abstract and impartial, rational speaking subject. As Linda Kintz, commenting on the work of Nancy Fraser, notes, ‘we can read the historical specificity in the use of words and symbols marked by the way the subject of enunciation was born into language, emerged into subjectivity, was subjected.’53 She contests the view that power structures can be concealed by apparently neutral, inclusive notions of the public. Castellanos’ and Lispector’s journalistic performance of female subjectivity, their gendered points of view and open discussion of women’s issues, similarly point to the asymmetries and hierarchies that characterize the public sphere and thereby, they subtly transform this sphere, as it is created by the press. The recognition of the two authors’ contributions only increased with their passing, and they received numerous posthumous honours in their respective countries. Castellanos, for instance, became the only woman writer to have been buried in Mexico’s Rotunda of Illustrious Men – a fact that she would undoubtedly have found ironic. The country’s most laureate woman writer today, Elena Poniatowska, positions Castellanos in a unique place in women’s history in the country. ‘Before her, not one but Sor Juana […] truly devoted herself to her vocation’, Poniatowska writes in reference to the proto-feminist nun and major poet of seventeenth-century Mexico, then known as ‘New Spain’.54 While renowned in her time for her literary and artistic gifts, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’ defence of the intellectual rights of women is the most important precedent of the political and cultural struggle of Latin American feminists

Linda Kintz, The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 237. Italics in the original. 54 Myralyn F. Allgood, ed., trans., Another Way To Be: Selected Works of Rosario Castellanos (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1990), xxxiv. 53

300

Ignacio Corona

throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. Castellanos’ intertextual connections with Sor Juana suggest a continuity of social struggles that traverses Mexican modernity. With regard to Lispector, no other Latin American woman author has attracted the same degree of critical attention. She is considered the best Brazilian author since Machado de Assis, the founder of modern Brazilian literature in the late nineteenth century, and as the best twentiethcentury Jewish writer after Franz Kafka. Her literary journalism, like that of Castellanos, paved the way for women’s self-expression in public and for the massive presence of women in the media in the last decades. In fact, changing media demographics in the region, as independently reported by Isabel Fraga and Tania Lara, confirm retrospectively for both authors, at least in the sense of achieving a more balanced gender representation in the media, their belief in their respective countries’ paths to modernization. Fraga goes as far as describing the phenomenon as ‘the feminization of the profession [journalism]’.55 In contrast to the time when Lispector was the only woman in the editorial room of a provincial newspaper, Fraga reveals that the average Brazilian journalist is a woman, white, college educated with a major in journalism and not affiliated with unions, non-governmental organizations or political parties. This is, generally speaking, the profile of the country’s journalists, according to research released by the National Federation of Journalists (FENAJ in Portuguese) and the Post-Graduate Political Sociology Program at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC in Portuguese). On her part, Lara confirms this trend by reporting that nowadays most of the news reports and the best investigative reporting and journalism in Mexico are being done by women.56 Isabel Fraga, ‘Quém é o jornalista brasileiro? Perfil da profissão no país’, Journalism in the Americas Blog (8 April 2013), accessed 5 July 2013. 56 Tania Lara’s report on the state of investigative journalism also suggests that there is an unprecedented gendering of this key sector of the public sphere in Mexico. Tania Lara, ‘Women at the Forefront of Investigative Journalism in Mexico’, Journalism in the Americas Blog (27 June 2013), accessed 5 July 2013.

302

Ignacio Corona

Bonifaz, Oscar, Remembering Rosario. A Personal Glimpse into the Life and Works of Rosario Castellanos, trans. Myralyn F. Allgood (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1990). Butsch, Richard, ‘Audiences and Publics, Media and Public Spheres’, in Virginia Nightingale, ed., The Handbook of Media Audiences (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011). Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992). Castellanos, Rosario, El uso de la palabra (Mexico City: Excélsior, 1975). , Mujer de palabras, 2 vols (Mexico City: Conaculta, 2003). Fraga, Isabel, ‘Quém é o jornalista brasileiro? Perfil da profissão no país’, Journalism in the Americas Blog 8 April 2013, accessed 5 July 2013. Fraser, Nancy, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 109–42. García Canclini, Néstor, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 421–61. , ‘Modernidad: Un proyecto incompleto’, in Nicolás Casullo, ed., El debate modernidad-posmodernidad (Buenos Aires: Puntosur Editores, 1989), 131–54. Hansen, Miriam, ‘Foreword’, in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix–xli. Kintz, Linda, The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). Landes, Joan, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Lara, Tania, ‘Women at the Forefront of Investigative Journalism in Mexico’, Journalism in the Americas Blog, posted 27 June 2013, accessed 5 July 2013. Lispector, Clarice, A descoberta do mundo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 1984). , Selected Crônicas, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: New Directions, 1992). , Entrevistas (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 2007).

Gendering the Public Sphere

303

Livingstone, Sonia, ‘On the Relation Between Audiences and Publics’, in Sonia Livingstone, ed., Audiences and Publics:When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 17–42. Lugones, María, ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System’, Hypatia 22/1 (2007), 186–209. McGuigan, Jim, ‘The Cultural Public Sphere’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 8/4 (2005), 427–43. Mignolo, Walter, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). , ‘Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking’, Cultural Studies 21/2–3 (2007), 155–67. Miller, Nicola, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America. Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900–1930 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel and Assenka Oksiloff, foreword Miriam Hansen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Nolasco, Edgar C., Clarice Lispector: nas entrelinhas da escritura (São Paulo: AnnaBlume, 2006). Nunes, Aparecida M., Clarice Lispector Jornalista (São Paulo: Editora Senac, 2006). Pontiero, Giovanni, ‘Preface’, in Clarice Lispector, Selected Crônicas, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: New Directions, 1992), vii–x. Quijano, Aníbal, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification’, in Mabel Moraña et. al., eds, Coloniality at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 181–224. Rama, Angel, La ciudad letrada (Hannover, NH: Ediciones del norte, 1984). Rodriguez, Richard, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam Books, 2004). Spivak, Gayatry C., ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. Splichal, Slavko, ‘Eclipse of “The Public”. From the Public to (Transnational) Public Sphere. Conceptual Shifts in the Twentieth Century’, in Jostein Gripsrud and Hallvard Moe, eds, The Digital Public Sphere. Challenges for Media Policy (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2010), 23–40. White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

Oded Nir

Totalizing Imaginaries: Collectivity and Utopia in Modern Hebrew Fiction from Altneuland to Neuland

The dependence of the nation-state on the emergence of a national imaginary, or on projects of ideological construction, has been thoroughly documented and studied. Perhaps the most well known of these studies is Imagined Communities (1983) by Benedict Anderson, who views print capitalism as the main protagonist of the dramatic appearance of a properly national imaginary. In this new imaginary, individuals who have no direct social relation (and who often have very little in common empirically) nonetheless imagine one another as equal members of the same collective entity.1 These projects of ideological construction offer us a glimpse into a specific relation between what Marxists call the social and economic infrastructure and the political, legal and cultural superstructures: they tie together, in concrete ways, developments in productive powers and the emergence of capitalist society, on the one hand, with imaginary constructions, on the other. It is precisely this view of the nation-state that provides the basis for the wave of critiques of national ideology in the 1980s and 1990s – which, broadly speaking, see its construction as enacting a suppression of difference. In the Israeli context, which we will address further below, it is the emergence (not devoid of struggle) of the so-called New Historians in the late 1980s – Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Gershon Shafir and others – that clears

1

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

306

Oded Nir

the way for postcolonial critique in the Israeli/Palestinian context.2 Even if not strictly committed to the postcolonial theoretical discourse, the New Historians’ writing aimed at exposing the oppressive truth hidden behind Israeli national ideology, particularly in relation to the wrongs committed against Palestinians by the Zionist project (in collusion with the British mandate over Palestine) and later by the state of Israel. Whether cast as phallocentric, ethnocentric or teleological, the different projects through which national ideology is constructed and maintained are seen in these critiques to have relegated certain subjectivities to subordinate positions in the imagined hierarchy of the national subject, if not excluded them altogether from the national project. The validity of these critiques notwithstanding, what becomes unthinkable within them is the process of ideological construction itself, or the attempt to re-imagine social relations, material conditions and their historical trajectory in order to achieve a social goal. This unthinkable origination of the current situation and prospect for a different future includes these critiques’ own historical moment: they neglect their contemporaneity with neoliberal attacks on the nation-state and its accompanying postnational ideology – nowhere as strongly asserted as in the period’s discourse of globalization.3 The (mostly unintended) collusion of these late-1980s and 1990s critiques with global capitalism should therefore signal to us that a more dialectical approach to the critique of the nation-state should be taken, one that does not turn a blind eye to the failures of the nationstate, but that can also accommodate what we can call its moment of truth: its successes in giving imaginary figuration to collectivity. In this essay, we will therefore consider the nation-state and its imaginary not only with regard to the oppressions it enacts, and with regard to its inadequacies, but 2

3

See for example, Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). In the explosion of writing about globalization in the 1990s, proclamations of the death of the nation-state (whether seen positively or negatively) and its inadequacies in addressing global phenomena are asserted almost ubiquitously.

Totalizing Imaginaries

307

rather as a transformative collective project whose historical failure always leaves its marks in its self-representations. Our object being Zionist and Israeli literature, we will turn our attention to the productive moment, to the coming-into-being of a collective imaginary, rather than to the elision and misrepresentations that accompany its failure. It is precisely this dimension of collectivity – its need for an imaginary mapping of itself – which Fredric Jameson calls ‘cognitive mapping’.4 Echoing Georg Lukács’ description of the spread of exchange and reification in a society, Jameson contends that stretching social relations of production over very large distances in increasingly varied ways (or, the constitution of capitalism on a global scale) necessitates an aesthetic mediation of our conception of the social whole.5 In other words, when we can no longer experience directly the social relations that constitute our reality, the social whole can only be perceived with the help of an aesthetic figure – or what we can call a totalizing representation of them. For Jameson, aesthetic figuration denotes in this context a mechanism that productively reduces the unrepresentable multiplicity of social relations to a perceivable figure. This act of substitution of the figure for the relations themselves is what orients us in social and physical space. Attempts to aesthetically represent the social whole thus become central for Jameson to any collective project aimed at radical social transformation.6 We will not be able to fully explore here the tradition of Marxist thinking about totality and totalizing aesthetic on which Jameson draws in this essay. Jameson’s implicit reference to Lukács in the essay (he explicitly draws only on Althusser’s definition of ideology to explain his notion of cognitive mapping) is not inconsequential in this regard. For it is Lukács whose work on the historical novel and nineteenth-century realism focuses on

4 5 6

Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60. Ibid.; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 84–7. Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, 351.

308

Oded Nir

their totalizing aspect.7 Realism, for Lukács, narrates the contradictions of bourgeois society, representing them thorough setting up a social typology, with its corresponding psychology, ideology and material settings. The mediating activity of realist narration, according to Lukács, slowly reveals social types as constituting antagonistic positions that belong to a single system, or a contradictory whole. It is in this sense that realism presents us with a totalizing aesthetic, or an attempt to map the social whole, fraught as it is with internal antagonisms.8 We will not be concerned here with the totalizing aesthetic of the realist variety. Rather, we will explore other sites in which the production of totalizing imaginaries takes place. To begin, we should stress that a totalizing aesthetic does not always involve a direct representation of an existing society. One such example is the genre of utopian literature, to which our first literary object – Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902) – belongs. The mapping of social contradictions enacted in realist novels is replaced in utopian literature by the imaginary mapping of utopian society, or what Darko Suvin describes as its cognitive dimension: one that posits new connections between technological innovations, subjective desire and a new arrangement of social institutions.9 In other words, what constitutes the utopian genre’s totalizing aesthetic is what Phillip Wegner calls its attempt to orient its reader in a new social space, or its constitution of ‘pedagogical practices […] that enable us to inhabit, make sense of, orient ourselves within, and act through any particular space. This […] is the domain of architecture, urban planning, nation building, and social engineering.’10 It is, of course, the aspiration to cover all the social bases, or all dimensions of life, that grants this orienting function of utopias their totalizing character. 7 8 9 10

Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 5–6, 88, and 154. Georg Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’, in Ernst Bloch et al., foreword Fredric Jameson, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 28–59. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 3–14. Phillip Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 15.

Totalizing Imaginaries

309

Two more things need to be stressed before we begin our discussion of Altneuland. First, even though utopian novels describe a non-existent society, this does not mean, of course, that utopian narration lacks any relation to the historical moment and the social structure from which a particular novel emerges. For, to adopt Suvin’s terms again, the cognitive element of utopian literature is incomplete without estrangement, or the rendering unfamiliar of the present through an adoption of the utopian point of view.11 The non-existent utopian society always, in one way or another, presents us with an estranged view of our reality, from the future’s point of view. And with the reference to temporality we have already moved to the second important point: that the synchronic mapping enacted by utopian novels always implies a diachronic one as well, or some kind of historical totalization, in which certain tendencies in the present are speculatively developed by the utopian imaginary.

Altneuland and the Coming Collectivity Altneuland appears on the literary landscape in 1902 in German and was translated into Hebrew in less than a year. Even though it can easily be contested that Altneuland belongs to Hebrew Literature, the swiftness of its translation and its intended audience’s particular relation to the emergence of a robust secular Hebrew Literature support its inclusion in the emerging literature. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, secular Hebrew Literature – whose origin is traced usually to the early eighteenth century12 – began to be more widely read among European, particularly Eastern European, Jews (as opposed to religious Hebrew texts and what was seen as their textual extensions into the realms of education, Jewish law

11 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 6. 12 Dan Miron, Bodedim be-mo’adam (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987), 57.

310

Oded Nir

and customs).13 The same period saw the slow rise of Zionism as an ideology, a development whose close relation to the development of Modern Hebrew letters has been studied extensively.14 What is important for us is to view the rise of Zionism (incurring initially nothing but the scorn of both Jewish orthodoxy and the remnants of the Haskala movement) as a result of some ideological failure, or of a growing incongruence between Jewish everyday experience and the narratives that made that experience identifiable and comprehensible, allowing individuals to imagine a place for themselves in society.15 We will not be able to explore the specifics of the ideological gap into which Zionism was born, but the extensive literature on the birth of nationalism in Europe gives us the general coordinates of the transformations to which Zionism constituted an answer: the emergence of the European nation-state as the hegemonic force regulating everyday life, not only in the big European cities but in small towns and villages, too. Urbanization and industrialization, the spread of capitalism as a mode of production – all of those came together to challenge (among other things) the more localized, autonomous existence of small Jewish towns and communities. These were accompanied by the birth of national ideologies available to all – no longer only the business of royalty and the bourgeoisie – that have become the necessary means to imagining a collectivity which can no longer be immediately perceived by any one consciousness.16 It is therefore not the case that Zionism had an unexplainable magical appeal in Jewish eyes (as many critics assume, even if only implicitly in their periodization of Hebrew literature, according to Dan Miron).17 Rather, it provided an

13 Ibid., 57–62. 14 For example, in Miron, Bodedim be-moa’dam; Hannan Hever, Hasipur Vehale’om (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007); Gershon Shaked, Hasiporet Ha’ivrit 1880–1980, vol. 1. (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uchad, 1977); Baruch Kurzweil, Sifrutenu Ha-chadasha: hemshech o mahapecha? (Tel Aviv: Schoken, 1959). 15 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel (London: Verso, 2012), 177–96. 16 For discussions of the rise of modern European nationalism, see Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Anderson’s Imagined Communities. 17 Miron, Bodedim be-moa’dam, 74–5.

Totalizing Imaginaries

311

ideological response to these concrete transformations that, at the same time, resulted in the formation of a substantial Hebrew readership. As Miron puts it: In [the 1880s], several conditions converged to create a real need for Hebrew-language literature and Journalism. These conditions formed as a result of three transformations: 1. Socio-economic developments that brought many of the Jewish middle class to a state in which a need is born to step beyond the pale of the traditional-religious world. 2. The pogroms and anti-Jewish policies implemented by [the Russian] authorities […] created among the Jewish masses […] a new sense of social self-consciousness […] [and] an urgent need for discussion of European Jews’ future. 3. The decline of the Haskala’s anti-orthodox influence on Hebrew literature, which had allowed many to venture beyond the religious world without severing its ties to it.18

It is these developments that open the way for the rise of Zionist influence over Hebrew literature, at the same moment as this literature becomes necessary for many Eastern European and Russian Jews, as Miron points out in the quote above. The precise conditions for the possibility of Zionism deserve a much more detailed analysis than the one we can offer in this essay. What is more important to us is what Zionism brings to the emergent Hebrew literature. Our first working hypothesis is that the emergence of Jewish nationalism has given a new function to the newborn literature, namely a utopian imaginary, or what Na’ama Rokem sees as an ‘ability to construct spaces, which makes it [prose] an ideal tool for presenting a blueprint for a future Jewish state.’19 Of course, it is not that utopian moments were absent from the Jewish religious textual world; rather, it is the concretization of this utopian impulse into a more properly nationalist program, a secularization and territorialization of it, which is introduced into the mainstay of Hebrew literature through the Zionist imaginary.20 This is the background to the

18 19

Ibid., 77–8. My translation. Na’ama Rokem, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 74. 20 For an (unsympathetic) account of the transformation of Jewish eschatological ideology into the Zionist national-territorial one, see Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the

312

Oded Nir

appearance of Herzl’s Altneuland (published in Hebrew under the title Tel Aviv – where ‘aviv’ means ‘spring’ and the word ‘tel’, not easily translated into English, connoting both ‘hill’ and ‘ruins’ – suggestive of the renewal of the old and dilapidated). Herzl’s text will allow us to think of Zionism and Modern Hebrew literature as constituting at their moment of inception a utopian project. Before developing this line of thought, however, some political comments are in order, even if only to curtail any over-hasty political judgement of seeing Zionism as a utopian project. First, we should note that this line of inquiry does not in itself constitute some implicit justification of the atrocities committed against Palestinians by the state of Israel. That Zionism can be seen as a utopian collective project does not mean that it was a successful one. Rather, it is the failure, the slow falling apart of the totalizing utopian imagination of early Zionism, which constitutes the subject matter of many later literary texts. Second, approaching Zionism through its utopian moments forces us to see its moments of truth, or in other words, to see it as ideologically active in the positive, constructive sense of ideology (for which we have to thank Althusser), one which highlights what ideology does, what it enables, rather than what it hides or distorts. Simply put, the possibility of any collective project depends on our ability to comprehend the ways in which ideology welds together desire and materiality, rather than the ways in which it blocks some empirical truth, even if these blockages, omissions and elisions are constitutive of it. The interesting questions about Zionism today have nothing to do with exposing over and over again the horribly unethical reality behind the illusion that dupes the Israeli masses (which, again, is not denied here); rather, these questions involve asking how people come to participate of their own will in a collective project such as Zionism, and how the project had Land of Israel (London: Verso, 2012). Herzl’s utopian text was preceded by two other utopias that imagined the resettlement of Jews in Palestine: Edmund Menachem Eisler’s Ein Zukunftsbild and Elchanan Leib Lewinsky’s utopian Jewish monarchy of Trip to Eretz Israel in the Year 2040 (published in Hebrew). Even though each of these were read and debated, Herzl’s utopia was by far the most influential of the three.

Totalizing Imaginaries

313

allowed them to imagine their own liberation through it in the first place. A mindless appeal to the masses’ naïveté, to the ease with which people can be misled, are plainly insufficient as an explanation for the rise of Zionism. Surely, the evidence of the initial, almost unanimous rejection of Zionism by European Jews can serve as a constant reminder to us that people are not easily misled, even in the age of so-called grand narratives. Assuming that an intellectual effort’s goal is not to establish the gullibility of everyone except the researcher and his social clique, it follows that a leftist critique of Zionism can never remain at the level of ideology-busting (or showing how misinformed the Zionist masses are), but such a leftist critique rather should try to recreate the ways in which Zionist narratives responded to a lack and captured desire, the ways in which they imaginatively attempted to solve real contradictions – an operation of any ideology if it is to come into the world in the first place. In light of this critical context, we should also mention that the existence of a strong historical connection between nationalism and utopian literature has been asserted in Phillip Wegner’s Imaginary Communities (2002), a text on which we will draw extensively below. Indeed, this is where we can start understanding the peculiarities of Zionist utopianism. As Wegner argues, the utopian thought experiment can be considered as an imaginative development of perceived reality, rather than as an attempt to represent it: if both literary and theoretical representations approach the narrative present in terms of the past, attempting to grasp it as some form of a completed whole, semiotic itineraries or performances like those of the narrative utopia conceive of the present in terms of the future, as something that is incomplete and continuously coming into being. That is, the present, its concerns, desires, and contradictions, rather than being the end of the representational practices of the narrative utopia (as in those of literature or theory), serves as the very raw material from which the narrative performance will generate something original.21

In this respect, Zionist utopia is a peculiar creature, because its referent, the present reality to be estranged and developed through the future’s 21

Ibid., xix.

314

Oded Nir

vantage point, simply does not exist: there is no single social, institutional or territorial unit on the basis of which the process of utopian figuration can begin. There could be no easy utopian mapping and neutralization of, say, class antagonism when the group in question does not map into one class structure but a strongly varied multiplicity of class divisions; the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie into which Herzl was born, for example, does not stand in any direct social relation to the rural Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, and neither do their ideological worlds converge around the same oppositions. It is precisely in this context that we should view Hannan Hever’s assertion that there is no one Zionism at the movement’s inception, but many Zionisms, and correspondingly several Zionist literary traditions, which battled for primacy over Jewish opinion.22 Altneuland generally displays a structure that would surprise no reader of utopian novels. Friedrich Löwenberg, a well-off Viennese Jewish intellectual, and Kingscourt, a Prussian aristocrat who has made a fortune in the United States, both disillusioned with their lives (‘sunk in the depth of depression’),23 decide to travel to a remote island, away from societies in which they cannot find their place. On their way to the island, their ship stops at Palestine, which strikes them as dirty, poor and ‘pitifully shabby’ (echoing Herzl’s own impressions on his visit to Palestine, as several scholars have noted).24 The travellers then set sail for the island and spend twenty years in solitude, about which the novel has almost nothing to say. When our travellers then decide to visit Europe, their ship docks in Palestine again. Much to their surprise, the country has undergone a radical transformation following massive Jewish settlement and the foundation of Altneuland. Here we encounter the familiar form of the utopian narrative – the travellers explore the country and learn about the Jewish utopian society, with the help of local guides. As their journey progresses, both Löwenberg’s and Kingscourt’s desire for being part of society is rekindled, and they decide to stay in Altneuland.

22 Hever, Hasipur Vehale’om, 9–46. 23 Herzl, Old-New Land (Haifa: Haifa Publishing Company, 1960), 6. 24 Ibid., 31. See Rokem, Heinrich Heine, 75.

Totalizing Imaginaries

315

This is not to say that Herzl’s utopia is only a bad imitation of other utopian novels, or deals with material that does not speak to the social contradictions experienced by most European Jews at the time. Rather, the opposite is the case: the raw material on which Herzl’s utopia works is drawn from the discourse of the Zionist movement and its internal debates (even if at the same time, as Muhammad Khalidi claims, it tries to adhere to the diplomatic constraints of the Zionist project).25 Examples abound: Herzl’s adoption of a ‘soft’ utopian socialism (all land is publicly owned, a ‘syndicate of cooperative societies’ manages the state’s affairs), uneasily combined with capitalist free enterprise in the new Jewish state, should be read in light of the failure of the first privately-sponsored settlements of the 1880s and the rising popularity of socialist ideas among young Eastern European Jews.26 The peace enjoyed by the citizens of the new state, which has no army, attests to the future disappearance of anti-Semitism,27 which was of course a major concern of the Zionist movement. The character of Reshid Bey, an Arab engineer from Haifa who is an enthusiastic member of the New Society, allows us to imagine the successful future integration of Palestine’s current inhabitants into the utopian society. His presence in the utopian novel should be read in light of the internal debates of the Zionist movement about the current inhabitants of Palestine.28 In this context, the obviously Orientalist representation of Palestinians in Herzl’s novel (and in early Zionist discourse in general), with its accompanying fears of 25

Muhammad Ali Khalidi, ‘Utopian Zionism or Zionist Proselytism? A Reading of Herzl’s Altneuland’, Journal of Palestine Studies 30.4 (2001), 55–67. 26 For discussions of Herzl’s shifting views on utopian socialism, see Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Derek Jonathan Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 49; Miron, Bodedim be-mo’adam, 67. 27 Herzl, Old-New Land, 105. 28 Ibid. Ahad Ha’am, one of Herzl’s main opponents in the Zionist movement, criticized the plan for Zionist settlement in Palestine for its lack of consideration of its possible effects on the Palestinian population. See Ahad Ha’am, ‘Emet Me’eretz Israel’, 1891 accessed 4 January 2015. For a detailed description of the conflict between Ha’am and Herzl, see Goldstein, Yossi, Ahad Ha’am veherzl (Tel Aviv: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2011).

316

Oded Nir

oppressed-become-oppressors, and of a civilizing mission gone bad, is very clearly a mediated form of thinking through the problem of the Jews’ own oppression in Europe. Edward Said’s insight into the ‘mirroring’ function of Orientalist discourse – the West’s attempt to establish its own identity through its representations of the Orient – is thus strongly affirmed here. In speaking about the Palestinian ‘problem’ and the possibility of reproducing oppression through a colonial enterprise, the Zionists (and Herzl’s novel) were actually speaking about the problems faced by European Jews, albeit in an estranged form.29 Altneuland, therefore, takes as its raw material – the basic contradictions to be neutralized and rearranged by the future – from the pool of categories of Zionist discourse, which themselves turn out to be mediated vehicles for thinking about the real problems of Jewish diasporic life in Europe.30 Thus, as utopian imaginaries go, Herzl’s Altneuland is bolder than many other utopian novels, for the cognitive ‘distance’ between the real contradictions it tries to resolve and the categories it employs is doubly mediated. In an age in which national ideology in general is being ‘democratized’, or transformed to sustain an imaginary space for a much larger variety of subjectivities than before,31 Herzl’s utopia employs a discourse that, we must remember, is shared by what is at the time of its publication still a minority among European Jews. This, of course, is a very different situation than that faced by the major European nationalisms, including the British one on which Wegner’s discussion of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) focuses in Imaginary Communities. For Wegner, the invention of utopian national space and institutions has for its raw materials not only a territory, but also a proto-nationalist material-institutional framework and a corresponding political discourse. In contrast, Herzl’s utopia has 29 30 31

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 3 and 7. Again, focusing on what the peculiar type of Zionist Orientalism enabled in Herzl’s utopian imaginary is not an attempt to justify Zionist Orientalism, or to question its deleterious effects. For Herzl, the more specifically Jewish concerns of Altneuland become inseparable from more general utopian concerns with socialism, gender relations and in particular with the promise of technological progress, as Avineri, Prenslar and Rokem show. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 23.

Totalizing Imaginaries

317

none of these except the political discourse, which at the time had not yet been disseminated widely. That Altneuland, as critics note, is careful not to define the borders of the utopian society testifies precisely to this fact.32 For our purposes, it is important to notice the strong totalizing character of the development of the contradictions in Herzl’s utopia (which is of course common to all utopian programs, to use Jameson’s term), which was surely made more sharply visible to Herzl’s contemporaries through the large cognitive distance it traverses.33 Like other utopian programs, Altneuland tries to systematically map the symbolic space of the new society, constituting what Wegner describes as the orienting function of utopian novels that we have mentioned above. As both Jameson and Wegner emphasize, the totalizing aspect of utopian programs does not constitute a closed system. Rather, as will be further explained shortly, the imagined system is a radically open one, as the contradictions taken as its subject matter are never resolved ideologically, an operation which Wegner calls, following Louis Marin, ‘the refusal of non-contradiction’. In Marin’s words: Utopic practice, through the play of its discursive topics, does not construct a theoretical concept; rather, it sets the scene, the space of representation, the place of figurability, which is its imaginary schema and the sensuous framework. It would be, to speak the language of Kant, the schematizing activity of the social and political imagination which has not yet found its concept; a blind activity, but one that would trace for knowledge and for action the place, the topic, of its concept. A schema in quest of a concept, a model without structure.34

It is no wonder therefore that from today’s perspective, Herzl’s Altneuland would by summarily judged to be a naïve daydream (or, by critics of Zionism,

See Rokem, Heinrich Heine, 60. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 1–9. Phillip Wegner relates this strong Symbolic activity of narrative utopia to Jameson’s conception of cognitive mapping, which is one of Jameson’s most well-known formulations of the process of totalization (see ‘Cognitive Mapping’). 34 Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play (London: Macmillan, 1984), 163. 32 33

318

Oded Nir

as a cynically oppressive program).35 This judgement is probably the best evidence for the way in which Altneuland has played a major role in figuratively pre-defining, at least in part, the discursive and institutional spaces of Zionist nation-building. Indeed, the uselessness of utopian texts once their historical moment has passed – expressed in labelling them naïve or cynical – is by no means specific to Altneuland; nor should we chalk it up to a postmodern incredulity towards utopias in general. As Wegner remarks, narrative utopias are vanishing mediators, ‘cultural interventions that in retrospect appear as bridges over the “holes in time” between different organizations of social life, and whose particular effectivity disappears once these transitions have been accomplished.’36 The radical openness of the totalizing operation of Altneuland – on which we will elaborate below – is therefore lost today, a loss attested to by the novel’s alternate judgements as cynically oppressive, or naive. The utopian refusal of non-contradiction, or the continuous displacement of contradictions by the totalizing imagination, is everywhere evident in Altneuland. The underlying contradiction of the novel is a historical one – between the new and the old – a problem of historical change that puzzles our protagonists. As Kingscourt says at the beginning of their visit to the utopian society: I’ll readily admit that everything you’ve so far showed us should not surprise us, because we’ve actually seen it all in Europe, though in scattered bits and pieces that were not coordinated into a harmonious whole […]. Though I perfectly understand the state of things here, I can not understand its growth. The transition from the old I once knew, to the new that I now see, is quite beyond my comprehension.37

It is, of course, at this moment that the novel itself addresses the main problem of utopian literature – the creation of utopian newness from bits For example, on the occasion of Altneuland’s republication in Hebrew in 2002, critic Ariana Melamed claims the novel is ‘pitifully naïve’ in ‘Ma asita li, Herzl’, Yedioth Aharonoth (7 September 2002) accessed 29 September 2014. 36 Wegner, Imaginary Communities, 9. 37 Herzl, Old-New Land, 62. Emphasis in original. 35

Totalizing Imaginaries

319

and pieces of the familiar present. One way in which this contradiction is thematized in the novel is through its treatment of the transformation of bodies – form the European Jewish ones to the ones of the utopian society. This bodily transformation is the focal point of Michael Gluzman’s discussion of the novel.38 It is through this example that we will be able to address at once the anti-utopian tendency to see utopian programs as necessarily devolving into oppressive schemas, and the totalizing displacement of contradictions. Gluzman’s critique of the novel focuses on Herzl’s attempt to address the popular stereotype of European Jews as having weak, distorted bodies, replete with signs of degeneration though their feminization and homosexualization.39 Gluzman shows how the protagonist’s body functions in the novel as a space in which the transition from European to the utopian existence is figured: during the long sojourn on the island, Löwenberg is transformed from a ‘miserable, flat-chested specimen of a Jew-boy’ into ‘quite a lad’ who might be ‘dangerous to women still’.40 This bodily transformation paves the way, during the visit to the Jewish utopia, for the rekindling of the protagonist’s desire for social engagement and participation in the collective enterprise. This rekindling of desire for constructing collectivity runs parallel to the Jewish protagonist’s personal life – his gradual falling in love with a woman he meets in Altneuland’s New Society, and the weakening of the (all but explicitly stated) homoerotic bond with Kingscourt, the aristocrat, who tells Friedrich right before their second landing in Palestine that he could not live without him.41 For Gluzman, the bodily transformation signals not only the inscription of anti-Semitic stereotypes into the Zionist utopia, but also the prescription of heteronormative values as means to eradicate the bad content of Michael Gluzman, The Zionist Body: Nationalism, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Hebrew Literature (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007), 34–66. 39 Ibid., 36–7. Also, see Rokem’s discussion of Herzl’s Jewish stereotypes and their relation to the influence of Zola’s novels on him (Rokem, Heinrich Heine, 80–1). In that sense, Altneuland sociological treatment of the stereotype (which we will discuss shortly), can also be said to echo Zola’s naturalism or realism. 40 Herzl, Old-New Land, 42. 41 Gluzman, The Zionist Body, 50. 38

320

Oded Nir

the stereotype invoked by the novel’s initial characterization of our Jewish protagonist.42 That, of course, can easily lead us to condemn Altneuland and Zionism for their suppression of homoerotic desire, of alternative modes of gendering, etc. However, even if we do not subscribe to Herzl’s ideological imaginary of the healthy and productive body, it is important to trace the work of totalization, or the attempt to imagine transformation in the creation of new subjectivities in which the novel engages with respect to the new Jewish body. First, it is crucial to notice that Altneuland not only constructs a stereotype of individual Jews, but rather a larger social imaginary and diagnosis: the European Jews’ degenerated state is diagnosed as a result of Jewish dependency on the power of European elites, best captured by Friedrich’s dependency on Kingscourt, rather than being some Jewish innate nature. In Altneuland, even Friedrich’s initial lack of desire to participate in producing collectivity is a result of this dependency or lack of historical agency. Furthermore, bodily transformation has to take place before a cultural transformation can take place (echoing to an extent the fact that revolution must always strike twice): the attainment of bodily agency, figured through the strong productive body, is a precondition for attaining historical agency, or taking part in building a utopian society. Only after spending some time in Altneuland does Friedrich suddenly begin to question the reclusive path he had chosen by travelling to the island.43 Thus, the journey to the remote island functions as what Marin and Jameson call the utopian neutralization of the social conditions that have produced the ‘degenerate’ Jew in preparation for the possibility of participating in the new collectivity.44 The totalizing imaginary therefore ties together bodily transformation with cultural and social transformations. Second, and even more importantly, the prescribed solution turns out not to be an imagined resolution of contradictions (say, between Jewish weakness and the activities of social construction), but it rather leads to the

42 Ibid., 52–4. 43 Herzl, Old-New Land, 66. 44 Fredric Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, Diacritics 7.2 (1977), 2–21.

Totalizing Imaginaries

321

emergence of new contradictions. As Gluzman notes, the strong gendered coding of bodily transformations that Herzl employs comes into conflict with another principle of Herzl’s utopia – gender equality.45 Gluzman shows how the novel hovers uneasily between the demand that male characters be manly, strong and productive (in order to distance them from the feminized European Jews), and the utopian demand for equality between men and women. For Gluzman, this contradiction is a vicious one, rendering the Zionist imaginary incoherent. For our purposes, however, it is precisely the fact that contradictions are not resolved in the utopian novel, or the utopian refusal of non-contradiction, which is important for the continuous, active production of collectivity: the displacement of the opposition between European Jews’ supposed passivity and the activity of social construction to an opposition between the new masculinity to be achieved and gender equality. It is only through this continuous displacement of contradictions that the totalizing imaginary’s function can be said to be an opening up of representational possibilities (rather than an act of suppressing difference, as critics of totality would have it). The production of new oppositions provides us with the ground to further develop the social thought-experiment and the continuous remoulding of collectivity, that becoming of the Deleuzian peuple à venir. It is precisely this openness of the totalizing project that the 1980s and 1990s critiques of nationalism in general, and of Zionism in particular, tend to miss. That Zionism has ultimately failed as an emancipatory project should not blind us to the totalizing moment, or to attempt to imagine collectivity, which stands at the origins of the Zionist project. That we might not anymore share today the specific ideologies through which the process of totalization works in utopian novels should not blind us to their creative kernel: their imaginative attempt to neutralize existing social contradictions without resolving them, to constantly shift the grounds of becoming through constantly weaving and reweaving desire, subjectivity, bodily sensations and social formations.

45 Gluzman, The Zionist Body, 60, and Herzl, Old-New Land, 57.

322

Oded Nir

Neuland and the Globalization of Israel We will now have to gloss over many historical transformations in order to address our second literary text, Eshkol Nevo’s 2011 novel Neuland, whose title explicitly references Herzl’s Altneuland (and, tellingly, not the Hebrew translation of Herzl’s novel’s title, Tel Aviv). If the backdrop to Herzl’s novel was the world of European Jewry, Neuland’s conditions of production are entirely different: it is globalization and its assault on the nation-state which provide the novel with the material for its attempt to totalize or to imagine collectivity. With regard to Herzl’s totalizing imaginary, we should mention two important transformations that take place in the century separating the two novels, even though we will not be able to discuss them at length. First, even if the state of Israel cannot in any way be seen as the realization of Herzl’s utopia, as Na’ama Rokem remarks, this does not mean that Altneuland did not leave its mark on Zionist thinking and the Israeli state.46 The clearest successor to Altneuland’s totalizing imaginary is the Halutzim movement, which developed in the 1910s and 1920s among the Jewish settlers of Palestine. The Halutzim can be seen as a form of utopian vanguardism. The Hebrew word halutz, in the Zionist context, was meant to be a rough translation of ‘vanguard’, the word itself borrowed from the Old Testament, in which it referred to soldiers leading the charge.47 As Boaz Neumann shows, in the Halutzim’s imaginary, the organization of collective labour and lived experience produced new forms of collectivity, new subjectivities, desires and bodies.48 It is only in the 1940s, and particularly as a result of the 1948 war (in which transformative labour finally and decisively took the back seat to the violent capture of land and the massive dispossession of Palestinians) that the Halutzim’s 46 Rokem, Heinrich Heine, 73–4. 47 If Herzl relies heavily on technology to imagine solutions for social problems, this technological dimension is later subsumed under the Halutzim’s transformative labour: machines and technological advancement are here imagined to be an extension of collective capacities and freedoms. 48 Boaz Neumann, Tshukat hahaluzim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2009), 16.

Totalizing Imaginaries

323

imaginary undergoes a crisis from which it cannot recover; S. Yizhar’s short stories from the period, and his magnum opus Yeme Ziklag (1959), attest to the breakdown of the Halutzim’s imaginary (the crisis is interpreted as both a crisis of values and subjectivity by critics of Yizhar’s writing). The Israeli national ideology after the 1950s is thus only a reified remnant of the earlier totalizing discourse. The other important change is, of course, the dissolution of national hegemonic ideology itself, concurrent with the formation of neoliberal global capitalism, in the late 1980s in Israel. Here we encounter the by-now familiar effects of neoliberalization on the nation-state: the nation-state losing, to a degree, economic autonomy (whether actual autonomy or the abandoning of the ideal of it), the growing erosion of social welfare and the privatization of major state monopolies – comprehensively captured in the case of Israel in Paul Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s The Global Political Economy of Israel (2002).49 National hegemonic ideology becomes defunct in the process, making social contradictions suddenly visible again on a large scale, as the work of sociologist Uri Ram shows.50 This is the point at which the work of the aforementioned Israeli New Historians appears on the stage, which is just as symptomatic of the disintegration of national ideology as the literary production of the period. Orly Castel-Bloom’s picaresque novel Heikhan Ani Nimtset? (1990) [Where am I?], for instance, noted by critics as the birth of Israeli postmodernism, attests to the feeling of social disorientation caused by this ideological dissolution.51 It is this social context that provides Neuland with its raw material to be totalized. If Castel-Bloom seems to celebrate disorientation and lack of

49 Paul Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Merichaei milchama ledividendim shel shalom ( Jerusalem: Carmel, 2001), 175–8. See also their The Global Political Economy of Israel: From War Profits to Peace Dividends (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 274–357. 50 Uri Ram, Haglobalizatsia shel Israel: mcworld betel aviv, jihad beyrushala’yim (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2005). 51 Orly Castel-Bloom, Heichan ani nimtset? (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1990). For her writing’s role in Israeli ‘postmodernism’, see Uri Cohen, Likro et Orly Castel-Bloom (Tel Aviv: Achuzat Ba’it, 2011), and David Gurevich, Postmodernism: Tarbut vesifrut besof hame’a ha’esrim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1997), 287–304.

324

Oded Nir

certainty, Neuland treats this feeling of disorientation and lack of purpose, as we will see, as a problem of imagining collectivity. The novel is centred on two Israeli characters, Dori and Inbar, who travel to South America.52 Their journeys begin separately. While Dori is looking for his missing father, an avatar of Israeli masculinity (former military general become successful businessman), Inbar’s journey starts out with her travel to Berlin to meet her mother. Instead of returning to Israel, she spontaneously decides to board a plane to Peru, where she joins Dori, whom she never met before except for a brief encounter at the airport. The superficial similarities to Herzl’s Altneuland are clear: the travellers in both novels are disillusioned with their lives. The Prussian aristocrat and the Viennese Jew who cannot find their place in society in Altneuland become Neuland’s two travellers: Dori, a history teacher who lives in the shadow of his successful father, with whom he could never communicate, and Inbar, the producer of a radio talk show dispensing psychological advice to callers, deeply estranged from her mother (shortly into the novel, the reader learns that one of the callers committed suicide, an incident which propelled Inbar to take a break from work and travel to visit her mother in Berlin). Both are involved in marriages that are on the brink of dissolution, echoing Friedrich’s situation at the opening of Altneuland. This similarity is not merely superficial, since the bourgeoisie that embarks on the voyage in Herzl’s novel is here replaced by people of a very specific class. Far from representing Israeli society as a whole, both Dori and Inbar belong to the world of middleclass Jewish, Ashkenazi Israelis. It is this particular class from which Israeli hegemonic ideology had taken its archetypal national subject. As a result, the crumbling of this hegemonic ideology brought about by globalization (and the crumbling of the middle class which this ideology helped sustain) has been most acutely felt by this class. The general feeling of purposelessness and powerlessness of both characters in the beginning of the novel

52

Eshkol Nevo, Neuland (Or Yehuda: Zmora-Bitan, 2011).

Totalizing Imaginaries

325

are the markers of the crisis experienced by this particular class, a feeling of powerlessness shared with the characters of Herzl’s bourgeois Vienna. 53 Another similarity has to do with the accidental encounter with utopia, common to many utopian novels. Altneuland’s travellers’ second stop in Palestine is a pure whim, not an act motivated by a search for utopia. Similarly, Dori and Inbar’s travel to South America is not motivated by the search for a better society. Yet, here we encounter an important formal difference between the novels: almost the entire plot of Neuland happens not at the last stop of the trip – back in Israel – but on the equivalent of Herzl’s remote island, that is, in South America. And only during that journey do they pass through something like a utopia, the Neuland commune in Argentina, to which we will return later. At this point, it is important to note that the commune is only another station, even if the last one, through which the characters pass before their return home, rather than a final resting place as in Herzl’s Altneuland. Indeed, it turns out that all of the commune’s members are only temporary residents, merely stopping on their way to somewhere else.54 This structure – inverting the focus of the novel from the utopian society to the journey toward it – is important for two reasons. First, it signals to us that the novel is not a utopian novel. This structure is not an arbitrary choice but one that emerges, as Nevo puts it in an interview, from the fact that ‘everyone’s sceptical, everyone’s desperate, quietly and darkly […], everyone thinks that it’s pointless to talk about the future, because everything moves in an endless loop of “that’s just how it is,” from which there is no way out.’55 It is here that the classed feeling of crisis that we mentioned above is thematized as a crisis of the utopian imagination

53 Nevo, Neuland, 27–30, 143, 185–90. There are, of course, many other similarities between the novels. The Zionist plan of settling in South America, mentioned in Altneuland, for example, is echoed in Dori and Inbar’s southern-American destination. 54 Nevo, 495–6. 55 Quoted in Omri Herzog, ‘Neuland me’et Eshkol Nevo: Magi’a l’aretz hamuvtachat’, 6 June 2011 accessed 9 September 2014, my translation.

326

Oded Nir

itself, extensively discussed by Adorno, Jameson and others.56 The inversion implied by Neuland’s structure, therefore, is nothing less than a symptom and a problematization of the blockage of the utopian imagination in the novel’s form. On the other hand, as Omri Herzog has pointed out, if travel narratives in Hebrew literature have tended to work in the service of national ideology – the traveller coming into the fold of the nation through the transformations enacted by the journey – this is not the case in Neuland.57 The return to Israel is not accompanied by a reconciliation of Dori and Inbar to some national mission from which they were previously estranged – nor could it be, considering the dissolution of national hegemonic ideology discussed earlier. Nor do they end up in each other’s arms. Rather, as Herzog claims, it leaves open the contradictions that it detects. Thus, the structure of Neuland’s plot defies both the nationalist travel story as well as the generic utopian novel, despite the obvious resonances it has with both. Yet, there is good reason not to celebrate the novel’s ambiguity for its own sake, or for some deeper ethical truth that this ambiguity supposedly reflects, as Herzog seems to do. Regardless, we have arrived at a problem: on the one hand, as mentioned above, the generic utopian novel depends on what Wegner calls a refusal of non-contradiction, or on leaving ideological contradictions undecided. On the other hand, the postmodern rejection of so-called grand narratives tends to be accompanied by a celebration of inconsistencies and ambiguity.58 This, in turn, makes it difficult to distinguish between the utopian version of keeping contradictions open and its

56

57 58

Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review 21 (2004), 65–78; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), §22; Imre Szeman and Eric Cazdyn, After Globalization (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Herzog, ‘Neuland me’et Eshkol Nevo’. That postmodernism can be attributed to Israeli fiction is a problematic assertion that we will not be able to address here in any detail. It should be at least noted that Israeli postmodernism differs from the American one in the central role played in it by overt attacks on national ideology. Loss of certainty and stable meaning is here much more openly a loss of national meaning-making.

Totalizing Imaginaries

327

postmodern version).59 What, then, is the role of ideological ambiguity in Neuland? Is it simply a reaffirmation of the tired postmodern ‘truth’ that there is no such thing as certainty? Or, is it an attempt, seemingly doomed to failure, to revive something like utopian literature? We can start answering these questions with what we have already discussed: the novel constitutes an attempt to think utopia – in this case Herzl’s utopia – in the face of the great blockage of the utopian imagination. If the novel centres around the path to utopia, rather than on utopia itself, we can finally look at Dori and Inbar’s actual journey in a new light. What this journey dramatizes and opens up for aesthetic figuration is precisely the process of ideological neutralization, which we have discussed above. The latter is strongly associated with utopian texts; beginning the process of moulding and re-moulding ideological contradictions without resolving them. Thus, for example, the narration of Inbar’s journey to Berlin to visit her mother provides an occasion for the novel to raise what is a familiar ideological trope to all Israelis – the Holocaust and its relation to the foundation of Israel.60 The part of the novel describing Inbar’s journey is made up of passages narrating her memories of conversations with her grandmother, who at a young age escaped Nazi-occupied Europe to Israel, but also her fights with her mother and the events leading to her brother’s suicide during military service.61 The family is destroyed by the disaster; the family’s loss of whatever allegiance to the nation it still had is paralleled 59

The becoming-indistinguishable of the utopian self-contradiction and its postmodern version is captured in one of Fredric Jameson’s early formulations of one of the effects of postmodernism: the becoming identical of the utopian and the ideological, a fusing-together whose predecessors can be found, as always, in modernist art, as Adorno’s essay on Beckett’s Endgame demonstrates. See Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass culture’. Theodor Adorno, ‘How to Understand Endgame?’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 216–40. 60 In contemporary Israeli national ideology, the Holocaust is taken to be the ultimate proof for the need for a Jewish state. For a post-Zionist critical exploration of the changing role of the Holocaust in Israeli ideology, see Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 61 Nevo, Neuland, 113 and 185.

328

Oded Nir

by the separation of Inbar’s parents, her mother moving to Berlin and her father to Australia, where he marries again. Inbar is initially very hostile to the idea of travelling to Berlin. She is very close to her grandmother, who harbours a deep hatred for all things German. Inbar’s visit to Berlin acts on several levels. First, Inbar’s interaction with her mother reveals that the mother’s move to Berlin had been for her a way of coping with loss. Second, the move also enabled Inbar’s mother to regain a sense of community with other Israelis who live in the city, substituting the now-defunct national ideology.62 Even the city itself, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, becomes a symbol of unification in the eyes of Inbar’s mother – apparently a psychological compensation for the family’s disintegration. What is important to notice is the sheer number of ideological contradictions inscribed in Inbar’s three-generational story: deeply engrained Holocaust fears versus the new émigré community in Berlin; post-Zionist present (represented in Inbar’s sense of crisis around national sentiment, after her brother’s death) versus a past of strong connection to the nation-state; the older nuclear family versus alternative family structures. All of these contradictions are going to be neutralized in the novel, as we will now see. Two things are important to mention here. First, the turn to alternative (or, not nation-centred) forms of living does not simply psychologize social and ideological problems: the alternative community of expatriates in Berlin, for all its multicultural underpinnings, still preserves the nascent impulse of a collective project. Rather than a simple psychologization – explaining away some apparent social contradiction through positing a psychological problem in its stead – Neuland presents us with the overdetermination of contradictoriness itself. The antagonism between mother and daughter provides a figurative mechanism through which other contradictions are made visible: Inbar’s Israeli nationalist hatred of Germany versus the postnationalist multicultural cosmopolitanism which Inbar encounters on her 1991 trip to Berlin (Inbar’s ‘they were all here during the Nazi period’ versus the Jazz-Klezmer fusion concert which Inbar ‘would never 62 Ibid., 162.

Totalizing Imaginaries

329

have attended if she were in Israel’); oppositional psychological dispositions (the emigration to Berlin as a coping mechanism with the death of Inbar’s brother versus seeing emigration as a form of escapism or non-confrontation); and social contradictions (the alternative community in Berlin, one of whose members invites Inbar to their meetings).63 The antagonism between mother and daughter, through which all of these contradictions are figured, is not resolved in the novel; rather, what is emphasized is the transmutability of the contradictions, or the way in which they can be narrated as substitutes for one another. Social structure, psychological attitudes and political positions thus inflect one another, each offering some kind of modulation of all the others. That Inbar gains a certain understanding of her mother’s reasons for choosing to settle in Berlin after the failure of the Israeli nation-state is a modest equivalent to Herzl’s protagonist’s sojourn on the island: both allow for the neutralization of the social contradictions that led them to a state of despair. This process of neutralization is present in Dori’s much longer story as well, dealing with different sets of contradictions, ones that are more related to the structure of Israeli masculinity.64 The ambiguity of the novel, or its preservation of contradictoriness, is

63

Inbar’s precarious employment in Israel is important with respect to the social contradictions that the novel explores. The impoverishment of the Israeli middle class as a result of neoliberal globalization is what divides the relatively financially secure generation of Inbar’s parents from Inbar herself. The class contradiction that emerges in Israel as a result of privatization and cuts to social spending is thus, again, inscribed in the opposition between Inbar and her mother. That the expat community in Berlin contains both rich and poor (Inbar’s mother standing in for the petit-bourgeoisie and the Israeli shop clerk standing in for the working class) makes it possible to imagine a neutralization of class antagonism. Ibid., 166–7. 64 Examples abound. The tying-up of contradictions in the novel consists of several layers. The overarching contradiction can be said to be the one symbolized by Dori and Inbar themselves: Inbar’s debilitating brokenness (the broken family, the broken career, the failed nationalism etc.) as opposed to Dori’s no less debilitating reified wholeness (holding together the family structure at all costs, his frustrating career as a history teacher, the old welfare-state Zionism which seems out of date etc.). Again, Inbar and Dori’s love story does not end in unification or marriage – the contradiction thus remains open at the end of the novel.

330

Oded Nir

therefore not a restatement of postmodern truth but an adaptation of one of the narrative processes associated with utopian literature. It is on this slippery level of neutralization that the novel’s totalizing impulse can be found. The large number of contradictions evoked is important; indeed, the novel can be seen as nothing but an attempt to take inventory of the different ways in which social contradictions can be narrated. Equally important, however, is the re-moulding of these contradictions, their transmutation into different contradictions on all levels. In Dori’s case, neutralization begins with his realization that he tends to view any new landscape with a ‘securitizing gaze’, a habit he needs to drop when he lands in Quito – a city which to Dori looks divided like some strange combination of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, marked by a division which stands in opposition to Berlin’s symbolization of unification and reconciliation in Inbar’s story, an opposition which is itself a reworking of the opposition between masculinity and femininity.65 This initial moment is then developed in all directions through Dori’s reflections on his parents’ relationship, and its relation to Zionism, as opposed to his own failing marriage and his reified belief in ‘national values’, which makes him an object of ridicule. Similarly, his relationship to his son is contrasted with his own relationship to his father. Historical, psychological and social connections are constantly made and re-made. The sudden eruption of forgotten events into his memory, constantly adding more material to be totalized, turns out to be both the result of the journey and its catalyst. 66 It is this process of neutralization that accompanies the entire journey, encompassing more and more ideological contradictions as the novel progresses. This becomes inextricably tied to the hunt for Dori’s father. The detective work that goes into finding his father – the effort led by a local guide with a talent for sniffing out lost Westerners – can be seen as a metaphor for the process of spatial orientation that Wegner sees at work in the narrative utopia’s description of the novum: the local guide is a substitute for the resident of utopia that answers the visitor’s questions and

65 Ibid., 50 and 61. 66 For example, ibid., 268.

Totalizing Imaginaries

331

thus solves the puzzles of the utopian society. What is significant for us, however, is that the search and the process of neutralization culminate in Dori finally finding his father in a utopian commune in Argentina, which the father had helped establish. It is true that the novel describes the social structure of the commune, which displays some easily recognizable reified utopian themes, from egalitarian decision-making to an equal distribution of necessary duties. This frees as much time as possible for the pursuit of personal interests, for a unification of exploring ‘personal potential’ and collective potential.67 It is also very clear, however, that there is not much newness to be explored in the commune. Everything described is easily recognizable as a reified utopian trope, without any new or surprising connections between technological, social and cultural rearrangements. Even though our travellers admit to each other that there is much they do not understand about the commune, the unexplored remains unexplored. It is therefore not in the actual description of the utopian society that the novel invests itself. Instead, we must remember that Neuland, the utopian commune in Argentina, is for all its residents only the final station on the journey back to Israel. As in Altneuland, the protagonists are ready to join the utopian effort only once the journey neutralized the social contradictions that caused reclusiveness and the feeling of purposelessness. We quickly learn the commune’s purpose: it was established according to ‘Herzl’s values’, Dori’s father tells us, and its goal is that the habits formed in it, and the sense of collective agency gained, will somehow help transform Israel itself. ‘The change’, Dori’s father says, ‘cannot come from the inside, so it has to come from the outside, by creating an alternative, the existence of which will bother people and challenge them.’68 According to Dori’s father: A state cannot exist only to survive, Dori. The original purpose behind the Establishment of Israel was to have all the Jews come to a country in which they will not be persecuted. But that was the goal. Past tense. A nation needs a goal.

67 Ibid., 495–6. 68 Ibid., 495, my translation.

332

Oded Nir A nation without a vision is like a family without love, and if there’s no love, why keep the family together?69

At this moment, the novel finally diagnoses its own historical situation. The latter is to be found in what Dori’s father calls ‘the lack of vision’ in contemporary Israel (as opposed to Herzl’s Zionism), that feeling of aimlessness and purposelessness that the novel detects on a personal level but also on the scale of national leadership. Despite the falseness of the novel’s conception of its own historical moment (Altneuland offering its readers much more than an end to the persecution of Jews), what is interesting is that this misrecognition provides the occasion for a totalizing effort, or for an attempt to describe the social conditions that brought about the ‘lack of vision’, and to imagine their neutralization. Yet, the absence of such an alternative ‘vision’ in the novel is telling, signalling for us again that the problem is not one that is surmounted by the novel itself. Rather, the novel’s final question is how this blockage is to be overcome: not utopianism proper, but a cure for the utopian blockage, or anti-anti-utopianism. The absence of futurity is translated into a spatial metaphor – the lack of an outside (so common a statement among thinkers of globalization). This is the same outside which can provide us with an alternative and which is created by the utopian break – separating the known world from that far away island or planet. It is the creation of that outside, the production of it (rather than its discovery) that becomes the centre of the novel. We can finally read the novel as complex allegory for the possibility of the utopian itself. The various sites of ideological neutralization – national failure, dissolution of families, lack of enjoyment – that concretely refer to specific ideological and social situations familiar to Israelis of a specific class act in this allegory as a figuration of the process that any thinking about utopia in the Israeli context will have to work through. This process, the allegory tells us, leads to the rebirth of the utopian enclave to which we currently have no access. It is important to note, moreover, that the absence of an alternative ‘future vision’ in the

69 Ibid., 488.

Totalizing Imaginaries

333

novel seems to tell us, on the allegorical level, that no such vision will be available before the process of neutralization actually takes place and before an actual attempt takes place to create an alternative social form for which the Neuland utopian commune is a figure. Neuland, thus, tries to present us with an inventory of interconnected social, psychological and historical contradictions that any attempt to imagine Israeli collectivity today would necessarily have to confront. The Berlin expatriate community and, to a larger extent, the Neuland commune, function in the novel like Suvin’s estranging mechanisms or Jamesonian neutralization: only through them can the sense of despair be exorcized that paralyzes Dori and Inbar. Yet, while Altneuland proceeds to imagine what a better society might look like, Neuland stops at the level of neutralization. It is at this moment that we arrive at a somewhat surprising result. Seen from this perspective, Neuland is not a less naïve novel than Altneuland, or one that reflects a more advanced or realistic consciousness of social problems. Rather, the opposite seems to be the case: Neuland stems from a social situation that is in a sense more backwards than that of Altneuland, one that cannot yet even figure a collectivity to come.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005). , ‘How to Understand Endgame?’, Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 216–40. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Avineri, Shlomo, The Making of Modern Zionism (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Castel-Bloom, Orly, Heichan ani nimtset? (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1990). Cohen, Uri, Likro et Orly Castel-Bloom (Tel Aviv: Achuzat Ba’it, 2011). Gluzman, Michael, The Zionist Body: Nationalism, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Hebrew Literature (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007). Goldstein, Yossi, Ahad Ha’am veherzl (Tel Aviv: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2011).

334

Oded Nir

Gurevich, David, Postmodernism: Tarbut vesifrut besof hame’a ha’esrim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1997), 287–304. Ha’am, Ahad, ‘Emet Me’eretz Israel’, 1891, accessed 4 January 2015. Herzog, Omri, ‘Neuland me’et Eshkol Nevo: Magi’a l’aretz hamuvtachat’, 6 June 2011, accessed 9 September 2014. Hever, Hannan, Hasipur Vehale’om (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007). Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, Diacritics 7/2 (1977), 2–21. , ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60. , ‘Future City’, New Left Review 21 (2004), 65–78. , Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). Khalidi, Muhammad Ali, ‘Utopian Zionism or Zionist Proselytism? A Reading of Herzl’s Altneuland’, Journal of Palestine Studies 30/4 (2001), 55–6. Kurzweil, Baruch, Sifrutenu Ha-chadasha: hemshech o mahapecha? (Tel Aviv: Schoken, 1959). Lukács, Georg, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), , History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). , ‘Realism in the Balance’, in Ernst Bloch et al., foreword Fredric Jameson, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 28–59. Marin, Louis, Utopics: Spatial Play (Atlantic Highlands, NJ; London: Macmillan, 1984). Melamed, Ariana, ‘Ma asita li, Herzl’, Yedioth Aharonoth, 7 September 2002 accessed 29 September 2014. Miron, Dan, Bodedim be-mo’adam (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987). Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Neumann, Boaz, Tshukat Hahaluzim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2009). Nevo, Eshkol, Neuland (Or Yehuda: Zmora-Bitan, 2011). Nitzan, Paul, and Shimshon Bichler, Merichaei milchama ledividendim shel shalom ( Jerusalem: Carmel, 2001). , The Global Political Economy of Israel: From War Profits to Peace Dividends (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

Totalizing Imaginaries

335

Penslar, Derek Jonathan, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Ram, Uri, Haglobalizatsia shel Israel: mcworld betel aviv, jihad beyrushala’yim (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2005). Rokem, Na’ama, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2013). Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Sand, Shlomo, The Invention of the Land of Israel (London: Verso, 2012). Shafir, Gershon, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, 1882– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Shaked, Gershon, Hasiporet Ha’ivrit 1880–1980, vol. 1. (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uchad, 1977). Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). Szeman, Imre, and Eric Cazdyn, After Globalization (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Wegner, Phillip, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Zertal, Idith, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Notes on Contributors

ignacio corona is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University, specializing in Mexican and Latin/o American Cultural and Literary Studies. He is the author of Después de Tlatelolco: las narrativas políticas en México (2001) and co-editor of The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle: Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre (2002), Postnational Musical Identities: Production, Marketing, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario (2008) and Gender Violence at the US-Mexico Border: Media Representations and Public Intervention (2010). christian j. emden is Professor of German Studies at Rice University. His work focuses on German and European intellectual history and political thought, and he is on the editorial board of Modern Intellectual History and the Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie, co-edits the book series Cultural History and Literary Imagination and serves as an external reviewer for the European Science Foundation. His books include Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (2014), Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (2008), Walter Benjamins Archäologie der Moderne. Kulturwissenschaft um 1930 (2006) and Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (2005). He has co-edited Beyond Habermas: Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere (2012) and ImageScapes: Studies in Intermediality (2010). bernd fischer is Professor of German at The Ohio State University. His books include Ein anderer Blick – Saul Aschers politische Schriften (2015); Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity (2011; with Tim Mehigan); Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture (2007; with Helen Fehervary); A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (2003); Das Eigene und das Eigentliche: Klopstock, Herder, Fichte, Kleist. Episoden aus der Konstruktionsgeschichte nationaler Intentionalitäten (1996); Christoph Hein. Drama und Prosa im letzten Jahrzehnt der DDR (1990); Ironische

338

Notes on Contributors

Metaphysik. Die Erzählungen Heinrich von Kleists (1988); Kabale und Liebe. Skepsis und Melodrama in Schillers bürgerlichem Trauerspiel (1987); Literatur und Politik. Die ‘Novellensammlung von 1812’ und das ‘Landhausleben’ von Achim von Arnim (1983). His current project runs under the heading Aesthetics and Bureaucracies of Recognition. edgar landgraf is Associate Professor in the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages at Bowling Green State University. His research interests include German literature, aesthetics and philosophy from the mid-eighteenth to the nineteenth century, as well as contemporary literature, and the application of systems theory to these different areas. He is the author of Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives (2011) and numerous articles on Goethe, Karl Philipp Moritz, Kleist, Kant, Nietzsche and Niklas Luhmann, among others. susanne lüdemann is Professor of German Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Munich. Her current research focuses on forms of philological knowledge, the relationship between law and literature, and theories of modernity. She is the author of Politics of Deconstruction: A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida (2014), Jacques Derrida zur Einführung (2011), Metaphern der Gesellschaft. Studien zum soziologischen und politischen Imaginären (2004), and Mythos und Selbstdarstellung. Zur Poetik der Psychoanalyse (1994), and has co-authored Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (2007) and Des Kaisers neue Kleider. Über das Imaginäre politischer Herrschaft (2002). christoph menke is Professor in Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt/Main, focusing on political philosophy and philosophy of law. He is the author of Die Kraft der Kunst (2013), Recht und Gewalt (2011), Kraft. Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie (2008; Engl. 2012), Philosophie der Menschenrechte. Zur Einführung (2007; with Arnd Pollmann), Die Gegenwart der Tragödie. Versuch über Urteil und Spiel (2005; Engl. 2009), Spiegelungen der Gleichheit (2000; Engl. 2006), Tragödie im Sittlichen. Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (1996) and Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida (1988; Engl. 1999).

Notes on Contributors

339

may mergenthaler is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on theories of literature and poetic language. She has published a book, Zwischen Eros und Mitteilung: Die Frühromantik im Symposium der ‘Athenaeums-Fragmente’ (2012), and articles on Hölderlin and Keats. Her current project examines metaphor and its critique in lyric poetry from the Romantic period to the present. dorothea von mücke is Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University, specializing in eighteenth-century and Romantic German and literature and aesthetics. Her books include Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1991; with Veronica Kelly, ed. and intro.), Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century (1994) and The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (2003). She is a co-editor of the New History of German Literature (2004).  oded nir is a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on Marxism and post-Marxism, Israeli and world literature, globalization and Critical Theory. His dissertation is titled ‘Nutshells and Infinite Space: Totality and Global Culture’ (2014). juliane rebentisch is professor of aesthetics, ethics and political philosophy at the Offenbach University of Art and Design. She has published Theorien der Gegenwartskunst zur Einführung (2013), Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz (2012), Ästhetik der Installation (2003/2011; Engl. 2012) and co-edited, most recently, Juzgar el arte contemporáneo. Simposio internacional/Judging Contemporary Art. International Symposium (2012), Willkür. Freiheit und Gesetz II (2011) and Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (2010). jade larissa schiff is Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College and works at the intersections of political theory, international relations, phenomenology and literary criticism. She is author of Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative, Ontology, Responsiveness (2014) and her most

340

Notes on Contributors

recent articles include ‘Liberal and the Question: Strauss and Derrida on Politics and Philosophy’ (2014), ‘Varieties of Thoughtlessness and the Limits of Thinking’ (2013) and ‘From Antiliberal to Untimely Liberal: Leo Strauss’ Two Critiques of Liberalism’ (2010). kam shapiro is Associate Professor of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. His work explores various means by which sovereignty and citizenship are invested in and composed by affects and habits. He is the author of Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics (2008) and Sovereign Nations, Carnal States (2003) as well as various articles, including ‘Confounding Solidarity: Singular, Universal and Particular Subjects in the Artworks of Tehching Hsieh and the Politics of the New Left’ (2013) ‘Critical Feelings and Pleasurable Associations’ (2010) and ‘Myth of the Multitude’ (2004). fernando unzueta is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University, specializing in nineteenthcentury Latin American cultures and the formation of national identities and historical consciousness. In his book La imaginación histórica y el romance nacional en Hispanoamérica (1996), Unzueta provides a new theoretical and historical articulation of the romance nacional as a genre closely connected to historical discourses and national imaginings. His most recent articles include ‘Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century’ (2009), ‘Subjetividades latinoamericanas al borde de la modernidad: entre el hombre de bien y el buen ciudadano’ (2009) and ‘Novel Subjects: On Reading and National (Subject) Formations’ (2002).

Index

Abbt, Thomas  18 Adorno, Theodor W.  198–9 aesthetics  183–90, 198, 205–8, 212–4, 307 Altamirano, Ignacio M.  248–9, 251, 254–5 Althusser, Louis  205–6, 312 Anderson, Benedict  20–1, 231–2, 305 Appadurai, Arjun  213–4 autonomy  105–6, 186, 190, 214–5, 264, 323 Benjamin, Walter  197 Bennet, Jane  216, 218 Blest Gana, Alberto  247–8 Martín Rivas 256–62 blood phones  211 Bourdieu, Pierre  83–4, 185 Bovenschen, Silvia  198 Burke, Edmund  43–4, 46–7 Castel-Bloom, Elaine  323–4 Castellanos, Rosario  281, 287–8, 292–3, 298 Chasteen, John  232–3 citizenship  52, 238 colonialism see Latin America collective imaginary  306–7, 320–1 communicative distortion  63–4, 67, 85 conflict resources  208–10 Connolly, William  221 constitutionalization  122, 126, 133, 140 Damasio, Antonio  214 Darko, Suvin  308–9

David, Jacques Louis, Oath of the Horatians  53–7 deliberative democracy  85–6, 90 demagogue 144 demonstrations 173–4 Dewey, John  212–4, 223–4 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste  186 embodied cognition  205 embodiment (political) 42–5, 57 exclusion  48–9, 58 expert cultures  149 first-order hypocrisy  144 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín ‘Apología de El Periquillo Sarniento’ 243–4, 247 Don Catrín de la Fachenda 243 El Periquillo Sarniento 240–4 Flatley, Jonathan  221–2 folletines [feuilleton]  245, 258 fraternity (brotherhood)  45–58 freedom 183–14 Freud, Sigmund  79–80 global economies  204, 206, 208–9 Gluzman, Michael  319–21 Habermas, Jürgen  121–3, 146, 250, 254, 261–2 Between Facts and Norms  122, 128, 131–4, 143, 148, 150–1 critiques of his public sphere concept  265, 277–8, 281, 299 ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’ 278

342 Index Knowledge and Human Interests  65–9, 72–3 On Systematically Distorted Communication  70–1 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere  123, 129–30, 138–9, 237–9, 264–5, 277 Theory of Communicative Action  63–5, 76–7 Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence  73–6, 78 Halutzim movement  322–3 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri  177–9, 206 Harvey, David  212 Hebrew literature  311–2 Herder, Johann Gottfried  2 art  28, 29 ‘Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancient?’ 16–37 folk 34–5 language  23, 27 literature  32, 33 nation 34–5 philosophy  28, 29 print culture  23–4 religion  23, 26 Herzl, Theodor, Altneuland  309, 314–21 Horace 185 House (tv show)  219 Israel, State of  312, 322, 323 Jameson, Fredric Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions  317 ‘Cognitive mapping’  204–6, 214–5, 307

‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’  320 Postmodernism 207 Judson, Olivia  217 Judt, Tony  15–16, 37 Kant, Immanuel  1–3, 136, 184, 190, 195–6, 317 Khalidi, Muhammad  314 Kintz, Linda  299 Kluge, Alexander, and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience 296 Lacan, Jacques, Écrits  82, 299 Latin America Argentina 331 authoritarian regimes  276–7 Brazil  276, 284n27, 290 colonialism  280–1, 282–3, 287 indigenous populations  294 letrados [men of letters]  233, 239, 264 ‘lettered city’  239, 264, 287 literature  234–5, 264–5 Mexico 274 nation building  231–3 novel, ninetheenth-century  244–7, 250, 254–6, 261–2 novel, theory and criticism  252–3 modernization  274–5, 279, 281–2, 294 postcolonialism 284 public sphere  233–4, 237–40, 275, 279–80, 282–6 women  275, 290–1, 293–5, 300–1 Lefebvre, Henri  222–3 Lefort, Claude  42, 174–5 legitimization  103–4, 131 Lippmann, Walter  93–5, 107, 224 Lispector, Clarice  275–6, 289–90, 297–9 Luhmann, Niklas  96–116, 170–1

343

Index Lukács, Georg  308–9 Lynch, Kevin  205–7 mapping aesthetic 208–12 cognitive see Jameson reflexive  213–6, 221–2 Marcuse, Herbert  80–1 Marin, Louis  317 market economy  135–8 Martí, José, Amistad funesta [Doomed Friendship] 263–4 mass consumption and culture  190–2, 242, 244, 248–9, 264–5 masses  157–60, 165, 173–4 materialist philosophy  213, 216–7 Mendelssohn, Moses  3 mimesis 88–9 More, Thomas, Utopia 316 Moser, Carl von  18 multitude  157–8, 165–9, 176, 178–9 Negri, Antonio see Hardt Negt, Oskar see Kluge Nevo, Eshkol, Neuland  322 New Historians  305–6 Ngai, Sianne  220–1 Nietzsche, Friedrich  160–1 normative demands  125 normativity 127–8 oath (political)  49–58 obesity 217–8 ontological distortion  64–5, 76 Orientialism see Said Palestine 315–6 pathological distortion  64–5 Plato 158–63 Poblete, Juan  252, 258–9 Polgreen, Lydia  208

politainment 148 political apathy  111–4 political improvisation  114–5 Poniatowska, Elena  299 postmodernism  214, 326–7 Israeli postmodernism  323, 326n58 power 115 public as mirror and audience  107–9 public image (Kevin Lynch)  215–6 public opinion  99–101, 110, 130–2, 143–6, 170–2, 249, 258–9, 286 public sphere  233–4, 237 gendering of the public sphere  272–3 relationship to the media  286 Rancière, Jacques  175 Rawls, John  147 Rokem, Na’ama  311, 322 sacrifice 56–7 Said, Edward, Orientalism 315–6 Sarmiento, Domingo F.  236, 253 second-order hypocrisy  145 self-observation 107–8 Sennett, Richard  193 Sociedad de la Igualdad [Society for Equality] 260 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz  299–300 South America see Latin America Spivak, Gayatri  298 subjectivity, expression of  297–9 Tarde, Gabriel  166–7, 169 taste (bourgeois taste)  184–190, 198 consumerist  192–194, 197 postmodernist 195–6 Taylor, Charles  89 tertulias  235, 258–9, 260–1 theatrocracy  159–160, 164, 172, 176 Tocqueville, Alexis  170 totalization  208–9, 215, 320–1

344 Index utopianism  313–4, 316–8 anti-anti-utopianism 332 crisis of utopianism  325–6 utopian neutralization  320, 329–31 Weber  142, 144 Wegner, Philipp

Imaginary Communities  308, 313, 317–8 Wellmer, Albrecht  178 Young, Iris Marion  85–7 Zionism(s)  310–4, 315–6

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY This series promotes inquiry into the relationship between literary texts and their cultural and intellectual contexts, in theoretical, interpretative and historical perspectives. It has developed out of a research initiative of the German Department at ­Cambridge University, but its focus of interest is on the European tradition broadly perceived. Its purpose is to encourage comparative and interdisciplinary research into the connections between cultural history and the literary imagination generally. The editors are especially concerned to encourage the investigation of the role of the literary imagination in cultural history and the interpretation of cultural history through the literary text. Examples of the kind of issues in which they are particularly interested include the following: – The material conditions of culture and their representation in literature, e.g. responses to the impact of the sciences, technology, and industrialisation, the confrontation of ‘high’ culture with popular culture, and the impact of new media; – The construction of cultural meaning through literary texts, e.g. responses to cultural crisis, or paradigm shifts in cultural self-perception, including the establishment of cultural ‘foundation myths’; – History and cultural memory as mediated through the metaphors and models ­deployed in literary writing and other media; – The intermedial and intercultural practice of authors or literary movements in ­specific periods; – The methodology of cultural inquiry and the theoretical discussion of such issues as intermediality, text as a medium of cultural memory, and intercultural relations. Both theoretical reflection on and empirical investigation of these issues are welcome. The series is intended to include monographs, editions, and collections of papers based on recent research in this area. The main language of publication is English.

Vol. 1 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Papers from the ­Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Vol. 2 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the C ­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Vol. 3 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. Papers from the ­Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, C ­ ambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Vol. 4 Anthony Fothergill: Secret Sharers. Joseph Conrad’s Cultural Reception in Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Vol. 5 Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.): Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Vol. 6 Renata Tyszczuk: In Hope of a Better Age. Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9 Vol. 7 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X Vol. 8 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8 Vol. 9 Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes. Studies in Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1 Vol. 10 Alasdair King: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing, Media, Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 Alexandra Kolb: Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 Carlo Salzani: Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 Monique Rinere: Transformations of the German Novel. Simplicissimus in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 Anna O’ Driscoll: Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds): Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds): Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 Vol. 20 Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds): Playing False. Representations of Betrayal. 355pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0 Vol. 21 Guy Tourlamain: Völkisch Writers and National Socialism. A Study of RightWing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960. 394pp., 2014. ISBN 978-3-03911-958-5 Vol. 22 Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds): Alternative Worlds. Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900. 343pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0

Vol. 23 Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel (eds): Invisibility Studies. Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture. 388pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0985-1 Vol. 24 Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds): Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. 349pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0991-2