eJournals REAL 34/1

REAL
0723-0338
2941-0894
Narr Verlag Tübingen
2018
341

Narratives about American Democratic Culture

2018
Winfried Fluck
W infriED f luck Narratives about American Democratic Culture I. When the pioneers of the American studies movement tried to develop an argument that would convince a hostile academic world of the need to study American literature and culture, they basically had two choices� One was to claim that American literature and culture merited special scholarly attention because, in contrast to the elitism of European culture, it could be seen as a manifestation of specifically American virtues, as a culture inspired and shaped by democratic conditions and ideals� For this argument, scholars like Constance Rourke had paved the way in the 1930s� Against those European as well as American critics who considered American culture inferior and who asked, often in exasperation, whether and when an authentic, uniquely American culture would finally emerge, Rourke answered that it had been there all the time, but that critics, in their erroneous equation of the idea of culture with European high culture, had failed to take any note of it� 1 In order to make up for this oversight, her work focused on a vernacular tradition in American culture, tracing, as Alan Trachtenberg has put it, “the intricate web of indebtedness of all the major writers from Emerson to Henry James, and contemporaries like Frost and even Eliot, to the bursting, lawless energies of everyday vernacular comedy in America” (4) - a vision of American culture as expression of common American values that found strong support in American culture of the Thirties and its focus on “the people.” 2 One way 1 Cf� Arthur Wertheim: “Constance Rourke’s historical essays during the Depression were devoted to discovering the roots of American culture� The seven volumes she published between 1927 and 1942 are closely linked to the intellectual climate of the 1930s, specifically to the themes of regionalism and nationalism in the arts and related fields, and her interest in the relationship of folk and popular culture to regional traditions led to the discovery of neglected aspects of Americana” (50). The most important of Rourke’s books are Trumpets of Jubilee (1927); American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931); Davy Crockett (1934); Charles Sheeler. Artist in the American Tradition (1938); The Roots of American Culture (1942)� As Robert Spiller wrote in a review of the latter, Rourke’s “theory provided an explanation of national character, which freed it from (…) a formal aesthetic tradition. (…) Her hope was to discover and define a distinctive American aesthetic, however crude, as the expression of an emerging American national character” (66). 2 It is still echoed in the central role that the term vernacular culture played in the work of critics like Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx in the Fifties� See Leo Marx, “The Vernacular Tradition in American Literature,” and Henry Nash Smith’s book Mark Twain� The Development of a Writer� Twain played a key role for both, Smith and Marx, 6 W infriED f luck to create a culture of national self-recognition that would give expression to America’s best values was to turn to American democracy as a way of life and to focus on vernacular forms of culture in which common people would recognize their own voice and their own values� As Philip Gleason has shown in his discussion of the founding years of American studies, World War II played an important role in strengthening that argument by putting the idea of democracy at the center of American national identity� So strong was this phase of a “democratic revival” (349) that “America as a practical instance of democracy came to be equated with the abstract ideal of democracy” (353). America was the exemplary democratic nation and hence, in order to fully understand and appreciate the power of its ideals and values, one had to focus on its democratic culture� However, in the attempts to legitimize a special focus on the study of American literature and culture, the democratic culture-narrative was eventually displaced by another line of argumentation that may be called the American Renaissance-narrative� This narrative focused on a body of American authors of the Romantic period which F�O� Matthiessen had put at the center of American literary history in his study American Renaissance. 3 This shift from democratic culture to American romanticism raises the interesting question why the writers of the American Renaissance were considered more useful for the academic legitimization of American literary studies than the democratic tradition� I can think of two reasons� One is that a democratic culture defined as vernacular tradition was, aesthetically speaking, not a very imposing form of culture and hence, perhaps with the exception of Mark Twain, not very well suited to counter the reservations of skeptical Ivy League English-departments� The standards of cultural achievement and aesthetic value that had gained dominance in academia after World War II were those of formalism and aesthetic modernism, and vernacular culture because, of all major American writers, he came closest to vernacular culture� - In his study The Beer Can By the Highway. What’s American About America, John Kouwenhoven develops a theory of American culture based on the idea of a vernacular culture� See also his study The Arts in Modern American Civilization in which he aims to identify the arts that are truly representative of American civilization and finds them, preferably, in “Stone, Steel, and Jazz,” as one of his main chapters is entitled. As he makes clear in the chapter “What is Vernacular? ” Kouwenhoven uses the term vernacular to draw attention above all to American technological design� For a discussion of the continuing importance of the concept of the vernacular for a theory of American literature see also Sieglinde Lemke’s study The Vernacular Matters of American Literature. 3 Matthiessen’s study marks a key moment of transition from the one narrative to the other. On the one hand, Matthiessen claims that the five authors he studies have one common denominator, their devotion to the possibilities of democracy� On the other hand, however, his own analyses hardly highlight this aspect: “My aim has been to follow these books through their implications, to observe them as the culmination of their authors’ talents, to assess them in relation to one another and to the drift of our literature since, and, so far as possible, to evaluate them in accordance with the enduring requirements for great art� That last aim will seem to many only a pious phrase, but it describes the critic’s chief responsibility� His obligation is to examine an author’s resources of language and of genres, in a word, to be preoccupied with form” (xi). Narratives about American Democratic Culture 7 of the Rourke-kind fell notably short of those standards� You probably have to live in a small town, as Rourke did, to counter high-brow reservations about American culture with Davy Crockett� The American Renaissance writers, on the other hand, were far better suited to meet the aesthetic criteria derived from modernism� At least this is the case, if one reads them from the point of view that D�H� Lawrence had introduced into the study of American literature in his book Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923. In his brief foreword, Lawrence turned all conventional wisdom about American literature and culture on its head by arguing that some American writers of the nineteenth-century are really the most radical of modern writers, true modernists avant la lettre� His bold claim is worth being quoted at length, because, unwittingly, it provided a key argument for post-World War II American studies: Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American� Russian and American� And by American I do not mean Sherwood Anderson, who is so Russian� I mean the old people, little thin volumes of Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman� These seem to me to have reached a verge, as the more voluminous Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov reached a limit on the other side� The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached� The European moderns are all trying to be extreme� The great Americans I mention just were it� Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them to-day� The great difference between the extreme Russians and the extreme Americans lies in the fact that the Russians are explicit and hate eloquence and symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, whereas the Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning� (viii) 4 Matthiessen may have put American romanticism at the center of American literary studies, but he had not provided an interpretive model� Lawrence, on the other hand, suggested a method of reading that became dominant in the 1950s� 5 His argument is ingenious� What he manages to do with it is to redefine an American literature long considered provincial as a modern literature in the mode of a literature of subversion and negation� This claim depends on the premise of a double structure, and in effect, in retrospect, one may 4 Cushing Strout draws attention to an argument by W.H. Auden that influenced Lawrence strongly: “I first set out on literary studies very much under the influence of Tocqueville’s literary prophesies� I was led to them by W�H� Auden’s long poem New Year Letter. One of his notes strongly impressed me� ‘The American literary tradition,’ it ran, ‘Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, T�S� Eliot, is much nearer to Dostoievsky than to Tolstoi� It is a literature of lonely people� Most American books might well start like Moby Dick, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Most American novels are parables, their settings even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomania” (144-145). The French may have transformed Hollywood movies into a “classical cinema” and elevated American hard-boiled fiction to pulp modernism, but some English writers proved amazingly perceptive about the future canon of American literature� 5 For a helpful discussion of the impact of D�H� Lawrence on American literary studies see Michael J� Colacurcio, “The Symbolic and the Symptomatic: D�H� Lawrence in Recent American Criticism.” 8 W infriED f luck argue that almost all major studies written in the post-war founding period of American studies, characterized as myth and symbol school, are based on this methodological premise� 6 In each case, the interpretation of American literature and culture aims at the recovery of a covert level of meaning that undermines the surface level in a stance of negation, reenacting Melville’s famous “No! in Thunder” in defiance of a naively and uncritically optimistic view of “America.” Seen this way, what Lawrence calls classic American literature becomes almost an allegory of critical theories of modernity and an aesthetics of negation: One level, the textual surface seems to reflect, in its bland optimism and lack of a critical attitude, the instrumentalization of reason in modernity, while a second, underlying level of meaning provides a resource - in fact, the only remaining resource - for negating this naïve version of progress� The often forced ways in which this negating potential was established in interpretations by the myth and symbol school can then be seen as an almost willful act of resignification, saying in fact: If we want to make a strong case for the study of American literature, then we have to find a way to describe it, not as democratic culture, but as modernist culture, that is, as an art of double-coding and subtle negation� As Leo Marx puts it in the afterword to a re-edition of The Machine in the Garden: “Nevertheless, The Machine in the Garden emphasizes a fundamental divide in American culture and society. It separates the popular affirmation of industrial progress disseminated by spokesmen for the dominant economic and political elites, and the disaffected, often adversarial viewpoint of a minority of political radicals, writers, artists, clergymen, and independent intellectuals” (383). As Lawrence had suggested, the literary form that makes this double meaning possible is the symbol as a mode of representation that transcends any crude literalism� The symbol is inherently ambiguous, often an attempt to express the unsayable, perhaps even the unconscious� In reaction to the Thirties and its strong preference for realism, the symbol was rediscovered in the post-War period as a distinct feature of the language of literature, as something that provided literature with an aesthetic dimension of its own, complicated naively mimetic views of literary representation and prevented it from being instrumentalized as merely a political statement� 7 In their 6 On the central role of the idea of a double structure in the study of American literature, see my analysis in “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies” and in Theorien amerikanischer Literatur� 7 This explains the openly hostile attitude toward American popular culture in that generation, which, in taking another cue from critical theories of modernity, was rejected as “mass culture.” This rejection created a problem, however, with regards to a third strategy of legitimation, that of presenting American studies as a new, interdisciplinary method of cultural analysis focusing on American culture as a whole� The first attacks on the myth and symbol school within American studies therefore were methodological and not political, focusing on the apparent contradiction of an approach that claims to study American culture comprehensively and yet continues to regard high art as key document for an understanding of this culture� This challenge led to a crisis of self-definition and, eventually, to a shift in legitimation from modernist to methodological arguments� The debate - and what is at stake in it - is well Narratives about American Democratic Culture 9 search for a source of value beneath a corrupt Western civilization, modernist texts like T�S� Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Ulysses had emphasized myth and symbol as universal patterns of meaning, linking modern and pre-historic art� 8 In contrast to forms like realism or popular culture, this symbolism, transcending the limitations of Western rationalism, was “deep,” and an American literature that was organized along similar lines could thus gain the status of high art� Hawthorne and Melville moved to the center of the American canon, and the genre of the metaphysical romance with its intricate ambiguities became the American genre par excellence, the supreme embodiment of an American modernism avant la lettre� This elevation of American literature to the level of modern art provided a much better ground for justifying a special focus on American literature than a democratic culture defined as vernacular culture. Thus American studies of the post-War period made the romance the core of an American tradition that was praised, not for its expression of the democratic principle, but for its artful, double-coded critique of American myths� The myth and symbol school’s tacit reliance on a critical theory of modernity implies a particular view of American society and the role culture is supposed to play in it� In the democratic culture-argument, America is a pioneer country of democracy and hence a world-wide leader of a democratization process that is far ahead of European developments� In the American Renaissance-narrative, the view of America is that of a materialistic civilization, exemplifying some of the worst tendencies of modernity, and therefore only an art of negation or a strategy of double-coding can offer some kind of resistance� Virgin Land, the founding text of American studies, is already on the way from the vernacular tradition to a reconceptualization of literature as myth, but the following books by Charles Feidelson, R�W� B� Lewis, Richard Chase, Harry Levin, Leslie Fiedler, Leo Marx and Richard Poirier, the most important studies of American literature in the Fifties and early Sixties, moved the study of American literature from the democratic to the American Renaissance-paradigm� 9 Politically, this position may be defined as left liberal. It criticizes the naïve, self-congratulatory dimension of American liberalism and its undisputed belief in progress, but hopes that an interpretive skepticism about summarized in Leo Marx’s essay “American Studies - A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” which, despite the methodological emphasis of its title, is really a defense of, and a plea for, a continued focus of American studies on high art� 8 Important inspirations were provided by a number of influential “myth and symbol” studies like Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance; James Frazer’s The Golden Bough; Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces; in philosophy Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms and Susanne Langer’s popularization Philosophy in a New Key. 9 Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (1953); R�W�B� Lewis, The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth-Century (1955); Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957); Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness. Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958); Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964); Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere. The Place of Style in American Literature (1966). 10 W infriED f luck American “myths” may have the potential for increasing national self-reflexivity� However, when the new social movements emerged in the Sixties, this left liberalism was criticized for still believing in the idea of “America,” despite its own critical claims� This is a moment when the political Left, including left liberals, for whom aesthetic negation is still a strategy of resistance, is displaced by a cultural Left that considers dissent part of a ritual of consensus that merely stabilizes the system� Accordingly, modernity takes on a different meaning� In aesthetic modernism, there are still two versions of modernity, that of instrumental rationality and that of its negation by modern art� Now there is only one modernity left and it is all-encompassing in its reach� In aesthetic modernism’s version of modernity, there are conformists and non-conforming nay-sayers; now, even the nay-sayers are not merely complicit but colonizers in their own subtle, cunning, and often powerful ways� In the hermeneutics of suspicion that has dominated American literary studies over the last decades, phenomena like racism or sexism are no longer a dark underside of modernity but describe its very nature� In the context of this radical redefinition of modernity, a justification of the study of American literature can no longer be based on the claim that it offers a unique, especially interesting version of aesthetic modernism that cunningly undermines American myths� What other options are there, however, if one does not want to follow the radicalism of the cultural Left and its hermeneutics of suspicion all the way? Would it make sense, under these circumstances, to go back to the concept that had been left behind, that of a democratic culture? After all, the United States has been the standard bearer of democratic values in world history. As the influential political theorist and founder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly, put it in 1909, the United States is thus seen as the land of democracy with good reason, as a nation “committed to the realization of the democratic ideal“ (Keyssar ix)� 10 Basing our understanding of American culture on a value that has historically distinguished the U�S� from other countries would hold the promise of getting closer to the principles and values that have shaped America decisively and have given it a unique, if not exceptional role in history� Can such a focus counter the critique of America that has taken hold in American literary studies in the aftermath of the Sixties? Judging from the persistent re-emergence of the terms democracy and democratic culture in recent literary and cultural criticism, this is what some critics seem to have in mind; in fact, as we will see, the concept of a democratic culture and the claim that it is the representative American culture after all, has never gone away and has been kept alive by critics who do not see the unique potential of American culture in a culture 10 A typical version of an argument that is presented in many variants is provided by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua who claims in his essay “Democracy and the Novel” that for Americans democracy is “the very skin of their body,” because “the United States is the only nation in the world whose national identity is almost genetically related to democracy� Its national independence was forged at birth within the world of democratic presuppositions (…) Democracy is the only undisputed trademark of the American heritage” (Yehoshua 42-43). Narratives about American Democratic Culture 11 of negation or a radical political critique but in an - not necessarily uncritical - focus on the creativity of American democracy and its culture, often grounded in intellectual traditions like transcendentalism or pragmatism� 11 In the following essay I therefore want to take up the question again of how a democratic culture may be defined and whether - and to what extent - the concept can provide a conceptual basis for the study of American literature and culture� The argument will be presented in three main parts� The first part provides an overview of the many, often contradictory ways in which the concept of a democratic culture has been used in American literary and cultural criticism� Since this historical overview cannot provide a common ground for discussion, because of the very different uses made of the term ‘democratic,’ the second part will try to approach the problem in a more systematic fashion and focus on four influential theories and expressions of democratic culture� Responding to the limitations of these theoretical positions, the third part will propose a different perspective� In my conclusion the question of the relation between the concept of a democratic culture and the realities of American democracy will be one of the topics to be discussed� II. What exactly do critics mean when they use terms like democracy and democratic culture? Often, these terms are used as if their meaning and value would be self-evident, so that no further clarification is needed. In fact, the assumption of a common consensus may be part of the usefulness of the terms in the current intellectual climate: the word democracy seems to be one of the few remaining terms on whose value critics can still agree in times of postmodern relativism and philosophical anti-foundationalism� Democracy is where liberals and radicals, even conservatives, can still meet� And since democratic conditions will inevitably shape culture, one can expect to find the democratic principle pervading American culture� Thus, one of the most promising prospects of the term democratic culture lies in its suggestion that in studying it we are getting closer to the real meaning of America� As Philip Gleason and Leila Zenderland have pointed out in surveys of the development of American studies in the post-World War II period, many universities therefore “explained their new postwar American studies programs in the very language of the democratic revival” (Zenderland 277). 12 To study American democratic culture promised to provide a key to understanding America and to study America one of the best ways to engage in a support of democracy� 11 See, for example, Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, a critique of the cultural Left drawing on Walt Whitman and John Dewey as the main inspiration� In his Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle, Heinz Ickstadt describes the democratic principle as the distinguishing trait of American society and makes it the theoretical basis of his view of America and American literature� 12 Cf. Philip Gleason, “World War II and the Development of American Studies” and Leila Zenderland, “Constructing American Studies� Culture, Identity, and the Expansion of the Humanities.” 12 W infriED f luck But what exactly is democratic culture? Is it everything that is produced in a democracy as Tocqueville would have it? Or should we restrict the use of the term to those cultural forms that embody democratic values and ideals, as Walt Whitman would argue emphatically? And if the latter is the case, what is the contribution culture can make? A good starting point may be to take a look at what American cultural and literary criticism has highlighted as models or examples of American democratic culture� Even a quick, cursory glance reveals an amazing range of possibilities� On one end of the spectrum, the term is used for characterizing specific media in toto or entire taste cultures, no matter what their - possibly reactionary - content matter may be, for example when Garth Jowett calls film the democratic art or Jim Cullen entitles his survey of American popular culture “The Democratic Art.” Such sweeping definitions are not restricted to the mass media or popular culture, however. In his essay “Modern Democracy and the Novel,” A�B� Yehoshua describes the novel, starting with Don Quichote, as inherently democratic: “one finds the novel the most accommodating to a democratic perspective and reflecting in its flexibility and open structure some basic democratic principles� Perhaps, one can add, somewhat boastfully, the novel, more than any other artistic form, has encouraged and supported the democratic revolutions of modern times” (Yehoshua 45). One of the reasons is a greater degree of reader participation that the novel makes possible, “hence the relation of the author to the reader is more democratic” (47). However, reader positioning can vary, depending on author, genre, and period� Heinz Ickstadt thus shifts claims of the novel’s democratic potential to American classical realism where the narrator, in contrast to the historical novel, retreats, and reader participation is encouraged� Not the novel in general, but the realistic novel can thus be seen to come closest to Howells’s hope “that the fruits of the Enlightenment would finally ripen to the genuine cultural expression of realized Democracy” (Ickstadt 1979, 82). In his influential book Culture and Democracy, Horace Kallen argues that democracy “involves, not the elimination of difference, but the perfection and conservation of differences” (61). This is not something that the culturally still fairly homogeneous classical American realism can deliver, however, but multiculturalism can: “It involves a give and take between radically different types, and a mutual respect and mutual cooperation based on mutual understanding” (61) - not necessarily something America has already achieved but something that is one of its democratic promises� But it is in the 1930s that democratic art seems to have come into its own� For Ickstadt, the New Deal project of a public art brings to fruition “a concept of democratic art which runs through the history of American self-expression from Whitman to the democratic realism of William Dean Howells to the Progressive Era” (Ickstadt 1992, 277). At its heart was a populism that responded to the Depression with a narrative in which elites have usurped the power of the people and a regeneration of American society can only be achieved by the spirit of the people� Frank Capra’s 1930’s movies about smalltown heroes in the Lincoln mold, played by James Stewart or Gary Cooper, Narratives about American Democratic Culture 13 can be seen as a forceful reassertion of democratic ideals from a populist perspective� Capra was a political conservative, however, as was a painter like Edward Hopper: “Hopper’s belief in freedom and self-expression links his work to the democratic tradition� (…) Although his work is not usually discussed from the standpoint of politics and democracy, his focus on the common man links him to the values of democracy” (Levin 75). 13 This is a focus he shared with regionalist painters of the period and photographers who put „the dignity of labour and of the working-man, the dignity of the common people“ (Ickstadt 1987, 226) at the center of their visual representations� After World War II, views of Thirties-culture changed, and so did views of what constitutes democratic culture: what had been considered a forceful, authentic representation of the common man was now seen as sentimental populism that had tried to put culture in the service of a New Deal ideology� This - modernistically inspired - fear of a political instrumentalization of art led to a shift to an anti-representational aesthetic� Form and structure replaced content as the main source of meaning - which meant that the aesthetic value of art could no longer be determined by progressive political representations of the people� For narratives about American democratic culture this posed a challenge: they, too, had to locate the democratic principle of cultural forms in structural elements� This worked well in the case of jazz� For Stanley Crouch “jazz (…) reflects the very essence of our constitutional democracy,” because “there has never been a music in the Western world that allowed for so much improvisation on the part of so many” (7, 144). John Kouwenhoven agrees about the democratic qualities of jazz, but for different reasons� In his programmatically entitled book The Beer Can By the Highway, he focuses on objects that strike him as specifically American and that are, as Ralph Ellison puts it in a foreword, “democratically available to even the commonest of common citizens” (Ellison ii). The Manhattan skyline and the constitution, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Mark Twain’s writings, but also jazz and comic strips, and even assembly-line production and chewing gum are part of Kouwenhoven’s list - objects whose common denominator is not communal creativity but an open-ended, dehierarchized processual structure which for Kouwenhoven is also the idea that informs democracy - “the idea that there are no fixed or determinable limits to the capacities of any individual human being; and that all are entitled, by inalienable right, to equal opportunities to develop their potentialities” (Kouwenhoven 226). The shift from truthful representations of democratic conditions and ideals to “democratic structures” also proved immensely helpful in discussions of postmodernism� In an essay on “Postmodernism as a Democratic Aesthetic” Paul Cantor argues that at first blush “postmodern art seems to 13 Ironically, “Hopper and his wife (the painter Josephine Nuvision Hopper) disliked President Franklin Roosevelt� Hopper disapproved of the New Deal relief programs, including the WPA, which he believed would only encourage mediocrity� (…) The Hoppers believed that President was trying to make the United States a dictatorship” (Levin 77)� Other painters mentioned in this context are the precisionists Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler because of their paintings of mundane everyday objects� 14 W infriED f luck be elitist in nature, often obscure, esoteric, incomprehensible to the majority of people, seemingly out of touch with popular taste,” but that in fact it is a “democratic form of art” and that “it is therefore no accident that the movement has flourished most fully in the United States” (Cantor 173). 14 The more consistently the democratic principle is located in structure and not in politically progressive representations, the easier it is to argue that experimental avant-garde literature can become an exemplary version of American democratic culture: “Coming at the end of history, postmodernism is the democratic art form, for it denies that any form of art can truthfully represent reality, thereby making all aesthetic points of contention effectively moot and proclaiming the equality of all artistic styles” (Cantor 178). For Kouwenhoven and Crouch, democratic culture is constituted by openended processes, Cantor and other postmodernist critics think of a culture of radical dehierarchization� But Charles Hersch, who sees himself as member of a generation that grew up with Vietnam, brings the discussion back to a different definition of progressive politics, when, in his study Democratic Artworks, he defines democratic artworks as works “that support democracy” (2): “Through my examination of art and criticism from the fifties and sixties I show that politically engaged artworks can embody complex political ideas and support democracy by educating citizens” (3). One example is jazz that provides models of an egalitarian community, another example is Bob Dylan who “used folk music to unmask political deception and celebrate authenticity” (9). Sixties’ culture is especially useful for Hersch, because “what gives artworks a unique capacity for democratic political education is their engagement of the senses” (11). Hersch’s book offers by no means a throwback to a naïve politicization in the mode of the Thirties� Rather, it draws attention to an interdependence that we have already emphasized at an earlier point: whatever a critic’s view of democratic culture is, will depend on what his understanding of democracy is� The view of democracy that shapes large parts of Thirties-culture is that of a sentimental populism, the postmodern view is that of a radical structural egalitarianism that comes close to libertarian views� In contrast, Hersch takes his point of departure from a commitment to the idea of a participatory democracy and from the perspective of this premise, his inclusion of a singer like Bob Dylan makes perfect sense, because music, including Dylan’s, “contributed to the participatory, experiential politics of the sixties” (11)� “Because of its communal nature and its effect on the body and even the unconscious, then, music was more suited to the participatory nature of politics in the sixties” (12). At one time or another, it seems, terms like democratic culture or democratic aesthetics have been applied to almost every object or phenomenon in American culture - the mass media, film, popular culture, the novel, vernacular forms in writing and painting, Whitmanesque romanticism, realism, but also modernism, postmodernism, Thirties culture and Sixties culture, jazz, 14 As others would argue this process of dehierarchization already begins in modernism with writers like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 15 skyscrapers, multiculturalism, literature, films, and photographs about “the people.” One could add populist melodramas like the sensationalist novels of George Lippard, but also an anti-intellectual culture of immediate corporeality like rap music. Is there any way of making sense of this sprawling abundance? One obvious explanation is that democracy means different things to different people� Consequently, they can hold very different views on what the distinguishing marks are that make a cultural form “democratic.” The key terms here are access, structure, dehierarchization, and democratic ideals� For some critics, democratic culture is a matter of popular access, for others of democratic structures of representation, for still others of an aesthetic subversion of hierarchies, and for still others of democratic convictions� In each case different forms and practices become exemplary: 1) Access: some consider mass media like film or popular culture as exemplary forms of democratic culture, because they facilitate the consumption and comprehension of culture� Eliminating elitist barriers in culture can be seen as a democratic breakthrough� 2) Structure: another approach focuses, not on the question of access, but on aesthetic form; it calls those forms democratic that are organized by dehierarchized, open-ended processual structures in which no single element is a privileged carrier of meaning, as, for example, in the experimental literature of postmodernism� What others see as another chapter in the history of avant-garde elitism, can thus be reconceptualized as democratic culture� 3) Dehierarchization: a broader version of this form-focused approach sees the concept of democratic culture in the larger context of an ongoing historical process, starting way before the arrival of modern democracies, in which claims of religious, political, social, intellectual, and aesthetic authorities have been undermined by ever new aesthetic challenges� 4) Democratic Ideals: some critics want to narrow down uses of the term democratic culture to those cultural forms that are openly supporting democratic values, as New Deal culture often did, for example� In each of these cases, democratic culture can mean something entirely different: undermining the authority of high culture, of oppressive forms of order, of the dominant symbolic system, and of elite rule� At this point one could argue that democratic culture can indeed be many things and that its many differences do not matter as long as they are all democratic� But these different views of democratic culture can easily collide� Defining democratic culture by access could mean, for example, to include forms of popular culture or the mass media such as the film The Birth of a Nation, and indeed, for a long time, critics focused on the film’s pioneer contributions to the development of film language that made movies easier to understand for a broad public� However, from the perspective of democratic ideals, the film is, above all, blatantly racist and anti-democratic in its depiction of Reconstruction� From the perspective of access, but also from that of democratic values, experimental postmodernism does not look democratic at all in its hard-to-understand avant-garde aesthetic, whereas, on the other hand, from the perspective of “structural” democratic culture realistic forms of representation or the New Deal culture of the Thirties impose artificial systems 16 W infriED f luck of order that undermine egalitarian goals� From the perspective of a history of dehierarchization, New Deal culture looks aesthetically retrograde and does not fit into a story of aesthetic democratization, while from the democratic ideals perspective, forms of aesthetic dehierarchization can be conservative, if not reactionary, as modernism has shown repeatedly� To call a cultural object “democratic” is therefore not yet sufficient. Instead, critics should clarify what the democratic quality is that they have in mind� However, as a rule, they don’t, perhaps because it is more convenient not to be associated with any particular version of democracy� In not clarifying which one is meant, the critic can embrace them all and remain above the fray� How is it possible that democracy as a word familiar to all of us and valued widely can lead to so many different narratives? The answer, quite simply, is that contrary to the intuition from which this section took its point of departure - that we all seem to know what democracy is and that we therefore all refer to the same thing in discussing it - there is not just one, but there are a number of very different concepts of democracy in circulation� To be sure, the central idea of democracy is a promise of equality� But even if we agree to see democracy’s common denominator in a politics of equality, the problem of conflicting meanings remains, because equality, too, is not a term with a stable, self-evident meaning; it, too, can take on very different meanings, ranging from equality of rights, of rank, of equal opportunity and equal recognition to communal values like cooperation, citizen participation and universal values like the dignity of all men� In fact, one may distinguish different versions of democracy by how they conceive of equality� Calling the mass media and popular culture democratic implies a view of democracy as a system of formalized rights to which everybody is equally entitled� Narratives of democratic culture that are based on criteria of equal access therefore imply a liberal democracy in which equality is guaranteed by constitutional rights� In populist versions, equality, although it may be formally guaranteed, has to be wrested from the elites and regained for the people; its standard narrative is that of a betrayal of the promise of equality and of a heroic struggle to regain it� Not access per se is what counts, only certain plots have democratic meaning� Where critics have described classical American realism as democratic, they draw on models of deliberative democracy: whereas populist forms see democracy as a realm of conflict and heroic struggle, realism wants to bridge the gulf between groups and classes through processes of communicative interaction� Deliberative democracy is still based on the authority of the better argument, however, it differentiates between reasonable and unreasonable argumentation, whereas in participatory democracy, evoked by Hersch in the version of Sixties-Culture, equality means that all groups should get their equal share of acceptance, as the new social movements argue� But even these movements can exclude groups, the most equal condition would thus be a state in which individuals and single elements of a text are freed from all arbitrary hierarchies and forms of order - Narratives about American Democratic Culture 17 which is a version to be found in postmodernism and other experimental forms that can go in the direction of libertarianism in their radical vision of a freedom unfettered by any rules� What explains the plurality of narratives about democratic culture, then, is that these narratives are grounded, though rarely explicitly, in a range of different concepts of democracy - liberal, populist, deliberative, participatory, libertarian, one might also add direct democracy - all of which have their own characteristic cultural manifestations� And again, these different concepts of democracy and democratic culture cannot easily be reconciled with each other� From the perspective of participatory democracy, a liberal democracy is not sufficiently democratic, in fact, it illustrates what is wrong with America: a promise of equality that remains abstract and protects established hierarchies of power� From the perspective of a deliberative democracy, the quasi libertarian views of structural democratic culture would be a threat to democracy, because they work against a spirit of cooperation and undermine community� Liberal democracy criticizes participatory democracy for creating new inequalities, as, for example, in calls for affirmative action� Populist democracy rejects high culture as elitist, while, on the other hand, the high-brow experiments of the avant-garde in structural democratic culture are boasting of their radical egalitarianism� I am sure that one could fill a whole book on these contrasting conceptualizations, their different cultural manifestations, and their many contradictions� The major problem with narratives about American democratic culture so far has been that they almost always evade the question what kind of democracy they have in mind and instead prefer to hide behind the authority of empty signifiers like the democratic principle or “the people.” Used this way, the term is wonderfully convenient: it evokes positive values like equality but does not have to say which one� What if we turn to theory instead, that is, look at more systematic conceptualizations of American democratic culture? I will call these conceptualizations narratives, because in their attempt to define American democracy and its manifestations in American culture, they are telling very different stories about democratic America� To make the topic manageable within the context of this essay, the discussion will have to restrict itself to what I consider some of the most important and influential descriptions and expressions of American democratic culture: Alexis de Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John Dewey� Taken together, these four different narratives represent four divergent ways in which American democratic culture has been discussed in the larger context of American studies� The question that emerges, then, is whether and to what extent these narratives can provide a basis and convincing legitimation for putting the study of American democratic culture at the center of American studies� 18 W infriED f luck III. Despite the fact that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is still widely considered, as Harvey Mansfield puts it in his introduction to yet another recent edition, “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America,” (xvii) Tocqueville was a reluctant advocate of the new political system� He did not see himself as “an advocate of such form of government” (18), but he regarded the progress of democracy as irresistible, so that one had to come to terms with it and understand its advantages and disadvantages. As he says in the introduction: ”I admit that I saw in America more than America; it was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices, and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom” (19). As is well known, for Tocqueville the distinguishing feature of democracy is equality, as the famous first sentence of the book makes clear: “No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay here than the equality of conditions” (11). But Tocqueville is by no means enthusiastic about the prospect of equality, because he sees it as a threat to what for him is a higher value, namely freedom� This explains the often referred-to chapter on the “tyranny of the majority” that became a favorite reference point for American cultural critics after World War II who voiced dire warnings about the dangers of conformity, mass society, and other-directedness� But it also explains the Foucault-like passage quoted by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment that in a democracy power no longer reaches its goals by punishing the body but by going directly at the soul: “Under the absolute government of one, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul� The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us” (244). Tocqueville considered the arrival of democracy as the result of an irresistible and inevitable historical process. Why inevitable? Tocqueville’s reasons are given in a section of the book to which readers usually do not pay much attention, the author’s introduction� The reason why the progress of democracy is inevitable, is explained by his philosophy of history, a grand narrative about the course of history, that may look, at first blush, as if it were inspired by enlightenment narratives about the progress of civilizations but, at a closer look, shows a significant departure. To be sure, the story Tocqueville tells is one of a slow but steady advancement of equality, starting in the Middle Ages, but the forces that drive this process are by no means restricted to familiar enlightenment actors� It is not a gradual unfolding of reason, nor an ingrained longing for freedom, as the democratic narrative usually has it, that leads to a struggle for equality, but, paradoxically, often the very mechanisms of maintaining power: “In France,” Tocqueville writes Narratives about American Democratic Culture 19 for example, “the kings proved the most active and consistent of levelers” (10). Even adversaries of democracy cannot but contribute to its advancement: “As soon as citizens began to hold land otherwise than by feudal tenure, and the newly discovered possibilities of personal property could also lead to influence and power, every invention in the arts and every improvement in trade and industry created fresh elements tending toward equality among men� Henceforward every new invention, every new need occasioned thereby, and every new desire craving satisfaction were steps towards a general leveling� The taste for luxury, the love of war, the dominion of fashion, all the most superficial and profound passions of the human heart, seemed to work together to impoverish the rich and enrich the poor” (10-11). Seen this way, there is indeed, as Tocqueville argues, “hardly an important event in the last seven hundred years which has not turned out to be advantageous for equality” (11). In this history, America could become a pioneer nation of equality, not because of a hardy band of non-conformist freedom fighters who were driven by a vision to make America a shining city upon a hill, but, because “once discovered, (it) opened a thousand new roads to fortune and gave any obscure adventurer the chance of wealth and power” (11). This fits Tocqueville’s theory of the subject, which is, however, so elementary that the term theory may hardly seem fitting. Nevertheless, every grand narrative about history also has to give us an idea what it is that drives people and pushes the system forward towards equality (and, hence, democracy)� Tocqueville’s actors are far removed from heroic freedom-fighting motivations. They are driven, pure and simple, by “the most superficial and profound passions of the human heart,“ things like a taste for luxury, or the domain of fashion, or even, most shockingly, a love for war� What drives them, in other words, are ever new desires craving satisfaction, and this explains why the process is irreversible and unstoppable, because as soon as one desire is satisfied, another one will take its place: “Everywhere the diverse happenings in the lives of peoples have turned to democracy’s profit; all men’s efforts have aided it, both those who intended this and those who had no such intention, those who fought for democracy and those who were the declared enemies thereof; all have been driven pell-mell along the same road, and all have worked together, some against their will and some unconsciously, blind, instruments in the hands of God” (11-12). Therefore, Tocqueville concludes, “the gradual progress of equality is something fated� (…) every event and every man helps it along” (12). “The noble has gone down in the social scale, and the commoner gone up; as the one falls, the other rises� Each half century brings them closer, and soon they will touch” (11). In America they have touched and that makes democracy in America a fascinating test case� It is highly ironical indeed that the “best book on American democracy” radically undermines the founding myth on which many of the following theories of American democracy were based: that of the innate goodness and superior common sense of the common man, that is, “the people.” There is no common sense in Tocqueville’s democratic subjects; 20 W infriED f luck rather, they are inherently weak and therefore easily swayed by public opinion. In fact, as Mansfield and others have argued, democracy is government by public opinion� Individualism, as a form of willful self-isolation, reinforces this weakness� Tocqueville sees a remedy in voluntary associations but these depend on communal experiences that are not always available� In larger contexts, public opinion takes their place and makes the weak individual dependent on the tyranny of the majority� How does that affect culture and the arts? In his essay “Tocqueville and American Literary Critics,” Cushing Strout focuses on Tocqueville’s expectation that democratic poets, finding nothing ideal in what is real and true, would reach at last for purely imaginary regions� But Tocqueville’s remarks on the general fate of culture are much more pertinent here� After all, the main story he tells about the emergence of democracy is one of leveling, and since democracy transforms all spheres of life, including culture, leveling must also provide the key perspective for understanding this new kind of democratic culture� It would be wrong, however, to take this as a critique of mass culture along the lines of the cultural criticism of the post-War period� Tocqueville sees the process as one of gains and losses� Some things are gained by the process of leveling but at the cost of others: “So it is not true that men living in democratic times are naturally indifferent to science, literature, and the arts; only it must be acknowledged that they cultivate them in their own fashion and bring their own peculiar qualities and defects to the task” (458). On the one hand, there is a process of democratization at work; leveling also means that access to books and reading is increased, even on the frontier: “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare� I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin” (471). On the other hand, however, leveling can also mean loss of excellence: “When only the rich wore watches, they were almost all excellent� Now few are made that are more than mediocre but we all have one” (467). Appearance is now more important than substance. When Tocqueville first arrives in New York by boat, he is impressed by a number of little white marble palaces, some of them in classical architectural style� But at a closer look, he realizes that they were “built of whitewashed brick and that the columns were of painted wood� All the buildings I had admired the day before were the same” (468). Aesthetically, it seems, the major challenge for democratic culture is how to present a house made of brick and plaster to look like a marble palace� Again, this should not be understood as an expression of aristocratic contempt� What Tocqueville is aiming at is an explanation of the logic that is at work in democracy’s transformation of cultural production: “In aristocratic societies, craftsmen work for a strictly limited number of customers who are very hard to please. Perfect workmanship gives the best hope of profit” (466). On the other hand, there is always in democracies “a crowd of citizens whose desire outrun their means and who gladly agree to put up with an imperfect substitute rather than do without the object of their desire altogether� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 21 The craftsman easily understands this feeling, for he shares it� In aristocracies he charged very high prices to a few� He sees that he can now get rich quicker by selling cheaply to all.” But there are only two ways of making a product cheaper: “The first is to find better, quicker, more skillful ways of making it� The second is to make a great number of objects which are more or less the same but not so good� In a democracy every workman applies his wits to both these points” (466). And the same principle is at work in literature: “Democracy not only gives the industrial classes a taste for letters but also brings an industrial spirit into literature” (475). An ever growing crowd of readers always craves for something new and “ensures the sale of books that nobody esteems highly” (475). Such a literature has little impact on mores, the beliefs, manners and attitudes of a society� The main way in which it gives expression to democracy is as an expression of its restlessness in which everybody is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities and new experiences� 15 To read these passages as a putdown of American culture is to miss the point� Tocqueville’s line of thinking is far more subtle: in a society characterized by an equality of rank, people have to find new ways of gaining recognition. The more “mobile” and accelerated the search, the weaker the identity that can result from any particular act of recognition or attachment to an object, and the weaker the identity, the greater the need for ever new options, finally leading to a transformation of culture into consumption, because consumption is best suited to deliver a sequence of quickly changing objects for attachment. Indeed, for this purpose an aristocratic culture of “quality” is no longer useful; the emergence of mass culture and its convergence with consumption is thus not the result of a deplorable drop in standards but a logical response to changing conditions of identity formation ushered in by democracy� As Tocqueville puts it: “In the confusion of classes each man wants to appear as something he is not and is prepared to take much trouble to produce this effect” (467). Tocqueville concedes that such feelings are not unique to democracy, but it is democracy that establishes entirely new status confusions and a newly intensified restlessness. And, as he points out perceptively, it is democracy that extends this frantic struggle for recognition also to culture, in production and distribution as well as - most prominently - in reception� 15 Among the many things Tocqueville foresaw was also mass culture: “With but short time to spend on books, they want it all to be profitable. They like books which are easily got and quickly read, requiring no learned researchers to understand them� They like facile forms of beauty, self-explanatory and immediately enjoyable; above all, they like things unexpected and new� Accustomed to the monotonous struggle of practical life, what they want is vivid, lively emotions, sudden revelations, brilliant truths, or errors able to rouse them and plunge them, almost by violence, into the middle of the subject� (…) Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste” (474). 22 W infriED f luck IV. The story of a relentless process of leveling that Tocqueville tells about democratic culture is not exactly an inspirational one� For those in search of an American culture that would embody the best of America’s democratic values and ideals it could hardly be useful� Something more inspiring was needed� Walt Whitman met the demand by declaring from the outset of his book Democratic Vistas (1871) that he would use the words America and democracy as convertible terms (2)� America would be seen as a “paradigmatic democracy” (Rorty 30). Accordingly, in Whitman’s proudly “speculative” book, written after the end of the Civil War, in which Whitman had made it his task to take care of wounded soldiers, democratic culture emerges as something that is completely different from Tocqueville’s version� It is no longer the end point of a leveling process but a word for its transcendence� 16 However, this transcendence is still a promise, not yet a reality� In its present state, American democracy is not in a condition to fulfil the promise: “Democracy at present is still in its embryo condition. Its justification lies in the future, in the production of perfect characters among the people“ (33)� Although Whitman has grand visions of America’s future greatness, he does not ignore the unashamed materialism of the Gilded Age: “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted� The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism” (10). Whitman welcomes business success as a source of America’s prosperity, but it is not sufficient to determine the success of “our New World democracy” (10). A great moral and religious civilization is the only justification of a great material one. Unfortunately, America “is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results” (11). To add this spiritual dimension and to activate the promise of American democracy is the task Whitman assigns to culture, more precisely to a yet nascent democratic culture� One reason why American has not yet fully realized its democratic promise is that its culture is still shaped by feudal “Old World” remnants. That is true even for a writer like Shakespeare: “The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy� The models of 16 Democratic Vistas was written in response to Thomas Carlyle’s essay “Shooting Niagara; and After? “ written against democratizing tendencies in England and the U.S. For the composition and publication history see Reynolds: “In September 1867, a month after Carlyle’s essay had appeared, Whitman wrote the first part of his response, an essay titled ‘Democracy,’ which appeared in the December issue of the New York Galaxy, edited by F�P� and W�C� Church� His second essay, ‘Personalism,’ appeared there the following May� The third, ‘Orbic Literature’ was rejected by the Churches� After many revisions and additions, the three essays were eventually combined and published in 1871 as a seventy-five-cent green-covered pamphlet, Democratic Vistas” (477). Narratives about American Democratic Culture 23 literature, as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and basked and grown in a castle sunshine; all smell of princes’ favors” (28). A truly democratic culture can only emerge when these feudal elements are left behind: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past…“(4)� This culture is urgently needed� But the sad truth is: “America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing” (35). So far, then, culture has failed America� That explains the gap between the ideal of American democracy and its current reality: “As now taught, accepted and carried out, are not the processes of culture rapidly creating a class of supercilious infidels, who believe in nothing? ” (36) As Alan Trachtenberg has put it: “America provided an actual polity founded on constitutional principles of equality (for propertied white males, at least, in the founding formulation)� Yet America remained blind or unknown to itself� Once culture awakened America to itself, to the fact that it had already realized the conditions culture needs to achieve the externalization of inner harmony, then the true America would appear” (Trachtenberg 14). The struggle for realizing the promise of American democracy is thus a struggle over the meaning and function of culture� Only a truly democratic culture can save a corrupt American democracy� Whitman’s faith in this democratic culture (which, in his case, means literature, and, even more specifically, poetry) can be grandiose at times: “I suggest, therefore, the possibility, should some two or three really original American poets (…) rise, mounting the horizon like planets, stars of the first magnitude, that, from their eminence, fusing contributions, races for localities, etc�, together, they would give more compaction and more moral identity (the quality today most needed) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties, and all its hitherto political, warlike, or materialistic experiences”(7-8). This culture would confirm and ensure what America promised, an egalitarian society, and even more importantly, an all-pervasive spirit of brotherhood� What are the characteristics of such a democratic culture? Echoing his hero Lincoln, Whitman’s recurring reference is to “the people,” for him the life-blood of democracy� As David Reynolds points out, Whitman had been confirmed in his belief in the people by his Civil War experiences. On the other hand, he did not willfully ignore reality and overlook the “crudeness, vices, caprices” (2) one can encounter in the people. The list of vices Whitman has seen in the city looks as if it were taken from a sensationalist novel in the mode of George Lippard. Flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity, abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, petty grotesques, malformations and a long list of other unpleasant attitudes and appearances do not exactly add up to an endearing picture of the common people (12)� At the beginning and end of Democratic Vistas, Whitman even meets Carlyle half-way by questioning universal suffrage: “I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States� In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing” (2). 24 W infriED f luck How can Whitman criticize the lamentable moral condition of the people and nevertheless envision a new, transformative democratic culture based on the people? Whitman’s theory of the self has to be taken into account at this point� Just as American democracy has not yet realized its promise, the common people have not realized theirs� The reason is that they are not yet truly independent� It must therefore be the goal of a democratic culture to inspire and encourage that aspiration for independence and self-government that is inherent in all human beings� Independence has to become an inner state� Only if the individual is free and autonomous, can we expect a genuine transformation, “a man (…) standing apart from all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and untouchable by any canons of authority, or any rule derived from precedent, state-safety, the acts of legislatures, or even from what is called religion, modesty, or art” (14). This is how Whitman defines freedom: “The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American independence. What is independence? Freedom from all laws or bonds except those of one’s own being, controlled by the universal ones” (52). America remains incomplete as long as this transformation is not achieved, until the spirit of independence does not pervade all spheres, including that of individual being� Wouldn’t such a radical vision of individual independence lead to anarchy? No, because once the individual is in a state of freedom, his inner divine core that links him to universal and divine bonds, will guide him (52)� The liberation of a divine core in individuals will transform them into new beings� Goodness, virtue, solidarity, good laws follow freedom� Whitman’s treatment of religion is telling� He acknowledges that religion provides the foundation of man’s moral condition� In this it is the core of democracy� But not in its institutionalized form, because that, too, is governed by rules and bonds designed to tell the individual what to do. Religion can thus fulfill its moral function only, if it is set free from any institutional context� Only “in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all (…) the soul emerges, and all statements, churches, sermons, melt away like vapors” (39). Only this self can reach divine levels and commune with the unutterable� This potential resides in all people: “I can see there, in every young and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true personality, developed, exercised proportionately in body, mind and spirit” (42). That is why Whitman can put his trust, not in the individual, but in the common people who, at this stage, are envisioned as an aggregate of independent individual beings� There can be no tyranny of the majority here� The one and the many cannot be separated, one depends upon the other. Poetry ”operates both by permitting the one to dissolve into the many and the many to emerge into the distinction of the one” (Ziff 583). But how can the transformation to independence, from a state of dependence to a free, autonomous soul, be achieved? At this point, Whitman’s vision of a democratic culture deserves another look� What is needed in his view is “a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the Narratives about American Democratic Culture 25 very first class, and especially for highest poems” (67). That is the sole course of radical transformation open to American society� Literature has to achieve what democracy promises: “The purpose of democracy (…) is (…) to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly trained in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself…” (15). But by what means can literature achieve this effect? Whitman remains vague: “At best, we can only offer suggestions, comparisons, circuits” (46)� In fact, he has to remain vague, because he is talking about a future phenomenon� But the common link of his scattered hints is a literature that would lead Americans to a self-recognition of their divine potential - and that of America: “America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and cosmical, as she is herself” (54). Self-recognition is the implied theory of effect of this version of democratic culture, and democratic culture is achieved when it provides a recognition of American exceptionalism� When Democratic Vistas appeared, the resonance was muted� Since then, the text has gained in importance and status, up to the point in Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country in which Whitman and Dewey are credited to have forged a moral identity for America and to have given Americans “all the romance, and all the spiritual uplift” they need (97). Not everybody is an admirer, however: “Abstracted from his verse, Whitman’s democratic philosophy today appears naïve” (Ziff 590). The democratic culture Whitman talks about does not yet exist, it is only a vision that is put together in somewhat improvised fashion during the course of writing� However, there are two sets of assumptions that provided the basis for Whitman to present his vision with confidence. One is his assumption about the divine core of human beings that resemble Emersons’s who had already proclaimed in 1837: ‘A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (Trachtenberg 15). The other assumption is Whitman’s exceptionalist belief in America� Democratic Vistas is pervaded by his enthusiastic evocation of America’s greatness, of the prospect of a “nationality superior to any hither known” (4): “The Pacific will be ours and the Atlantic mainly ours� What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be? ” (55) To achieve this greatness and leadership among the nations, America has to pass through three stages� Two of them have already been mastered impressively: establishing a democratic Republic and becoming a successful, prosperous nation� What is still lacking is the third stage, establishing a truly democratic culture that would make independence also a state of being for the common people� But although this challenge has not yet been met, the fact that America’s evolution has already passed successfully through the other two stages is taken as a confirmation of the Hegelian narrative of progress on which Whitman relies here. The first two stages have already shown that America is bound to be exceptional, and because America is an exceptional nation, Whitman can argue with confidence that it will also successfully realize the third stage and become the superior nation of all ages� If not, 26 W infriED f luck there will be a breakdown in historical progress, America “will prove the most tremendous failure of time” (2). The claim of exceptionalism is derived here not from the city-upon-a-hill corpus of texts but from a Hegelian narrative of progress in which an ongoing struggle for freedom is the driving force� With his exceptionalist enthusiasm, if not self-intoxication, Whitman draws attention to a key problem in debates about American democratic culture, the wide chasm between theorized and actual democracy� Whitman realizes and acknowledges the problem in several passages of Democratic Vistas, and some commentators claim that his skepticism about American society increased during the period in which the three parts of Democratic Vistas were written� But ultimately, his optimism prevailed� It could prevail, because he solved the problem in a manner that is characteristic also of other theorists of American democratic culture: the not-so-ideal present is readily acknowledged, but taken as proof that it is more necessary than ever to insist on the ideal, for if one does not uphold the ideal, one will have to give up all hope for change� This formula is tailor-made for preserving the best of both worlds: to critically acknowledge American reality and yet to keep one’s faith in an American exceptionalism that can never be refuted, because its final realization still lies in the future� In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty provides a contemporary version of this kind of argumentation in his criticism of the cultural Left which, in his view, has given up any belief in America and its democratic potential� But what if the reality of a “Billionaire Democracy” undermines this belief so strongly that it can no longer be upheld? Whitman solved the problem by dividing his narrative into two parts, quite simply the presence and the future� But what does a philosopher like Richard Rorty do 150 years later who wants to revive Whitman’s equation of America and democracy to counter the pessimism of the cultural Left? The question is a crucial one for all narratives about American democracy and American democratic culture, namely how to deal with the disappointment that rhetoric and reality are often far apart from each other, in fact, may at present be drifting apart ever further� Rorty concedes that “Dewey and Whitman had to grant the possibility that the vanguard of humanity may lose its way, and perhaps lead our species over the cliff” (23). But they decided to keep the question open “in order to make room for pure, joyous hope” (23). And so does Rorty: “But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact� You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now� You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one in which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual” (Rorty 101)� However, wouldn’t democracy as a political system provide a sufficient normative base for criticizing democratic deficits? What about critics of democratic deficits who do not live in dream countries like America? The actual convertibility here is not between America and democracy but between democracy and American exceptionalism� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 27 For Rorty, too, the disappointment about the chasm between theorized democracy and its reality version is overcome by a belief in American exceptionalism: because we know that America is exceptional, we can also be sure that it will eventually bridge the chasm� It just has to be reminded (constantly) that it is exceptional� If the Left wants to bring about change, it will have to call for it by appealing to America’s greatness� That is the only way in which true democracy and democratic culture can be achieved: “As long as we have a functioning Left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman’s and Dewey’s dreams” (107). Whitman has shown the way. The source of his great influence on narratives about American democratic culture does not lie in his analysis of American society, but in the force of his rhapsodic, “orphic” rhetoric, his evocation of universal brotherhood, his insistence on the dignity of all beings, and above all, the promise of American exceptionalism� The literary models Whitman most often refers to are epics and tales of adventure, but in retrospect one wonders whether he is not another Don Quichote chasing, not dream countries but windmills� V. Tocqueville’s and Whitman’s versions of democratic culture could not stand further apart from one another� While Tocqueville approaches democracy as an irrepressible historical fact with which one has to learn to come to terms, Whitman elevates democracy to the level of a supreme historical promise, as the crowning touch and final confirmation of American greatness, and gives it a strong normative dimension: not everything produced in a democracy qualifies as democratic culture. A democratic culture is one in which independence is extended to the inner self of the common man by providing opportunities for self-recognition of a divine inner core in the individual and the nation� In his insistence on the common man as the key persona, Whitman evokes Mark Twain who published his travel-book manifesto The Innocents Abroad (1869) around the time Democratic Vistas was written and published� As in the case of Whitman, it was Twain’s starting point that the historical achievement of American society consisted in the recognition of the common man to be as good and worthy as any nobility, in fact, just as noble and dignified. Like Whitman, Twain assumed at this point of his career that this potential of the common man had not been fully realized yet, because of an unfortunate persistence in American society of an obsolete reverence for European standards of culture� As Lionel Trilling has pointed out, chapter 31 of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the key scene for understanding the conflict that characterizes all of Twain’s work. Henry Nash Smith has captured the conflict by calling his chapter on Huckleberry Finn ‘A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience�’ By dramatizing Huck’s feeling of duty to hand the runaway slave Jim over to his pursuers, Twain demonstrates to what extent Huck has 28 W infriED f luck internalized Southern ideology and thereby deformed his own conscience� But eventually, Huck’s sound heart proves stronger� Deep down the common man possesses an innate goodness, and the problem of American democracy is that this goodness is still deformed by remnants of European culture and its American copy, Southern culture� Hence Twain’s project: to use his irreverent humor as a weapon against authority and, as in The Innocents Abroad, especially against the custodians of European culture in order to break their hold on Americans and to liberate and strengthen the democratic potential of American society� This project reaches its politically most ambitious version in Twain’s 1889-novel A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court� What Whitman still projects into the future is tested by Twain in an ingenious utopia-in-reverse by sending a representative common man of nineteenth-century America, the foreman Hank Morgan from Connecticut, to the medieval England of King Arthur’s time� A true believer in progress (and in America as the exemplary land of progress), it is Hank’s noble democratic ambition to transform medieval society into a modern society “on the American plan.” Twain’s novel thus tries to address the problem that Whitman delegates to the future, namely how to achieve the transition from a still lingering, harmful legacy of Old World culture to a democracy and a truly democratic culture� Things go according to plan at the beginning� 17 Twain’s fictional set-up provides an ideal opportunity to expose the inferiority, injustice and backwardness of (English) feudalism (clearly a placeholder for the “Old World”) by confronting it with the common sense and moral idealism of the Yankee� But as the novel moves along - Twain is known for his spontaneous, unsystematic forms of composition -, the Connecticut Yankee begins to discover an unexpected bonus provided by his political mission, namely that he possesses a huge advantage in knowledge over the superstitious masses of the Middle Ages� As it turns out, the Yankee is by no means immune to the temptation of using this constellation to his own advantage� This leads to an amazing shift in focus as the novel progresses� Increasingly, the democratic reformer also turns into a successful businessman: “His career,” Henry Nash Smith points out, “resembles that of many industrial giants such as Carnegie and Rockefeller who were in the public eye in the 1880’s” (Smith 1964, 151)� The Yankee’s choice of words betrays the extent of his economic and social aspirations: proudly he awards himself the title of “boss” of the whole country, and by doing so, draws attention to a partial displacement of the intended object-lesson in democracy by a highly gratifying personal success story in which the liberator has turned entrepreneur and has become a successful self-made man� One striking fictional complication is that the very people whom the Yankee intends to liberate on the level of the political discourse emerge as potential competitors on the level of the success story� To liberate them would 17 For a more extended and detailed version of the following argument see my essay “The Restructuring of History and the Intrusion of Fantasy in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Narratives about American Democratic Culture 29 imply to gradually give up the privileged position that enables the Yankee to “take advantage of such a state of things” (37) and that repeatedly appears as a source of ill concealed satisfaction in the text: “… and if on the other hand, it was really the sixth century, all right ��� I would boss the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would have the start of the best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years” (16). In fact, so extensively is the Yankee’s success celebrated in the novel that it seems justified to speak of yet another level of discourse that is closely connected with the success story but clearly transcends it and approaches something like a fantasy of omnipotence� In the course of the novel, the Yankee does not only witness an extraordinary material and social success� In parts of the novel, he seems to move in a daydream world of absolute superiority and power - and, again, takes great delight in doing so� Even the role of successful businessman appears at a closer look to be just one example of a varying repertoire of roles and role changes, from Cowboy to star magician� Thus, while in principle the Yankee pays careful attention to social and political improvements, the actual narrative continuity and substance of the novel stems, in surprisingly large parts, from his focus on scenarios of selfaggrandizement and uniqueness� Whereas his involvement in the political and economic possibilities of his democratic mission is resumed more or less in passing, the Yankee becomes eloquent in describing scenes that affirm his uniqueness and gain the admiration of the native population� Such feelings of personal triumph are magnified in the course of the novel to extreme proportions, which suggest the idea of a fantasy of omnipotence: “Here I was, a giant among pygmies, a man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles” (66). In another striking paradox, the Yankee’s fantasy of grandeur depends on the very ignorance that makes him despair in his role as a democratically-minded liberator� For the champion of progress their enlightenment should be the primary goal; for the cultural hero, however, their naive superstition remains the basis of his unique status: “When I started to the chapel, the populace uncovered and fell back reverently to make a wide way for me, as if I had been some kind of a superior being - and I was“ (218)� The Yankee’s gradual shift from democratic reformer to successful selfmade man and cultural celebrity must be seen in the larger context of democratic theory� If democracy is the political system that abolishes status hierarchies and empowers the common man, then how can we be sure that the common man will use this new status “democratically“ and for the common good? In Whitman, this expectation rests on the metaphysical assumption of a divine inner core of the subject, in Huck Finn we already get a watered-down version in the form of a not yet culturally deformed “sound heart.” In The Connecticut Yankee and other of Twain’s later writings even the sound heart has disappeared� There is no sound heart that would protect the Yankee from his own craving for recognition and self-aggrandizement� For Whitman, to be a common man and to be part of a crowd of equally common people is all the recognition the common man needs� An independent individual, free and autonomous, is not in need of additional recognition� In contrast, although he 30 W infriED f luck shares the common man-rhetoric with Whitman, Twain’s subject comes closer to Tocqueville than Whitman� It is inherently weak and insecure, and in order to overcome this insecurity, Twain’s main characters - think of Col� Sellers in The Gilded Age or Tom Sawyer - are constantly indulging in day dreams of superior recognition� 18 After Col. Sellers has finally managed to establish a close relation with the American President, his imaginary self-aggrandizement knows no boundaries: “If he respected himself before, he almost worshipped Beriah Sellers now, as a superior being” (271). There are, then, in Twain’s literary world two types of common man: those that are empowered by democracy to recover their inner sound heart, and those who discover the usefulness of democracy to pursue their own dreams and ambitions even at the expense of others� One can identify Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer as representatives of the two types, and the difference between them lies in the importance the search for recognition has for each� Tom’s behavior is driven by his constant imagining of what it would look like in the eyes of others� On Huck’s raft there are no others; it is an important part of the book’s pastoralism that the search for recognition can be put to rest on the raft� Only at the end of the book, in its often criticized concluding section, when Tom returns to Huck’s world, the story of liberation turns into a story of manipulation� Similarly, what drives the Yankee is a thirst for recognition of his superiority by the masses� Without thematizing this aspect, Twain, by following his instincts, reveals a complication in nineteenth-century narratives about democracy and the common man that apologists of the common man ignored: abolishing social hierarchies does not necessarily mean that equality and universal brotherhood will prevail from now on� On the contrary, because the liberated common man will continue to “crave satisfaction,” recognition foremost among them, new inequalities will emerge as the result of new opportunities but also the competition for them� American democracy is by no means immune to this danger; on the contrary, it is a pioneer society in liberating individuals, including common people, to discover entirely new ways for gaining recognition in their ongoing struggles for distinction� The Yankee could not resist the temptation of taking advantage of his superior knowledge, because, unexpectedly for the democratic reformer, the Middle Ages can provide something that nineteenth-century America could not, namely a superior form of recognition: “Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn’t a baby to me in acquirements and capacities; whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be 18 Twain’s common men have two major weaknesses� One is their hunger for fame, that is, for superior recognition, the other, the lure of money� In addition to The Connecticut Yankee, Twain returned to the promise of a sudden rise in status and the lure of money again and again, for example, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “The Stolen White Elephant,” “The £ 1 000 000 Bank-Note,” “The $ 30 000 Bequest,” and The Mysterious Stranger. The Prince and the Pauper and Puddn’ head Wilson tell stories of a sudden rise in status and fortune made possible by the prototypically “fictitious” device of changed identities. Narratives about American Democratic Culture 31 foreman of a factory, that is about all“ (60)� Tom Sawyer, Col� Sellers and the Connecticut Yankee are “weak” subjects who crave, not primarily satisfaction of their desires, but ever new forms of recognition of which they can never get enough, so that they are willing to use deception, manipulation, even destruction. In the end, the proud, self-confident American democrat Mark Twain had to face a sobering truth� He did no longer trust an America that wants to bring democracy to the rest of the world� 19 While Whitman happily celebrated himself, Twain had enough good sense not to trust the Tom Sawyer in himself - and, by implication, also not the common man� 20 VI. It was this problem that pragmatism wanted to overcome by finding a source of selfhood that would be strong and resilient enough to resist domination and manipulation by others� The name that comes to mind in this context is that of John Dewey whose work has been called a “philosophy of democracy” by Hans Joas� Dewey has gained this status by taking Tocqueville’s desires and transforming them into what is desirable� As Robert Westbrook puts it: for Dewey - he could have added: in contrast to Tocqueville - democracy is “an association in which individual members seek by means of deliberation to transform their individual ‘desires’ into a collective consensus about what is desirable” (138). How can this be done? The answer can be found in a pragmatist theory of the self� There are no subjects in this theory, only organisms that are stirred into action by problems - even on this elementary level theories of mass democracy based on the idea of passive individuals are already undermined� Problem solving is the basic condition of organic life and in order to solve problems organisms have to consider the best course for action� In this process, experiences are made that give the self more control, more ability to rethink its problems and thus the potential for making changes� This process ties us to others, for in order to make sense of our experiences and make sure that we are drawing the right conclusions from them, we need to communicate with others� Human beings are therefore inherently social beings and must have a shared interest in social arrangements that further communication and social interaction� This must be the interest of every self, for only in this way can we hope to achieve growth� Growth is the key concept and the key value in this narrative� 21 Every organism must strive towards growth in order to overcome immaturity (= a lack of fulfillment of growth), and democracy is a social arrangement that is preferable to other forms, because it provides the best conditions for growth and personal development� 19 As is well known, Twain would soon become a harsh critic of American imperialism� 20 In his book Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s ‘A Connecticut Yankee’ William Spanos extends this reading to the level of a national allegory� 21 Cf� Sidney Hook: “By human freedom Dewey meant the power to realize one’s natural potential of growth in a desirable direction” (223). 32 W infriED f luck As in the case of Tocqueville, Dewey’s theory of democracy is constituted by a prior assumption about what constitutes human beings� If I assume that human beings are driven by passions and desires that crave satisfaction, I must focus on how these desires can be controlled and channeled� This is why Tocqueville takes up so much space in describing the division of power in American democracy� On the other hand, this is an aspect of democracy in which Dewey is not interested at all; as many observers have noted, Dewey is not really discussing democracy as a political system� The charm of his theory of democracy is that there is no need for finding answers for vexing problems like the division of power or voting rights or the fairness of political representation: “Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished” (Dewey 1939, 224)� The common man, driven by Twain into destructive selfcontradictions as the result of a conflicted personality, has an entirely unproblematic reappearance in Dewey’s argument� His democracy is based on “faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with common sense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication” (224). If society provides free assembly and free communication, the common man will do the rest and pave the way for democratic cooperation� He will do so in his own best interest, because cooperation is the best way to become more rational, more social, and finally more moral and thus the best way to achieve growth and individual self-development� Resorting to the common man (and his common sense) as the backbone of democracy may be a familiar move� But in the case of Dewey it rests on assumptions that are different from those of Whitman and Twain - neither on a metaphysical belief in a divine inner core of the common man, nor on a sentimental pastoralism that nourishes a sound heart� Instead, the case for democracy can simply rest on the need of the organism to grow� Since every human being, like other organisms, will be - in fact, must be - interested in achieving growth, it should also be interested in establishing the best possible conditions for growth, and these are clearly provided by democracy and the possibilities it opens up for participating in communication and exchange� Democratic cooperation can help human beings to develop their capacities for growth� As Paringer puts it: Dewey saw in American democracy “the conception of a social harmony of interests in which the achievement by each individual of his own freedom should contribute to a like perfecting of the powers of all, through a fraternally organized society” (Paringer 34)� Dewey uses the term democracy not for describing a political system of majority rule but as an ethical ideal, or as Dewey puts it in The Public and Its Problems: “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life� It is the idea of community life itself� (…) Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just Narratives about American Democratic Culture 33 because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community” (148-9). In other words, democracy is only a real democracy when it has reached a state of true community� Its cooperative spirit will develop the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment, “to participate in the design and testing of social policies, and to judge the results of its actions” (Putnam, quoted in Westbrook 137)� Democracy, then, means social cooperation for Dewey� Social cooperation provides the best conditions for attaining growth through constructive and creative activity� Indeed, Dewey became of interest to literary scholars because he extended the idea of creativity to include everyday life and thereby to bridge the gap between life and art, as many modernists tried to do at about the same time� 22 One would expect him, then, to be open to aesthetic innovation; after all, his work is roughly coexistent with the rise of modernism and, more specifically, abstract art. But Dewey rejected abstract art: “In the light of this contribution to the question of form and substance, it is evident that Dewey would consider the treatment of form as illustrated in the poetry of Gertrude Stein, or other ‘abstract artists,’ spurious� Broken lines and fragments of curves when used ‘abstractly’ in graphic art are inadequate media for artistic expressiveness because (…) as fragmentary sensuous data they fail to arouse normal psychological responses” (Melvin 307). Abstract art rests upon a false atomistic psychology� It is the wrong kind of art for a democracy, because it is “expressive of the social atomism and natural rights doctrines of the seventeenth-century political thought” (308). This argument is not restricted to modernism� It applies to aesthetic experience in general� In Art as Experience Dewey provides a by now classical example to demonstrate that any object can be constituted as an aesthetic object by taking an aesthetic attitude toward it� He illustrates the point by a group of people approaching the Manhattan skyline on a ferry� Some see the skyline merely in practical terms without attributing any significance to the shape of the skyline� Others look at it in terms of real estate values, still others in terms of a tourist attraction� “Still another, who is taking the journey for the first time, looks eagerly but is bewildered by the multiplicity of objects spread out to view� He sees neither the whole nor the parts; he is like a layman who goes into an unfamiliar factory where many machines are plying.” In contrast, the object becomes an aesthetic object when the observer sees the single aspects in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river: “He is now seeing aesthetically, as a painter might see” (140). For this observer, the single parts cohere and form an image which provides the basis for an aesthetic experience� It is, in other words, the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience that it sees single elements, not as separate entities, but as part of a whole� This successful integration of parts can become a metaphor for the successful integration of the individual into society, and, hence, for a fully achieved democracy� 22 For an analysis of Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experience and a comparison with other, competing concepts, see my essay on “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” 34 W infriED f luck Dewey’s pioneer achievement consisted in shifting the discussion of aesthetics from the aesthetic object to the side of aesthetic experience� Aesthetic experience was the supreme form of experience for him, but only in a specific sense: not because of the intensity of experiences but because aesthetic experience could best provide an experience of wholeness and integration, that is, because it could be seen as the equivalent of a basic epistemological premise of pragmatism, already formulated in Dewey’s essay on the reflex arc concept, namely that it is the whole - the organization of all single elements by an integrating principle - that makes the parts what they are� 23 Aesthetic experience can thus become a model of successful integration� Even if this integration has a processual dimension, so that we are not talking about a static organicist model, the process remains meaningless, if it does not reach its fulfillment at one point - for which aesthetic experience as a heightened, enhanced sense of ordinary experience provides the model� For Dewey, aesthetic experience is a word for the fulfillment to which living can and should lead� The same premise that made Dewey such a strong supporter of the idea of democracy also steers his aesthetic theory - and hence his view of democratic culture - into a particular direction that subsequently undermined its influence: if aesthetic experience is a supreme form of experience, then it must also be, by definition, an experience that supports growth and provides an experience of fulfillment - in contrast, for example, to aesthetic experiences of negation or de-familiarization and other aesthetic effects� The case is interesting, because it marks the limitations of Dewey’s often praised open-endedness� His emphasis on process has been praised by Rorty and others as an exemplary anti-foundationalist position� But when Dewey rejects modernist experimental art, because it takes openness into the wrong, “atomistic” direction, his view of process reveals its tacit normative bias. Dewey’s openness is that of evolution, not of pluralism� There is a normative basis to open-endedness, then� For Dewey, it remains incomplete, or, more precisely, unfulfilled, if it does not reach a state of fulfillment at one point, even if only temporarily. Aesthetic experience is such a moment of fulfillment - which would exclude a vast array of cultural and artistic forms� What makes Dewey different from Tocqueville - that democracy is elevated to the level of a normative concept - also limits the usefulness of his theory for defining American democratic art and culture as a plurality, in fact, it raises it to an abstract level that is hardly applicable� For Tocqueville unsolvable conflicts are the driving force of (and constant threat to) democracy. For Dewey, democracy is the social form that helps us to overcome conflict through cooperation� A problematic situation sets a process of problem-solving in motion that can lead to growth, just as growth will eventually lead to cooperation� Despite a rhetoric of open-endedness, this remains the underlying evolutionary, almost behaviorist assumption of Dewey’s pragmatism and his faith in intelligent democratic action. In his essay “Creative Democracy,” Dewey writes: “To take as far as possible every conflict which arises - and they are 23 Hence, the confirmation of wholeness must be the goal of interpretation: “analysis is disclosure of parts as parts of a whole” (Art as Experience 314)� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 35 bound to arise - out of the atmosphere and medium of force of violence as a means of settlement, into that of discussion and intelligence, is to treat those who disagree - even profoundly - with us as those from whom we may learn, and in so far, as friends” (226). In a 1969-essay, Dewey’s student and longtime associate Sidney Hook writes in response: “Human beings will act in any event� To get them to act with intelligence, not out of blind passion and fear, especially in moments of crisis, if they have not already been habituated to think intelligently in moments that are not critical, is a vain hope� It is unintelligent to expect people suddenly to act intelligently” (231). This is why Dewey needs an evolutionary premise: it is not unintelligent to expect people act intelligently, if it is in the interest of the organism, both social and individual� Whatever the merits of Dewey’s approach to art and culture may be for aesthetic theory, his narrative about democratic culture can be of little use for American studies� The reason lies not only in the latent organicism of his definition of aesthetic experience which, if applied to an analysis of American culture, could have the consequence of having to exclude large parts of it� Dewey’s narrative focuses on culture and art in general; he is not interested in, and has little to say about, features that others may claim to be uniquely American� One might argue that his values - growth, cooperation, open-endedness - reflect special promises, or even qualities, of American democracy and can therefore be seen as specifically American values. But Dewey’s key claim that the value of art does not lie in specific qualities of an aesthetic object, as, for example, beauty, but that it is the result of taking an aesthetic attitude towards an object, was also put forward by the Czech structuralist Jan Mukarovsky at about the same time, and I haven’t heard anybody claim yet that this can tell us something significant about Czech values. In the final analysis, Dewey’s aesthetic theory and his narrative about democratic culture are trapped in circularity: if art can be a metaphor for democracy, but can only be experienced as art in a moment of fulfillment of everyday experience, then democracy and aesthetic experience become synonymous and define each other. Democracy is achieved by successful integration and as such modeled after, and realized by, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience, as a model of fully integrated parts, is exemplifying democratic values and hence the supreme manifestation of democratic culture� VII. Dewey highlights a recurring dilemma of definition in narratives about democratic art and culture: the narrower the normative content of the term democratic culture is, the greater the tendency for exclusion� If democratic culture is understood as a form of culture that gives expression, either on the formal level or on that of content, to democratic values and ideals, then media like film or the popular arts, or influential aesthetic movements like romanticism or modernism - to name a random sample - cannot be subsumed automatically under the category, because they are often anti-democratic� On the 36 W infriED f luck other hand, if we want to go beyond a normative conceptualization of democratic culture, should we broaden the term to include every form of culture produced under conditions of democracy - which would also have to include cheap sensationalist mass culture and The Birth of a Nation? If one looks at the uses that have been made of the term democratic culture in American studies, the latter practice is indeed the dominant one� However, such a broadening of the term makes it almost meaningless, not only as an analytical concept, but also as a value concept, and would thus undermine its usefulness for describing a supposedly unique and distinct trait of American culture� The same can be said about approaches in which democratic culture is defined by the criterion of access� Technology has continuously opened up an ever wider access to culture and has thus contributed to an ongoing democratization in the reception of culture� But this is a general phenomenon of modernity and has also happened in non-democratic countries and societies, for example when we think of the role radio and film have played in the Third Reich. What we encounter in trying to come up with a definition of American democratic culture are three very different narratives: it can be seen as expression of democratic ideals, as in the populism of Thirties-culture, as a principle of form, as in the case of jazz or postmodernism, or as a product of modern conditions that have led to a reduction of the cultural barriers of access, as in the case of film and other popular forms. These are the three options one finds in American literary and cultural criticism. Are there still others? In several publications the German Americanist Jürgen Peper has offered a theory in which he suggests a shift in the terms of discussion by defining the aesthetic as a “democratizing principle.” 24 In Peper’s approach it is no longer democracy that produces a certain type of culture; rather, it is a particular potential of the aesthetic that has had a democratizing effect on culture and society. Peper’s starting point is Baumgarten’s definition of the aesthetic as sensuous perception, that is, as a new branch of epistemology� As such the aesthetic opens up access to levels of consciousness and experience that an insistence on reason as the only legitimate source of knowledge has to subordinate� This does not mean that the aesthetic is the handmaiden of the irrational� As a form of cognition that is not exclusively subject to the claims of reason and open to sensation, emotion, affect, and even corporeality as sources of knowledge, it can draw on the free play of the imagination and, in doing so, has the freedom to try out untested, utopian views of reality. Its starting premise is the question “what if”: what if we assume that an American common man from Connecticut would get the chance to transform medieval society into a democracy on the American plan? In order to emphasize this utopian testing ground potential, Peper introduces the concept of an experimental epistemology� Experimental epistemology means that in order to stage his mental experiment, Twain temporarily put the reality principle in brackets - which is a freedom not restricted to utopias, but open to aesthetic objects in general� Such bracketing is the main mode of operation 24 See his essay “The Aesthetic as a Democratizing Principle.” Most of Peper’s work is in German, but this essay provides a good summary of his argument� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 37 of the experimental epistemology of the aesthetic and it allows us to focus on aspects that may otherwise have been subordinated or ignored altogether� In an aesthetic mode of perception, we can see an object temporarily freed from other possible functions and can temporarily ignore the question of how real it is in order to open up different, often very subjective ways in which the world can be seen and experienced� This does not mean that these texts and objects are removed from politics� It means that their political meaning and function is realized in their own detached, bracketed fashion as an experimental epistemology� For Peper, the history of literature and other aesthetic objects is that of ever new bracketings that aim to liberate dimensions of representation and experience that have still been suppressed by the dominant symbolic order� This story of liberation has a strong formal dimension; in the history of art, bracketing has been used to liberate and foreground formal qualities of artistic representations such as language, forms and structures, color, lines, rhythm, sound, even noise that had hitherto been perceived only as integrated, subordinated elements of representation� 25 But the story also has a social dimension, moving from Hegel’s representative hero to ever more marginalized figures and groups that had not been considered “presentable” in prior stages� Taken together, the story is one of an ongoing emancipation, although one may not always like the political uses that have been made of these new possibilities� As in the case of Tocqueville, this story is not necessarily and inherently progressive� It follows a logic of dehierarchization - and has, in this sense, a democratizing effect� Starting with the bracketing of reason in romanticism, we observe a movement downward to ever ‘lower’ levels of the symbolic order that were originally firmly controlled by a hierarchy of values that is now considered repressive� 26 What drives this process? At times, Peper suggests a homology of social and mental hierarchies� The process of dehierarchization he traces in literary and cultural history “corresponds to the emancipation of subordinate social groups and, at the same time, to the liberation of lower levels of consciousness hitherto disciplined by reason: imagination, emotions, sensuousness, and its appetites” (294). The link between the two stories of dehierarchization is provided by actors in search of emancipation who use the dehierarchizing potential of the aesthetic to subvert the authority and disciplinary power of the dominant symbolic order� Individuals or groups who, at one point, did not want to submit to a regime of reason have used the strong aesthetic effects of art to subvert its authority and subsequent hierarchies of knowledge� 25 This argument stands at the opposite end of Dewey’s� To keep single elements in their integrated form as part of a whole would stand in the way of democratization for Peper� 26 See also Herbert Grabes: “In this respect, literature is ‘only literature’, but as the ‘suspension of reference’ renders the affirmative or negating statements in literary texts merely quasi-statements from the point of view of epistemology, literature is also far less bound by the cogency of religious, moral, juridical and other collective norms� And this is, of course an important precondition for the ability of literature to make us aware of the limits of the culture of its origin and indirectly of the boundaries of every culture“ (Grabes 22-23)� 38 W infriED f luck The institutions of culture have helped them to assert their claims and have provided them with a certain degree of institutional authority� But can dehierarchization be automatically equated with democratization? In this case, the term democratization would simply describe any increase in individual freedom and freedom of self-expression� Moreover, from Peper’s perspective this emancipation is driven by, and limited to, the exploratory front-line of aesthetic innovation� At this point it can be helpful to broaden Peper’s approach by adding an argument Caroline Levine presents in her study Provoking Democracy. Why We Need the Arts. The book also takes its point of departure from a “surprising relationship between art and democracy” (ix). Levine would not deny that art is often elitist� Thus, it would seem to disqualify itself for narratives about democratic culture� However, as Levine puts it: “This book argues that democratic states need the challenges to mainstream tastes and values launched by artists in the tradition of the avant-garde.” Art “represents a struggle for freedom from dominant norms and values” (x) and the avantgarde “performs a necessary structural function within democratic contexts” (9). It is true “that art’s relationship to democracy is vexed and often hostile” and “that the historical avant-gardes often expressed a deep antipathy to democracy” (11). But as a social institution that is grounded in culture’s promise to explore questions of freedom from dominant norms, art can have an important function in articulating difference and dissent. This view finds a surprising confirmation in trials about modern art often initiated by populist politicians in the U�S�: “Working against the tastes and preferences of a volatile electorate, the courts have taken seriously the task of protecting unpopular expression, often overturning repressive statutes passed by legislators in favor of rebels and dissenters” (31). In their focus on the democratizing potential of art, Peper and Levine present different, but complementary points of view� Peper describes an inner-aesthetic logic of development, Levine does not deal with the avantgarde in aesthetic terms but offers a sociological interpretation by describing it as a social institution� As such, the avant-gardes use art to defy the bourgeoisie in celebration and defense of their own outsider status� Peper would not contradict, but not every defiant gesture against the bourgeoisie has had the same cultural impact and has found the same cultural recognition as aesthetically valuable� An exclusively sociological understanding can therefore not be sufficient; this is why Peper focuses on historical stages of aesthetic development and the experimental logic by which it is driven� But his theory is focused too narrowly on the inner logic of aesthetic innovation� Levine is right to remind us that culture also has a social and political dimension, what is liberated in ongoing processes of dehierarchization are often voices that have been ignored up to now, elements that did not yet fit the social and symbolic order and were not yet recognized as worthy of recognition� In more general terms, one may bring Peper and Levine together by saying that literature and other aesthetic objects can play an important part in linking processes of aesthetic and social dehierarchization� As a social group, Narratives about American Democratic Culture 39 the avant-garde’s role is to contradict what is mainstream, for Peper, it contradicts because in its search for freedom of expression it has identified certain epistemological barriers that still stand in the way of free expression� But these different approaches complement each other in significant ways, because, taken together, they can connect what often falls apart - aesthetics and politics, form and content matter� Although the dehierarchizing process, as both, Peper and Levine, point out, is not restricted to democracies, it has nevertheless gained a new force and dynamic in Western societies, including American democracy, where more and more voices are being heard, more and more claims for recognition are being made, and more and more difference is acknowledged� VIII. What is the driving force of this process of dehierarchization and its democratizing effect? Both, Peper as well as Levine, postulate a search for individual freedom� But if we want to avoid idealistic assumptions about a supposedly ingrained hunger for freedom in human beings, we have to ask by what need this search for individual freedom is generated� As I have argued in other publications, I posit a struggle for recognition as the driving force� The search for recognition is an elementary anthropological need; without recognition by others we would not know who we are� In societies of rank, the conditions for recognition are institutionalized; in democracies in which status is no longer institutionally secured, the search for recognition poses entirely new challenges� The absence of status markers increases status anxiety� In this situation, the function of culture changes� It can become a space for individual self-assertion and self-presentation� As a form that encourages individual expression, often of a transgressive nature, literature, taken here as exemplary for art and aesthetic objects in general, is a social institution with a special potential and privilege to articulate individual claims for recognition� 27 As part of the public sphere, it has increasingly played a crucial role in introducing such claims into a culture� This process is not inherently progressive; often it is unrepentantly self-centered - not because the modern world is populated with egotists, but because it lies in the nature of a struggle for recognition to aim at a positive self-reference, first and foremost for oneself� In literature, the starting points are often descriptions and experiences of misrecognition, of a sense of inferiority, weakness, or injustice� In order to overcome this experience it is necessary to defy those barriers and tear down boundaries that stand in the way of full recognition� The search for recognition in literature and other aesthetic objects can thus present the views of an individual or group that want to call attention to their own, often highly subjective experiences of misrecognition� In contrast to philosophical or social theories, literature can articulate individual claims 27 For a discussion of how these aims can also become those of the reader, see my essay “Reading for Recognition.” 40 W infriED f luck for recognition that need not necessarily be reconciled with other claims and need not be normatively justified. Hence, one of the major differences between literary texts and normative accounts is that literary texts can base the legitimacy of their claims on the power of aesthetic experience and its seemingly self-evident authority� This unashamed and unrepentant partisanship is actually one of the strengths of literature, because literary texts can articulate aspects of individual experience that are erased by broad social classifications, so that new dimensions of subjectivity can be revealed and normative accounts of what deserves recognition can be broadened� This process, I want to claim, is a driving force in an ongoing process of democratization and culture’s most important contribution to this process� IX. This essay began by drawing attention to the historical moment in the history of American studies in which the field had to find a convincing narrative of legitimation and believed that it basically had two options to do this: on the one hand, a narrative about America as the land of democracy and, linked with it, a uniquely democratic culture, and, on the other hand, a narrative about American culture as shaped significantly by an aesthetic modernism avant la lettre that could give unexpected depth to American culture. Contrary to what one would have expected after the end of World War II, the second narrative prevailed and dominated American studies for several decades� Now that it has lost its dominance, the question has emerged again whether and to what extent a return to the democratic culture-narrative might provide an alternative for American studies programs� In search of an answer this essay has taken several steps. The first, a survey of cultural criticism on democratic culture, has revealed a wide-ranging plurality of different views of democratic culture. They reflect divergent possibilities to define the key terms of the debate, democracy and equality. However, interpretations rarely acknowledge on which of these definitions they are based and prefer to hide behind the consensus term democracy instead. In response, my second step was a discussion of the most influential theories of American democratic culture in American studies and the very different narratives they have produced: Tocqueville’s narrative of leveling, Whitman’s story of transcendence grounded in his belief in American exceptionalism, Twain’s failed sentimental populism, and Dewey’s narrative of cooperation and growth� This discussion has revealed a major problem of the debate: the more normative the concept of democracy, as in the case of Whitman and Dewey, the more limited the possibilities of using it for an analysis of American culture� On the other hand, where the concept of democracy is used in a comprehensive, non-normative fashion as description of the full plurality of cultural forms produced under democratic conditions, it begins to lose any precision as a description of supposedly unique qualities of American culture� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 41 This is an important point to make, because, as pointed out at the beginning, the promise of the concept of democracy for American studies was, after all, that we understand America better� Because the most important thing to know about America appeared to be that it is a democracy, an interpretive focus on the democratic dimension of American culture would bring us closer to the real meaning of America than any high-brow narrative about the American romance� But what is it that we might understand better? Certainly not the realities of America. In his essay “The Beer Can By the Highway,” John Kouwenhoven reminds us that the concept of democracy, as it is used in writings about American democratic culture, “is an ideal, not a political system and certainly not an actual state of affairs” (226). 28 But if studies of American democratic culture are only studies of an ideal, to what extent can this provide a basis for the field? Is American studies supposed to be the study of American ideals? We are getting here to a core problem of the field. In the final analysis, the problem does not lie in the shortcomings of theories of American democratic culture� It lies in the starting assumption of American studies that a principle should and can be found that defines the uniqueness of America and its culture� Or to put it differently, the main problem lies in the unacknowledged Hegelian premises on which American studies relied since its beginnings� This Hegelianism assumes that studying the literature or culture of a country can provide a key to understanding its mind or its national character or its distinct patterns of thought - a history-of-ideas terminology that was at one point replaced by more up-to-date terms like national identity� This starting assumption of the field was a legacy of intellectual history that formed an important part of American studies until the mid-Seventies and was still predominantly Hegelian in its interpretive approach� Its methodologically most problematic consequence is that it pushes the interpreter to look for a unifying principle that can define this national identity and provide a key for understanding its true nature� Thus, interpretation, within this theoretical frame, must focus on the identification of a unifying principle. Democracy could be such a unifying principle, but only as an idea, not as a description of the realities of American life� This is why democracy entered American studies as the idea of democracy� And it almost goes without saying that this idea had to be a positive value, in effect, a virtue that could be used to distinguish American culture from other nations, moving many, if not most, theories and interpretations of American democratic culture from idea to ideal� The idea of democracy 28 Kouwenhoven withstands the temptation to put this argument into an exceptionalist context: “If, as I think American institutions have been shaped by the democratic ideal to a greater degree than those of some other nations, that is only because they were established at a time when the democratic ideal was in the ascendancy in the Western world; in a place where there were no already-established institutions which conflicted with or were hostile to democracy; and by people who, having been chiefly ‘the poor and down-trodden of Western Europe,’ had little reason to be attached to the nondemocratic or anti-democratic institutions still dominant in many areas of European life” (Kouwenhoven, 226-7). 42 W infriED f luck became an American ideal, and the conflation of democracy and America served to nourish an American exceptionalism that was part of the founding mythology of the field. In other words: due to its intellectual history origins, American studies may have been intended to be the study of American ideas, but because American exceptionalism was added to the mix, it became the study - and propagation - of American ideals� Where narratives about American democratic culture have been moved to the center, American studies has thus become an - often rhetorically effective - form of American self-idealization� 29 A growing number of critics would add: and of American self-deceptions� Neither the idea, nor the ideal of democracy, can provide a unifying principle that helps to distinguish American society and culture� Some parts of American culture will be democratic, others won’t (think of large parts of Southern culture)� All of it will be part of a plurality opened up by democracy, but what this plurality adds up to is by no means a uniquely democratic culture� To be sure, many American writers have been inspired by the democratic ideal, but many others have drawn attention to its constant violation in American reality� What good are democratic principles, even those voiced in wonderfully poetic fashion, if they are constantly violated up to the point where they seem to function only to obscure these realities? It is almost pointless, however, to point out the often glaring gaps between democratic ideal and the realities of American society� Narratives about American democratic culture never wanted to describe these realities� They wanted to tie the idea of America to the democratic ideal in order to be able to attribute unique virtues to America� Thus, they are not always what they claim to be� Often they are narratives about America in which the word America is replaced by the positive consensus term democracy in order to quell our increasing doubts about America� The narratives about American democratic culture discussed in this essay are least convincing where they are openly or tacitly exceptionalist, as in the case of the strongly normative accounts of Whitman and, inadvertently, Dewey� In putting this exceptionalism to the test, Twain has deconstructed its foundation, the idealization of the common man and “the people.” The author that offers the most convincing and useful story, however, is Tocqueville, if we do not misunderstand his narrative of leveling as lament about a loss of aesthetic qualities, but as description of a level field, in which entirely new conditions are created for the struggle for recognition� The only way in which democracy shapes this process is that it multiplies these claims for recognition, some of which will be democratic and others will not� Peper and Levine offer helpful explanations what the function of culture can be under such conditions in which new challenges, but also possibilities are opened up for the pursuit of recognition� In their work the meaning of democratization 29 In retrospect, this opens up a new perspective on the American Renaissance-narrative� Whatever its shortcomings, it was directed decidedly against American self-idealization� In fact, this may be one of the reasons why left liberal Americanists preferred it to the democratic culture-narrative� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 43 changes, however, from the establishment and extension of constitutional rights or participatory democracy to a history of ever new claims for recognition - a perspective in which American culture, both in its themes and forms, its dramatizations, performances and aesthetic effects, can gain new interest and relevance. 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