Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Frank, Jason A., author.
Title: The democratic sublime : on aesthetics and popular assembly / Jason Frank. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020044732 (print) | LCCN 2020044733 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190658151 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190658168 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190658182 (epub)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044732
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044733
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190658151.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For J. Peter Euben 1939–2018
Democratic peoples can be very amused for a moment by considering nature; but they get really excited only by the sight of themselves.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Preface: The Beautiful Revolution
The spirit of the people speaks to [democrats] through the ballot box as the god of the prophet Ezekiel spoke to the marrowless bones.
Karl Marx
In a series of articles written for the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850, later published by Friedrich Engels as The Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx looked back on the failed French revolution of 1848 and attempted to explain how the democratic aspirations that inspired the February assault on the July Monarchy—and promised to fulfill the dashed hopes of 1789, 1792, and 1830—also led to its termination in the reactionary popular dictatorship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular sovereignty, which had so often defined the emancipatory visions of two generations of radical activists and thinkers, was now not only an obstacle to genuine emancipation, but a plebiscitary source of power for newly emergent forms of political domination. Bonapartism became, for Marx, an important way of understanding the complex internal dynamics of popular—and later “populist”—authoritarianism. It is an analysis that continues to resonate powerfully today.
The national enthusiasm that propelled the revolution forward, and which quickly overturned the hated regime of Louis Phillippe, had successfully established for the first time in history a parliamentary republic based in universal male suffrage. The Second Republic’s provisional government was immediately thrown into a legitimation crisis, however, by the underlying sectional, parliamentary, and class conflicts lurking beneath its illusory foundation in the people’s unitary will. When the popular classes of Paris returned to the barricades in June to protest the conservative government’s closure of the National Workshops—and to convert the political revolution into a social revolution based in the “right to work”—they were abandoned by their fellow citizens and thousands were massacred in the streets by Cavaignac’s National Guard. The “fantastic republic” built around the pretensions of national unity, Marx proclaimed, quickly “dissolved in powder and smoke.”1
Tocqueville described the June days as a “slave’s war,” and in its aftermath the Party of Order quickly consolidated its power against any furthering of revolutionary aspiration.2
Looking back on these terrible events, Marx would write that “The February revolution was the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy, because conflicts which erupted against the monarchy slumbered harmoniously side by side, as yet undeveloped, because the social struggle which formed its background had only assumed an airy existence—it existed only as a phrase, only as words. The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because realities have taken the place of words, because the republic has uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the protective, concealing crown.”3
As he would vividly elaborate in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx saw the February revolution as a farcical restaging of earlier revolutionary events. Although the revolutionaries successfully overturned a bourgeois monarchy and established a democratic republic in its place, they remained nonetheless captivated by the king’s “concealing crown,” now in the fantastic form of national unity, the “magnanimous intoxication of brotherhood,” and the people’s indestructible sovereign will.4 Under the slogan of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Marx would write, “all classes of French society were suddenly propelled into the arena of political power; they were forced to quit their boxes, the pit, the gallery and act for themselves on the revolutionary stage.”5 The February revolution drew its “illusions, its poetry, its imaginary content, and its phrases” first and foremost from the inheritance of democratic revolutions past.6 It was a beautiful fantasy because it staged a spectacle of courageously heroic but harmonious concord—a triumphant reiteration of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People against the forces of monarchical absolutism—but it was also a lie because it was premised on “the imaginary abolition of class relations.”7 In a capitalist society, everything in the socio-political world that is experienced as beautiful is a lie, because it conceals the repulsive reality of class domination and exploitation on which that society is based.
Marx would argue that, during its historical apotheosis in the revolutions of 1848, democracy was itself ultimately exposed as the most beautiful, captivating, and destructive of illusions. In sharp contrast with antipolitical utopian socialists like Saint-Simon, Fourier, or Proudhon, Marx had himself embraced the radical potential of democracy as an “instrument of lower-class revolutionary agency,” but his analysis of the events following 1848 led him
to revise his earlier position.8 While the “cult of the people” had once had the historical efficacy and enlivening spirit to move the masses to emancipatory collective action—if once it had “served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles” and “magnifying the given task in the imagination”—these once “inexhaustible resources” were now taken up to support the forces of the most desperate reaction.9 The people, once the propulsive spirit and agent of revolutionary change, had now become an enervating ghost, a socially disembodied abstraction that authorized the destruction of the very political institutions that governed in their name.10 Reactionary anti-democrats had long proclaimed the idea of the people acting collectively outside of the authorized institutions of the state to be a phantom, a chimera, a ghost— to place one’s faith in the people’s sovereignty, Joseph de Maistre declared, was to believe in the “fecundity of nothingness.”11 In his De la Démocratie en France, Guizot had argued that “idolâlatrie démocratique” was the source of all of France’s political ills.12 After 1848, Marx mobilized these tropes against democrats, but he did so from the radical Left.
The direct incarnation of the people’s sovereign will, which for half a century had been what Pierre Rosanvallon describes as the rallying cry of the “radical project of a self-instituted society,” now became a political theology of Bonapartist reaction.13 “Against the National Assembly,” Marx wrote, “the constitutionally organized expression of the people,” the Party of Order “led into the attack the unorganized masses. . . . They taught Bonaparte to appeal from parliamentary assemblies to the people.”14 The people’s constituent power was thereby co-opted as a tool of reactionary dictatorship. With Bonaparte’s 1852 coup, Marx conceded that “universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: ‘All that comes to birth is fit for overthrow, as nothing worth.’ ”15
If modern democracy emerged as a potent political force out of the historical cauldron of class struggle, it would now have to be overcome as a result of those same struggles. To think that democracy was itself the goal was a “cretinism,” Marx argued, which “confines its victims to an imaginary world and robs them of their senses, their recollection, all knowledge of the rude external world.”16 Auguste Blanqui, the nineteenth-century master of “the art of insurrection,” would similarly remark upon hearing of Bonaparte’s coup, “what then, I beg you, is a democrat? It is a vague, banal word, without precise meaning, a word made of rubber. . . . What opinion would not
accommodate itself under this sign? Everyone claims to be a democrat, especially aristocrats.”17
This book excavates the lost radicalism of democracy in the half century before Marx proclaimed its “reckless voluntarism” a fantasy that needed to be dispelled in the name of true collective emancipation. “The principle of politics,” Marx would write of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and what he ultimately considered Rousseau’s baleful influence on an earlier generation of radical democratic revolutionaries, “is the will. The more one-sided and thus the more perfected political thought is, the more it believes in the omnipotence of the will.”18 For Marx, democracy’s affirmation of the people’s transformative power led both to a shallow understanding of the structural underpinnings of social ills and ultimately to a naïve faith that those ills could be meaningfully rectified through political action.
Most contemporary radical democratic theory, with its preoccupations with constituent power, the paradoxes of peoplehood, and historical dynamics of peopling, objects for theoretical and historical reasons to Marx’s pronouncements about the emancipatory inefficacy of “the cult of the people,” and rejects his confident materialist dismissal of such myths, fables, and fantasies. As Warren Breckman has recently demonstrated, a signature move of “post-Marxism” and its recovery of the political has been to replace the sociological essentialism of class with the symbolic constructivism of the people.19 Ernesto Laclau, the preeminent exemplar of this theoretical realignment on the Left, has argued that the reinstatement of “the people” as the preeminent political category—indeed, the “royal road to understanding something about the ontological condition of the political as such”20 is essential for the constitution of a unitary political actor out of the radical heterogeneity of competing social demands. The people, he writes, “helps to present other categories—such as class—for what they are: contingent and particular forms of articulating demands, not an ultimate core from which the nature of the demands themselves could be explained.”21
I share some of this radical democratic skepticism about the sociological essentialism of class and some of its relative optimism about the political productivity of popular “articulation,” but I also reject the linguistic or semiotic fundamentalism on which so much contemporary radical democratic theory—first and foremost Laclau’s—is based. There is a resistant kernel of concrete materialism in the aesthetics of peoplehood I develop in this book and its distinct mode of democratic representation in the form of the popular assembly. There is, of course, a long tradition of theoretical reflection on the
radical productivity of political imagination and myth within the broader traditions of Marxism itself, from Georges Sorel to Walter Benjamin to Franz Fanon, and this book draws inspiration from that tradition.
In his writings on the revolutions of 1848, Marx was attuned to three questions that I explore at length in the pages that follow: the remarkable but frequently disavowed reliance of democratic politics on eliciting the imaginary investments of its citizens; the aesthetic contours that give those investments their liveliness and power; and the role of “the unorganized masses”—what I will simply call the politics of popular assembly—as a distinctively potent form of democratic representation beyond democracy’s imaginary investments. I follow Marx’s lead on these questions, but with the hopes of neither exorcising the democratic ghost nor consigning it to the dustbin of history. While Marx asserted the entwinement of democracy and fantasy, the people and aesthetics, in order to dispel the enchantment of their radical pretensions, I will take up these same dimensions of democratic politics to recover a vision of democracy’s radicalism too often buried under the weight of its platitudes and historical “banalization.”22 Before democracy hardened into a conception of universal suffrage in 1848, it had a much wider—and more threatening—range of associations. For much of the first half of the nineteenth century, as Mark Philp has written, “democracy connoted not so much a specific institutional order as a cluster of political phenomena: crowd activity; popular pressure on government; demagogues bidding for crowd support; impulsive politics . . . and in general tumult and instability.”23
This book recovers democracy’s dormant or “sleeping” radicalism in the figure of the democratic sublime and does so, in part, by excavating the observations and insights of some of its most trenchant critics.24 “The principle of the sovereignty of the people is so dangerous,” de Maistre wrote, “that, even if it were true, it would be necessary to conceal it.”25 The task of recovery is not antiquarian, in other words, but engaged with some of the central preoccupations of contemporary democratic theory—the politics of peopling and of popular constituent power—as well as with what I consider its blind spots—the aesthetic contours of democratic representation and the surprisingly persistent power of the politics of popular assembly.
With democracy once again in crisis, and many predicting its demise, there may be some value in connecting the popular eruptions now defensively enacted in its name—whether wearing yellow vests in the streets of Paris, becoming “like water” in the squares of Hong Kong, or demanding that “every
vote count” in the United States—with democracy’s longer history of popular manifestation. In order to understand the persistence of popular assembly as a distinctive—and distinctively powerful—mode of democratic representation, I return to some central but largely forgotten dilemmas that attended democracy’s modern emergence. In looking back at the history of the ubiquitous figure of “the sublime people” from an earlier age, we may come to glimpse our own time of democratic crisis in a new light. Democracy will appear here as neither a self-evident norm nor a ruse and deception, neither a universal aspiration nor an empty platitude. Democracy is an enigmatic concept and practice, the history of which conveys dilemmas that we must continue to wrestle with concerning the very foundations of our political life.
Acknowledgments
This book has benefited from the comments and questions of so many friends and colleagues in the far-flung world of political theory that it is hard to know where to begin these acknowledgments. Closest to home, Cornell remains a stimulating place to think and work, and I am grateful to the generous colleagues who have discussed the ideas in this book with me, including Richard Bensel, Susan Buck-Morss, Paul Fleming, Jill Frank, Alex Livingston, Tracy McNulty, Aziz Rana, Camille Robcis, Neil Saccamano, and Sid Tarrow. A special thanks to Patchen Markell, who offered probing and insightful comments on most of the manuscript. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s John E. Sawyer Seminar on “The Political Will” brought together a terrific group of scholars to discuss topics close to the heart of this book, and I am grateful to all of them. The political theory graduate students at Cornell remain a source of inspiration. Special thanks to the participants in my seminar on “Political Theory and Aesthetics,” and to Nolan Bennett, Kevin Duong, Mike Gorup, Nazli Konya, and Ed Quish. I will never stop learning from Isaac Kramnick, who passed away before this book was finished. I miss him dearly.
Each chapter of this book was presented at different conferences and workshops, and I appreciate the invitations and the comments I received on those occasions. Portions of the Introduction were delivered at the “Democratic Interpellations” conference at UC Santa Cruz, and a condensed version was published in a roundtable on “Figurative Publics” at the Immanent Frame. Many thanks to all of the conference participants and especially to Banu Bargu, Nusrat Chowdhury, Mona Oraby, and Max Tomba.
Portions of Chapter 1 were presented at the “Images of Sovereignty” conference at KU Leuven, CUNY’s Committee on Globalization and Social Change, A Night of Philosophy and Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library, the Society for the Humanities Annual Invitational Lecture at Cornell, the Duke Graduate Student Conference in Political Theory, the “People, Constituent Power, and Revolution” conference at Uppsala University, and the University of Copenhagen. I would especially like to thank Michael Hardt, Stefan Jonsson, Andreas Kalyvas, Bas Leijssenaar, Sofia Nasström, Lars Tøender,
Dimitris Vardoulakis, Miguel Vatter, Neil Walker, and Gary Wilder for their comments. An earlier version of “The People as Popular Manifestation” was published in Bas Leijssenaar and Neil Walker, eds., Sovereignty in Action (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Chapter 2 was presented to Stanford’s Seminar on the History of Political Thought and the Research Seminar on Political Philosophy at KU Leuven. Special thanks to Keith Baker, Çiğdem Çıdam, Joshua Dienstag, Boris Litvin, Alison McQueen, Bernie Meylar, Stefan Rummens, and Nora Timmermans for their comments.
Earlier versions of “The Living Image of the People” were presented at the Remarque Institute’s 2015 Kandersteg Seminar on “Sovereignty” and published in Theory & Event 18, no. 1 (2015) and in Zvi Ben-Dor, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, eds., The Scaffolding of Sovereignty (Columbia University Press, 2017). Special thanks to Jodi Dean, Stefanos Geroulanos, Davide Panagia, and all of the Kanderstag participants for their comments. “Delightful Horror” was presented to audiences at Trinity College, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, the New School for Social Research, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Cornell University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. An earlier version was published in Nikolis Kompridis, ed., Political Theory’s Aesthetic Turn (Bloomsbury, 2014). Special thanks to Jeffrey Greene, Nick Kompridis, Lida Maxwell, André Munro, Ella Myers, Anne Norton, Thea Riafrancos, KyongMin Son, Rebekah Sterling, and Stephen White. Sections from Chapter 6 were presented at the annual Conference for the Study of Political Thought at Yale, the CUNY Graduate Center, Columbia University, Brown University, University of California, Berkeley, Hunter College, and the Political Concepts conference. Many thanks to Wendy Brown, Bryan Garsten, Alex Gourevitch, Kinch Hoekstra, Karuna Mantena, Robyn Marasco, Uday Mehta, Corey Robin, Melvin Rogers, Josh Simon, and Nadia Urbinati. The afterword on Jacques Rancière’s political aesthetics was presented at Northwestern’s Rhetoric and Public Culture Summer Institute and an earlier version was published in Dilip P. Gaonkar and Scott Durham, eds., Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière, Between Aesthetics and Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2019). Many thanks to Dilip Gaonkar, Scott Durham, and to the people and institutions who granted permissions to reproduce the Glenn Ligon images discussed there.
In addition to the many friends and colleagues already listed, I would like to thank four political theorists whose friendship and conversation have improved this book in many ways: Cristina Beltran, Bonnie Honig, Lori
Marso, and George Shulman. Tracy Strong read the entire manuscript and offered encouraging and helpful suggestions for revision. Thanks to him and to an anonymous reader at Oxford University Press. Will Cameron provided invaluable help in the book’s final stages. Angela Chnapko has been a wonderful and supportive editor with whom to work, and I am delighted to have this book included in the exciting political theory list she is building at Oxford University Press.
Peter Euben was the teacher who inspired my interest in political theory and who first provoked in me deeper reflections on what we talk about when we talk about democracy. Peter was a mentor, an inspiring example, and a dear friend. May his memory be a blessing. This book is dedicated to him.
Introduction
Beyond Democracy’s Imaginary Investments
When collective protest develops in the streets and occupied squares, it becomes not simply a demand for democracy addressed to the disputed power but an affirmation of democracy effectively implemented.
Jacques Rancière
I.
As another cycle of collective protest reverberated around the globe in recent years, crowds again took to the streets and public squares of cities from Santiago to Beirut, from Hong Kong to Baghdad, claiming their elected representatives do not, in fact, represent them. In the United States, the largest protest movement in its history—the Movement for Black Lives—drew between fifteen to twenty-six million people into the streets of hundreds of different cities and towns, and did so in the middle of a global pandemic’s demand for social distancing. The local grievances which triggered these uprisings vary widely—an increase in the price of public transportation, a tax on a popular messaging service, a revised extradition law, searing examples of racist police violence—but all express dismay and disgust at the economic and political inequalities of the existing system of representative government and a common demand to return political power to the people themselves. “Our government is a government of thugs!” “Chile woke up!” “There are no rioters, only a tyrannical regime!” The figurative space opened up by a widespread crisis of democratic legitimacy once again filled the streets with multitudes banging pots and pans, occupying public buildings and squares, building barricades, and throwing improvised dance parties celebrating the coming fall of the regime. Amid the proliferation of ever-new technologies enabling virtual forms of assembly, political participation, and “preference
aggregation,” the physical assemblage of popular collectives in public space has retained a distinctive and undeniable power.
Insurgent appeals to the authority of the people in the form of crowds, demonstrations, popular assemblies, and gatherings of “the people out of doors” have been a recurrent and distinguishing feature of modern democratic history since the eighteenth-century “Age of the Democratic Revolution.”1 The reiteration of such collective manifestations across a wide array of histories and geographies demonstrates their centrality to the democratic political imaginary, but they have never received the full theoretical attention they deserve. In this book I attempt to remedy this by offering historical and theoretical reflections on the enchantments of democracy, the sustaining fictions that enable it and give it life, as well as the collective phenomena that point beyond those fictions while never fully dispelling their allure; this book offers a study of the democratic sublime.
This is a difficult task, in part, because democracy has for so long been associated with the disenchantments of the modern age. The overthrow of monarchal rule during the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century involved a simultaneous rejection of the mystifying pomp and ritualized power of royalism, which, in the words of Catharine Macaulay, “blinded the people with the splendor of dazzling images.”2 If the king’s passive subjects were an “image doting rabble,” democracy’s active citizens were a ratiocritical public.3 Democracy’s iconoclastic disenchantments have been loudly proclaimed by its most eloquent critics and its most ardent admirers, from the late eighteenth century up to the present day.4
Edmund Burke was among the first and most influential of modern democracy’s critics. He warned that democracy would tear off “the decent drapery of life,” destroy the “pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal,” and leave nothing to authority but the sheer force of numbers and the threat of majoritarian violence;5 for Burke, democracy was “the most shameless thing in the world.”6 His nemesis Thomas Paine, the revolutionary citizen of the world, agreed that democracy would finally dispel the “dark coverings” and “superstitious tales” sustaining royal power—exposing the “government of kings” to be “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry”—but he argued that doing so would finally establish a government of the living, and not of the dead.7 Democracy promised a politics finally disenthralled of “Aaron’s molten calf, or Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image,” and attuned to the “simple voice of nature” and the natural rights of man.8
In the place of obscurity, there would be transparency; in the place of mysticism, rational clarity; in the place of secrecy, public accountability. Democracy would ultimately be proclaimed the political face of enlightenment itself, the collective process through which citizens could free themselves from their “self-incurred tutelage” and achieve their collective autonomy.9 As Marcel Gauchet has described it, democracy became the driving force of modern “autonomization.”10
Following this familiar view, democratic theorists have often emphasized the skills, virtues, and capacities citizens must acquire in order to assume the responsibilities of their political empowerment.11 The autonomous and selfgoverning people that is the source of democratic legitimacy must themselves be formed, disciplined, and trained into the capacity for collective self-rule. Alexis de Tocqueville focused so much attention on the Puritan townships and the different forms of civic association in Democracy in America because he believed they were schools of democracy that “bring [liberty] within the people’s reach,” and teach them “how to use and how to enjoy it”; associations provided democratic citizens with the necessary training in the difficult “art of freedom.”12 Countless others, from John Stuart Mill to Hannah Arendt, John Dewey to Robert Putnam, have followed Tocqueville in detailing how democracy enlists, enables, and interpolates the practices, habits, and dispositions crucial for its own maintenance and survival.
While these interrelated questions of democratic disenchantment and political education have been central preoccupations of democratic theorists, they have less often considered in any depth or detail how democracy must also enlist the imagination of its citizens as an ongoing condition of its existence, and certainly as a condition of its radicalization and deepening.13 Not just enlightenment and education, in other words, but entirely new forms of political enchantment are required by democratic politics. Democracy places new pressures on the collective imagination, unprecedented enticements of collective fantasy. At the heart of modern democracy’s fantasy space lies its enigmatic constituent subject: the people. Unlike the king standing at the center of royalism’s political cosmology—“a visible presence, wearing his crown and carrying his scepter”—the people that are the living source of democratic authority are never visible; the sovereign voice proclaimed in the revolutionary slogan vox populi, vox dei is never distinctly audible.14
In the medieval political theology of the King’s Two Bodies explored by Ernst Kantorowicz, there was both the living natural body of the king, subject
to illness and to death, and the political body of the realm, invisible and everlasting.15 The king does not die, but “deceases” when his natural body is separated from the corpus mysticum of the state. In democracy, “the people,” as Remo Bodei has written, “do not enjoy the privilege of correspondence between the physical and the political body, however temporary.” To support the authority of the sovereign people, “a massive and repeated symbolic investment is necessary.”16 The conjoining of the people’s two bodies therefore requires a double investment of the popular imagination. It must envision both their concrete material existence as well as their continuous persistence across time.
In order to attribute sovereign authority to the people, we have to imagine the contours and composition of their existence—the dilemmas of boundary associated with who the people are—as well as their capacity for transformative collective agency—the less frequently engaged but related question of how the people act. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Sheldon Wolin writes, created a new “idea of collective action thereby contesting the monopoly on action previously enjoyed by kings, military leaders, aristocrats and prelates.”17 Heroism was a collective as well as an individual preoccupation of nineteenth-century political theory. As John Stuart Mill would write, if previous radical changes in government “had been made always by and commonly for, a few; the French Revolution was emphatically the work of the people. Commenced by the people, carried on by the people, defended by the people with a heroism and self-devotion unexampled in any other period of modern history.”18 In visual culture, as I will explore in Chapters 3 and 5, the “emergence of multitudes as the protagonists of public life” transformed passive spectators into a new visual language of “group organization, coordination, and mobilization; of strikes, rallies, assemblies, campaigns, and marches; of acts of symbolic or real aggression and self-defense.”19
As the personal and external rule of the king was replaced by the impersonal and immanent self-rule of the people, representational dilemmas emerged that impacted questions not only of institutionalization and law, in other words, but also of visualization, composition, and form. Unlike the sovereign acts of kings and queens, the self of collective self-government could not be assumed or made directly available to sensory experience. Because the people has no clear form, it could assume multiple and competing forms— not merely an electorate, but also leaders, public opinion, demonstrations, declarations of principle. “A theory of democracy,” Pierre Rosanvallon has
argued, “must consist in the first place in constructing a typology of these figures of the people, or their modalities of appearance and expression, as well as the ways in which they become institutionalized.”20
This dynamic of figurative peopling is, thus, a key component of our “modern social imaginaries,” the ways “people ‘imagine’ their social existence . . . [and] their social surroundings” so as to make “possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”21 Imaginary investments of peoplehood mediate the people’s relationship to their own political empowerment—how they understand themselves to be a part of and act as a people. In this book, I will explore the distinct aesthetic-political problem of how to envision the people as a collective actor, a question that haunts the history and theory of modern democracy even though it has been insufficiently recognized by democratic theory’s usual preoccupation with the principles, norms, and procedures for legitimizing democratic rule. Far from being a barren site of disenchantment and demystification, democracy engenders new fantasies of collective belonging and transformative agency. Democratic citizenship is inseparable from this unending elicitation of the popular imagination, and in democratic contexts fantasies of peopling inevitably become extraordinary sites of political contestation.
II.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the so-called dreamer of modern democracy, was acutely aware of the imaginary investments required as popular sovereignty’s condition of possibility, even as he also marshaled the full force of his philosophical and literary talents to prevent popular sovereignty’s fantasy space from becoming a site of political conflict.22 We must “scrutinize the act by which people become a people,” he wrote in The Social Contract, “for that act, being necessarily antecedent to [any] other, is the real foundation of society.”23 Rousseau recognized that popular sovereignty would require new imperatives of peopling—the rituals of collectivity that he described in Geneva, for example, and that he envisioned in his constitutional proposals for Corsica and Poland—but, as I will explore in Chapter 2, he also recognized that placing the people as the sovereign foundation of political authority would engender demands beyond these imaginary investments: demands not only for the people’s existence as an “imagined community,” but for their collective, assembled presence.
Rousseau has often been wrongly described as a proponent of direct democracy, but he did insist on the direct and unmediated presence of the people in the sovereign assembly. For Rousseau, the people’s sovereign empowerment—their inalienable, indivisible, and indestructible will— engenders an unceasing demand that the people be both imagined and occasionally made physically manifest. Rousseau understood that alongside democracy’s imaginary investments, there would emerge pressures of physical materialization that would pose a series of dilemmas for political theorists and political actors in the coming era of democratic revolution. If the people is at once an effect of democratic representation and its very authorizing ground—as contemporary theorists of the paradox of peoplehood have demonstrated with Rousseau as their central canonical figure—the question arises of how to politically navigate the forms of political contestation and competing claims of peoplehood that emerge within that aporetic space.24 The unrepresentable sovereign assembly that sits at the heart of Rousseau’s theory of legitimacy is his attempt to fill the troubling gap of democratic representation with the people’s authoritative collective presence. “When the people are assembled,” Rousseau writes, “the jurisdiction of the government ceases . . . [because] in the presence of the represented there is no longer any representation.”25
Rousseau’s affirmation of the people’s collective presence in the sovereign assembly has often been denounced as a dangerous perversion of democracy and even the source of “democratic totalitarianism” by theorists who have focused attention on the distinctive dilemmas that democracy poses to questions of political representation. Rousseau is often read as the emblematic figure of collective self-immanence and democratic auto-poesis.26 A tradition of theoretical reflection on democracy indebted to Claude Lefort’s conceptualization of democracy’s “empty space” of power—traversing the ideological spectrum from François Furet and Marcel Gauchet on the Right, to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on the Left—has been profoundly attuned to democracy’s imaginary investments and symbolic forms while also being skeptical of what it construes as dangerous Rousseauian myths of collective embodiment and immediacy, which are usually conceptualized in the political theological language of incarnation. The attempt to redirect the political-aesthetic problem of what I call the people as popular manifestation into the political theological problem of incarnation is the focus of Chapter 1. Contemporary theorists of democratic symbolism insist in various ways on the importance of affirming the “gap” of democratic representation and
rejecting democratic “illusions of pure self-immanence.”27 Rosanvallon, who is the most prominent contemporary exemplar of this tradition, writes that in a democracy, the people “loses all bodily density and becomes, positively, a number, that is, a force composed of equals, of individuals who are purely equivalent only under the reign of law.”28 All claims of democratic embodiment or materialization are conceived by this tradition of theoretical reflection as dangerous disfigurations, infantile longings, or totalitarian impulses generated from within the symbolism of democracy itself. Democracy, in contrast, must be understood as strictly identical to the “disincorporation of power.”29
We need not embrace Rousseau’s particular vision of the people’s collective presence in democratic politics in order to think more carefully about the demand for collective embodiment beyond democracy’s imaginary investments that his work makes legible. Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty offers an anticipatory diagnostic of the central dilemmas of peopling that would emerge in the era of democratic revolution. Rousseau’s systemic theoretical reflections on these issues allow us to see more clearly how and why emergent democracy would come to generate not only imaginary investments but, beyond them, demands for the people’s direct public appearance and manifestation. Making the people not only imaginable but also tangible to the senses was a recurrent dilemma of the late eighteenthand nineteenth-century age of democratic revolutions. Democracy does not conceal sovereign power or shroud it in a mystical sanctum, but renders it publicly manifest, stages its actions, presents its own scaffolding.30 Collective staging and popular aestheticization are essential parts of a democratic political culture, and the politics of popular assembly was and remains one of the principle, most dynamic, and most historically persistent sites of this form of political enactment.31 III.
If democratic theorists, following Jürgen Habermas’s lead, have focused a great deal of attention on how a ratio-critical public emerged out of growing networks of print capitalism, coffee houses, reading publics, and so on, they have focused less attention on how the proliferation of popular assemblies— crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the “people out of doors”—mediated and gave tangibility to the people manifesting itself as a collective actor
