eJournals REAL 34/1

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

Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom: Notes on John Dewey and Frederick Douglass

2018
Dustin Breitenwischer
D ustin B rEitEnWischEr Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom: Notes on John Dewey and Frederick Douglass I. Introduction Whenever a citizen of a democratic society chooses to vote, to organize or to institutionalize; whenever she represents herself or is being represented by someone else; whenever she communicates and experiences with the world around her; whenever she processes a past, envisions a future, and commits to her present; whenever she is invested in modes of reflection and critique, one could argue that she, more or less committedly, engages in paradigmatic forms of democratic life, in modes of creative innovation and intervention, and in practices of aesthetic (self-)empowerment and (self-)liberation� Each of these instances potentially (or, at best) marks a moment in which the creative subject emerges as a democratic actor and in which the democratic subject emerges as a creative agent� Building on this idea, the following essay on John Dewey’s 1939 lecture “Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us” and Frederick Douglass picturetheoretical essays (published in the 1860s) seeks to determine the power of aesthetic freedom - i�e� the existential nature of a pre-subjective, non-conformist, creatively expressive liberty - within the dynamics of democratic existence and the social and individual struggles for equality� Disregarding the logic of chronology, I will first retrace the concept of “creative democracy” in the philosophical thinking of Dewey, for Dewey brilliantly combines a lucid historical analysis with a monitory prognosis of the future� The discussion of his conceptualization of creative democracy should therefore allow me to introduce an idea of the greater transhistorical disposition of ‘creative democracy’ in order to shed some light on Douglass’s philosophical fight for equality, freedom, and democratic participation in his writings some 70 years earlier� 1 Both Dewey and Douglass have formulated their theses on creative democracy and aesthetic freedom in times of great national and international political crises, i�e� the looming threat of two wars that have, at their time, determined the fate and the future of democratic societies� And both Dewey and Douglass, this essay argues, understand that (a) creative democracy 1 Even though it is unfortunate that she has not included Dewey in her thorough analysis of democracy and aestheticization, Juliane Rebentisch’s The Art of Freedom must be mentioned as one of the most timely and affirmative discussions of the relationship between aesthetic and democratic existence� 48 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr depends on an existential connection of nature (i�e� natural laws), equality (as expressed and experienced within the logic of these laws) and freedom (as the true expression of the aesthetic), and (b) creative democracy is therefore not merely a form of government but a way of life� In this regard, Dewey and Douglass place a particular understanding of aesthetic freedom (and aesthetic self-liberation) at the center of their democratic-egalitarian theories that, curiously so, follows the tradition of a post-Kantian thinking that has been significantly shaped by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his understanding of the poetic nature of human being� This post-metaphysical tradition will decisively inform my close reading of Dewey’s and Douglass’s theories of creative democracy and aesthetic freedom� In addition, my discussion of Dewey’s and Douglass’s influential transhistorical positions positions itself at the interface of two cultural paradigms of our time: (1) the international crisis of democratic sovereignty (vis-à-vis the rise of populism, right-wing autocracy, or the unforeseeable consequences of our communication in social networks and with the help of artificial intelligence) and (2) the all-embracing presence of the so-called creativity dispositive (as manifested in the growing impact of creative industries, the cultural changes due to flexible working hours and an increase in self-employment, and the infamous ‘aestheticization of life-worlds’ that forces individuals to act as creative designers of their own lives)� 2 And yet, this essay does not seek to provide an in-depth analysis of current crises� Rather, it wants to draw on a particular understanding of creative democratic participation that may eventually help us, in turn, to make sense of present misalignments� Its core ideas essentially revolve around the power of the aesthetic in the context of democratic (co-)existence and, along these lines, around the ways in which the freedom afforded by democratic participation always already intersects with dynamics and processes of aesthetic experience� In my comparative reading, I hope to show that Dewey and Douglass promisingly complement each other: while Dewey points out that being democratic always already means being creative (i�e� being an aesthetic existence), Douglass highlights the idea that aesthetic (self-)experience is a key factor in our democratic (self-) experience and (self-)creation� This essay asks: Does each of these two thinkers represent one side of the very coin whose minting reveals nothing less than the melded nature of creative democracy and aesthetic freedom? II. “…all should partake” - John Dewey In 1939, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, John Dewey delighted the guests of his complimentary dinner with a short lecture entitled “Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us.” 3 Dewey presents a nation that still suffers 2 For an introduction to these debates, see Brown, Undoing the Demos; Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism; Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity� 3 A list of literature on Dewey and democracy (and, in fact, a list of Dewey’s own insights into the dynamics of democracy) would go beyond the scope of this essay� The debate about Dewey’s understanding of democracy is too varied and complex to be Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 49 from the economic and social turmoil of the Great Depression and that faces outside threats from Soviet communism and European fascism� But aside from its historical specificity, a number of Dewey’s diagnoses are yet again all too accurate today. Dewey detects a “crisis” in U.S. democracy, which is “due in considerable part to the fact that for a long period we acted as if our democracy were something that perpetuated itself automatically” (225). But Dewey does not merely urge his fellow citizens to act� Rather, he appeals to a common sense of collectivity by incessantly using the pronoun “we.” In this spirit of collectivity, the question arises whether Americans are actively (self-)governing or whether they are merely being governed, whether they seek to actively engage in democratic processes and institutions or whether they passively recede� For Dewey, as he underlines early on, life in a democracy is dependent on its citizens to cherish it as a way of life instead of simply accepting it as a given form of government� In fact, in the first paragraph, Dewey curiously conflates the “creation of democracy” with the phenomenon of “creative democracy,” thereby underscoring the processual dimension and the potentially infinite preservation of a “self-governing society” (224). And even though “creative democracy” may sound like a particular kind of democratic existence, Dewey’s lecture clearly testifies to his conviction that the ideal democracy is always already a creative democracy� What is more, and I will unravel this at a later point of this section, being creative and being democratic are more or less synonymous� Being democratic is being creative and being creative is being democratic� Or, to put it differently, Dewey’s understanding of creative being, i�e� of an aesthetic existence, is essentially (and even existentially) expressive and formatively democratic. As one needs to “realize in thought and act,” Dewey writes, “that democracy is a personal way of individual life” (226; emph. J�D�), democracy is dependent on its members’ imagination and participation, their passion for innovation and intervention; in short, their creativity� Dewey’s “vision of democracy,” Martin Jay therefore notes, “necessitated a robust commitment not only to an open-ended process of unimpeded free inquiry, which emulated that of the scientific community, but also to the selfrealization that came through active participation in the public sphere” (55). According to Dewey, a democratic coexistence is thus no longer the result of happy historical coincidences, as it had been in the early years of the young republic. And even though “[t]he crisis that one hundred and fifty years ago called out social and political inventiveness,” Dewey’s present (and, one may want to add, today’s present as well) even “puts a heavier demand on human creativeness” (“Creative Democracy” 225). Dewey warns his listeners that democratic self-regulation cannot endure if one merely relies on the self-reflexive (and, in a way, inventive) automatisms of systemic agency (i.e. “a kind of political mechanism” [ibid.]). Rather, he zooms in on the satisfactorily addressed here� Nevertheless, the following texts may be insightful as an introduction to the discussion: Friedl, “Thinking America”; Joas, The Creativity of Action; (in German) Joas (Ed�), Philosophie der Demokratie; Richardson, Pragmatism and American Experience; West, The American Evasion of Philosophy� 50 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr essential democratic actor, the human being� It is only with regards to the individual citizen that “we can escape from this external way of thinking” (226). Democracy “signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life” (ibid.), a task that can only be accomplished through “innovative effort and creative activity” (225). Democracy does not simply occur to last infinitely; it has to be continuously imagined, designed and reproduced according to its given socio-historical context� “Democracy,” in this sense, “is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature” (226), a statement that can be deemed one of the central insights in Dewey’s lecture, thus making it worth a closer analysis. Dewey suggests that democracy as a way of life is, by definition, not only dependent on the active engagement of each individual citizen, but that it is essentially “controlled,” i.e. actively guided, by one’s belief in the potentiality of and the capability to invest in such an engagement� For the pragmatist philosopher, democratic being is a mode of experience, the play-space for “free interaction of individual human beings with surrounding conditions” (229)� Which leads our discussion of creative democracy into the midst of Dewey’s aesthetic theory. Five years prior to “Creative Democracy,” Dewey presents his readers with a sentence that is as simple as it is exemplary for his pragmatist philosophy, and that may very well be understood as the essence of his theory of aesthetic experience� In Art as Experience, he writes: “Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment” (17). According to this logic, the experience of the aesthetic object is existentially dependent on dynamics of creative agency on the part of the recipient� 4 Aesthetic experience is an act of completion, in which the order of the aesthetic object reveals itself and becomes engrained in the experiential universe, i�e� the life-world, of its recipient� The idea to highlight such a completion (in order to achieve fulfillment in order to evoke completion in order to…) epitomizes the antimetaphysical foundation of Dewey’s philosophy and exposes its essentially democratic spirit� In Dewey’s logic - and here we may only want to think of his museum pedagogy - 5 , the involvement of the recipient and the inclusion of the aesthetic object in the recipient’s immediate and (self-)determining conditions signal the breakdown of an aesthetics of autonomous art� In this regard, aesthetic experience, in general, and the experience of art, in particular, allow for immediate and often unexpected renegotiations and reassessments of one’s given social, political, intersubjective, etc� reality� As Stefan Deines notes: For this reason, Dewey can say that art is more moral than given moral principles or moral conditions� Rather, the moral or democratizing function of art can be attributed to its potential to transcend prevailing conventions and norms (or their 4 For an introduction to Dewey’s aesthetic theory, see Fluck, “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience”; Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics; for a discussion of completion and aesthetic in-betweenness in Dewey’s Art and Experience, see Breitenwischer, Dazwischen, esp� 56-63� 5 Cf. Hein, “John Dewey and Museum Education.” Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 51 interpretations) in ways that give us leeway over them� The freedom of the production process thus continues as it were - what is articulated by works of art are new aspects of social life, which are not yet included in the understandings and norms that originally orient the practices� They rather become irritated and challenged by that which is new and different� (5; my transl�) Art is not produced and received for art’s sake� The aesthetic is for and by human experience, and human experience, in turn, propels most strikingly within the experiential sphere of creative democracy� What is more, “Dewey’s insistence on making art accessible to the common man is not only an important facet of his thinking, it is also the proclamation of a political, an ideological belief,” Herwig Friedl argues (134). In a brief discussion of democracy and the arts in Freedom and Culture, also published in 1939, Dewey therefore underlines the necessary participatory nature of art, i�e� of art as an extraordinary mode of communication rather than a fetishized object of social distinction: “Even those who call themselves good democrats are often content to look upon the fruits of these arts [meaning, as he mentions earlier “literature, music, painting, the drama, architecture”] as adornments of culture rather than as things in whose enjoyment all should partake, if democracy is to be a reality” (9). 6 Neither is the aesthetic object autonomously detached from the life-worlds of its recipients, nor is democracy a self-sustaining form of government. - “Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment.” Or, to apply this dictum to the phenomenon of creative democracy: “Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means” (“Creative Democracy” 229). Much in line with Dewey’s sentiment, Volker Gerhard writes that “the unprecedented novelty that [democracy] presents in comparison to any other constitutional model requires a lot of future, so that it can actually succeed on the never-before-taken path” (41; my transl�) - echoing Dewey’s plea to consider creative democracy the “task before us” and referring us back to the idea of experience as end and as means� For Dewey, experience is the generator of creativity and creativity is the essence of democratic and aesthetic being� In this line of thought, democratic experience can thus be understood as the quintessential mode of aesthetic freedom (i�e� of free creative innovation and intervention)� Or, to be more precise, democratic life and aesthetic life seem to complement each other in and through the constantly perpetuated forcefulness of experience that 6 What follows is a brief discussion comparable in sentiment to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the “aestheticizing of politics” and the “politicizing of art” in his 1935/ 36 “The Work of Art in Its Age of Technological Reproducibility” (esp. 41f.). And even though Dewey and Benjamin could hardly be more different in their ideological premises, Dewey too signals a warning about the dangers of aesthetic misapprehension of art in totalitarian regimes� He writes: “The theater, the movie and music hall, even the picture gallery, eloquence, popular parades, common sports and recreative agencies, have all been brought under regulation as part of the propaganda agencies by which dictatorship is kept in power without being regarded by the masses as oppressive� We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason” (Freedom and Culture 10)� 52 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr intertwines reason and feeling, mind and body, nature and society� Following the aesthetic anthropology of Christoph Menke, one could argue that, in Dewey, too, “[t]he freedom of aesthetic life, precisely as freedom from any rule of generality, including the norms that define rational faculties, is the condition of possibility of the development, and successful enactment, of rational faculties” (570). Against the backdrop of such an “intelligent judgment and action,” aesthetic freedom thus “open[s] the road and point[s] the way to new and better experiences” (Dewey, “Creative Democracy” 227 and 229). If practiced and reflected upon correctly, the aesthetic and the democratic, in Dewey’s philosophy, are essentially one “power in human association” (Art as Experience 334)� Creative democracy is therefore not the result of external processes and authorities, but of intersubjective dynamics� The aesthetic and the democratic - intertwined in what Jason Kosnoski has labeled “Dewey’s social aesthetics” - are thus phenomena that demand, but, first and foremost, enable creative action� Democracy, according to Dewey, “call[s] into being things that have not existed in the past,” and the “task before us” existentially consists in the “creation of a freer and more humane experience” (229). But Dewey is well aware of the fragile nature of democracy and he strives to make a virtue out of necessity in that he cherishes the inherent fluctuation in democratic cultures� As Eddie S� Glaude puts it, Dewey advocated “a more intelligent pursuit of conditions that would enable [democracy] to flourish under continuously changing conditions” (141), and, as I would like to add, he thereby underlined the poetic nature of creative democracy� At which point Dewey’s philosophy is truly Emersonian� As if anticipating Dewey’s experiential sphere of creative democracy, both in an early lecture on “Politics” and an 1839 journal entry, Emerson evokes a curious image. In “Politics,” he writes: “every subject of human thought down to most trivial crafts and chores ought to be located poetically” (Early Lectures 3 239; my emph�)� Quoting his lecture excessively, he notes in his journal: “Everything should be treated poetically” (Journals 329; my emph�)� In this vein, the poetic, i�e� the act of creative practice, is both a matter of setting a place for itself and of specifically engaging with it� To treat things poetically is to treat them as a way of life that is essentially marked by one’s creative agency� This being said, I concur with Herwig Friedl who argues that “[b]oth Emerson and Dewey think democracy as an experiment always erasing precedent” (155). So, against the backdrop of Emerson’s proto-pragmatist desire for poetic treatment, the condition for aesthetic and democratic experience in Dewey is based on the idea of a possibility of completion and fulfillment, and just as art and aesthetic objects are merely products of our aesthetic attitude (i.e. sources, reflections, and results of human practices), democratic rules, norms, and institutions are just as well merely “expressions, projections, and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes,” as Dewey puts it in “Creative Democracy” (226)� 7 For Dewey, democracy is directly linked to human creativity because it is not only its product, but because it is always already its most promising 7 On the pragmatist idea of art as human practice, see Bertram, Kunst als menschliche Praxis (whose translation, Art as Human Practice, is forthcoming)� Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 53 foundation - it continuously “puts new practical meaning in old ideas” (226). In line with Rahel Jaeggi’s discussion of Dewey’s democratic philosophy, creative actions could therefore be deemed “practices of democratic self-determination” (343; my transl.). What is more, Dewey believes in the paradox that democracy is completest and thrives to the fullest when it is practiced as an ever-ongoing process of becoming against the backdrop of ever-changing social conditions, and, to use the words of Volker Gerhard, when it “make[s] productive that which is oppositional” (41; my transl.); oppositional to and within the sphere of democratic participation� Which leads us to Dewey’s understanding of a fundamental right to equality� Dewey seems to assume that inside every human being, “irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth” (“Creative Democracy” 226), works an aesthetic force whose absolute potential is civically and culturally dispelled in the creation of democratic freedom� Democracy is - and here Dewey takes up a term that is being similarly used by W�E�B� Du Bois in Darkwater - a “commonplace of living” (229). 8 The “commonplace” of democracy as a dynamic product of (individual and collective) creative action is thereby characterized by the “ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience grows into ordered richness” (229). 9 In this line of thought of democratic being as the creation of (an ever-changing) order, creative democracy (Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetic state) is the most powerful locus for processes of aesthetic education; it is the cultural sphere that (just like art) “liberates one from self-centeredness by 8 Cf� Du Bois, Darkwater 140f� 9 To which I may briefly add that “order” seems to be of the essence here. In another essay, it might be exciting to broaden the debate about Dewey’s alleged organicism to the phenomenon of a (post-idealist) order of beauty ( - an essay which would, first of all, need to distinguish between the aesthetic and the beautiful in Dewey’s aesthetic theory)� Dewey’s idea of a democratic order could, then, be contrasted with Friedrich Schiller’s idealistic and post-Kantian philosophy of beauty� In the 1790s, when the American and the French revolutions arguably marked the first critical moment in the advancement of modern democracy in the Western political world, Friedrich Schiller reacts with a striking theory of aesthetic freedom� Both in the Kallias letters (1790s) and his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Schiller grapples with his reading of Kant and suggests that beauty and freedom are intertwined in an existential relationship� At a time when man’s self-liberation is at the center of social and cultural life, Schiller, too, declaims the essential equality of human beings and their role in the make-up of the natural world� Schiller’s aesthetic theory is not only one of the most intriguing (early) interpretations of Kantian idealism, but, as such, a remarkable contribution to our thinking about the connection of the aesthetic and the political, or, as this essay seeks to investigate, the relationship between the idea of aesthetic freedom and the practice of democratic existence� Against this backdrop, one could argue that creative democracy, for Dewey, is essentially a system of implementing beauty ( - reminiscent of Friedrich Schiller’s dictum “beauty is freedom in appearance” [411; qtd� in Welsch]), i�e� a system that celebrates uncertainty and uncorrupted openness; a system that, on the one hand, underlines the aesthetic nature of human agency while, on the other, dismantling the metaphysical dualism of human being and the natural world. In a sense, Dewey (inadvertently) draws on this idea by conflating the erection of a sensible world with life in a free political community� 54 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr making it possible to experience and understand aspects of social life that (still) have no room in the given understanding that shapes one’s own identity and perspective” (Deines 5f.; my transl.). In Dewey’s words, creative democracy is determined by the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process� Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. (“Creative Democracy” 229) In contrast, then, “[a]ll ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences” (ibid.). As Cornel West insightfully notes, individual self-creation, for Dewey, is essentially tantamount to advancing creative democracy� 10 The democracy in creative democracy is not a set of rules, regulations, and institutions; it is not a set of ideas and governmental practices; rather, democracy must be understood (much like art and philosophy) as a “reflective human activity,” to borrow West’s words (73). One could turn to the proverbial and argue that democracy is the dynamic communicative acceleration of rhyme and reason� And as such, democracy is, in a sense, ‘unnatural’, for it is not a given but a created order; a polyphonic and diverse system whose ordered state depends on the ever-active forces of creative intervention� Or, as Dewey puts it, “[m]uch less is democracy the product of democracy” (The Public and Its Problems 84; emph� J�D�), which means that democracy is only insofar the enabler of the attainment of aesthetic (i�e� human) freedom as it is the latter’s product. “For Dewey,” to turn to Cornel West for a final time, “the aim of political and social life is the cultural enrichment and moral development of self-begetting individuals and self-regulating communities by means of the release of human powers provoked by novel circumstances and new challenges” (103). I dare say that there is hardly a more apt description of Dewey’s philosophy of aesthetic freedom� To sum up, Dewey’s appeal is clear: creative action is an expression of freedom worthy of our respect for our democratic coexistence� But if one wants to fully indulge in this coexistence, one has to accept that it alone provides the best framework for being creative� Democracy is the product and source of creative agency� It would thus be wrong to assume that the democratization of a society is about the final, unalterable conclusion of an organic process� Creative democracy as an expression of aesthetic freedom is expressive of the continuous unrest of the democratic agents� Creative action sustains democracy; not the other way around� On this note, let us turn to Frederick Douglass’s philosophy of equality and creative intervention� 10 Cf� West, The American Evasion of Philosophy 72� Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 55 III. “Pictures come not with slavery…” - Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass is one of the key political thinkers in the mid-nineteenthcentury United States, but his aesthetic philosophy is still hardly acknowledged when, in fact, as this essay argues, it must be considered one of the cornerstones of his political activism� 11 In a number of his texts, ranging from his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to anti-slavery essays and his lectures on pictures, Douglass sees existential connections between the realm of humans’ anthropological disposition of aesthetic being and their historical obligation to further the cause of universal equality and democratic coexistence� In said Narrative, Douglass writes about his (forbidden) process of (self-) education: The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness� Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever� It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing� It was ever present to torment me with a sense of wretched condition� I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it� It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm� (42f�) Within this array of anthropomorphisations of nature and imagining Douglass’s full immersion in the spectacle of his aesthetic freedom, Douglass is trapped in a “wretched condition,” which is marked by the insurmountable discrepancy between subjugation and the all-encompassing spirit of eternal freedom� 12 And when freedom “appeared,” Douglass entered an (idealistically framed) aesthetical world, a world in which, as Friedrich Schiller notes in one of his Kallias letters to his friend Körner, every natural being is a free citizen, who has equal rights with the most noble, and may not even be compelled for the sake of the whole, but rather must absolutely consent to everything� In the aesthetical world, which is entirely different from the most perfect Platonic republic, even the jacket, which I carry on my body, demands respect from me for its freedom, and desires from me, like an ashamed servant, that I let no one notice that it serves me� (421; qtd� in Welsch; emph� F�S�) 13 Much like the German idealists, Douglass understands the pre-subjective (i�e� existentially human) nature of freedom as aesthetic freedom� As he notes in his “Age of Pictures,” “how glorious is nature in action” (140). For Douglass, human beings are thus “free by the laws of nature” (qtd. in Buccola 49), and 11 John Stauffer’s essay “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom” is a remarkable exception� 12 Quite similarly, in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? ”, Douglass draws on practices of creative innovation and intervention in conjunction with the (sublime) power of nature to make his (universal) case for an equal society� He tells his audience: “Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake” (1239). 13 See also Fn� 9� 56 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr those laws, in turn, are the laws of the aesthetical world, i�e� the form-giving laws of creative being� For in fact, it is creativity and the dynamics of free selfexpression that Douglass, in a number of his writings, is most interested in� At this point, I want to move deeper into a particularly curious and surprisingly underappreciated set of writings, namely Douglass’s inquiries into the aesthetics of the picture and the nature of human picture-making� Right during the time of the Civil War, between 1861 and 1865, Frederick Douglass toured the northern United States with three lectures on pictures, namely “Lecture on Pictures” (1861), the already quoted “Age of Pictures” (1862), and “Pictures and Progress” (1864/ 65). And not least John Stauffer’s, Zoe Trodd’s and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s 2015 publication of Picturing Frederick Douglass should encourage scholars in the fields of literary and media studies to extend and strengthen the engagement with Douglass’s love for photography� In their book, the editors lay bare a fascinating, if not to say, unbelievable, fact: namely that Douglass, a formerly enslaved man, had been the most photographed American in the nineteenth century, surpassing even the likes of Lincoln and Whitman� Whenever he could, Douglass had his picture taken, a practice grounded both in his fascination with his own photographic likeness and the technology that is responsible to afford him that pleasure� Douglass believed in the power of photography� He had his picture taken more than 150 times, adding to this body of images his lectures on the power of the photographic picture. In these lectures, Douglass insightfully reflects on the new technology and links it to matters of abolitionist activism, social liberty, and democratic self-possession� “Douglass believed that the formerly enslaved could reverse the social death that defined slavery with another objectifying flash: this time creating a positive image of social life and proving that African American consciousness had been there all along” (Wexler 19f.). In a letter to a befriended printer, written in 1870, Douglass notes: “Pictures come not with slavery and oppression and destitution, but with liberty, fair play, leisure, and refinement” (qtd. in McClinton 37). Both in his portraits and his theoretical writings, Douglass emphasizes a curious relationship between reality and image, namely that he desires a reality that is as forcefully publicly recognized as the reality of truth in images� The photograph, for Douglass, undeniably confirms an existence, and for the former slave - a subject of radical non-possession - to capture something forever is essential to human liberty� In this line of thought, pictures refer human beings back to their responsibility to care for themselves and thereby excel as agents in a creative democratic society� Douglass writes: “[S]elf-criticism, out of which comes the highest attainments of human excellence, arises out of the power we possess of making ourselves objective to ourselves - [we] can see our interior selves as distinct personalities, as though looking in a glass” (“Pictures and Progress” 171)� 14 Here, we touch upon a crucial point in Douglass’s aesthetics of freedom and democratic being: the idea of an Emersonian “impersonal” in which 14 Or, as Dewey puts it: “We are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves” (Art as Experience 195)� Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 57 human beings encounter themselves in a state of sheer and uncompromised humanity (the essentially natural potentiality of individuality) and, not yet, in a state of conforming subjectivity� 15 The “impersonal” marks a moment of self-abstention that links the personal with the public� In many ways drawing on Johannes Voelz’s understanding of Emerson’s “impersonal,” I argue that it is through an aesthetics of the impersonal that Douglass presents his listeners, readers, and the recipients of his images with a paradigmatic model of self-investment, in and through which one is enabled to retreat into the interpretative play-space of non-identical impersonality� 16 It is on the basis of this idea of “impersonality” that the force of creative powers designates a particular way of apprehending the future and of reconfiguring the public� And it is through his self-acknowledged appreciation for the Emersonian “impersonal” that Douglass, as Douglas Jones argues, “imagine[s] the self in ways that forestall, or, better, dissolve categories of identity that polities use to discriminate” (6). Yet it is an idea of the impersonal, and here I quote Jones again, that “remains fixed on the person (the affective, the corporal, the psychical)” (ibid.). Douglass’s fixation on the person is profoundly based on his belief in the liberal and ethical value and virtue of democratic and aesthetic self-possession, as he is convinced that “[e]very man is the original, rightful, and absolute owner of his own body” (“A Friendly Word to Maryland” 42). And I argue that this cannot only be seen in Douglass’s literary narratives, but in his pictorial representations and his picture theory as well� “There is,” Douglass writes, “a prophet within us, forever whispering that behind the seen lies the immeasurable unseen” (“Age of Pictures” 152). 17 “This voyage of discovery,” he continues, “lies over the broad ocean of our common humanity” (153). In many ways, it is of course this assumption of a common nature, i.e. his implicit reflection on the Emersonian impersonal as a means of radical (aesthetic) self-empowerment, in and through which Douglass is most radically advocating the power of creativity in the (human) struggle for democratic equality. John Stauffer speaks of Douglass’s “artful defiance” (“Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning” 202), which leads us to a philosophical challenge that characterizes most of Douglass’s writings and his modes of self-representation, namely the attempt to intertwine a liberal understanding of self-possession with the normativity of aesthetic freedom� About man he therefore says that “his distinctive qualities as man, are inherent and remain forever. Progressive in his nature, he defies the power of progress to overtake him to make known, definitely, the limits of his marvelous powers and possibilities” (“Self-Made Men” 333). And when Douglass contends that human’s appreciation of pictures may essentially be deemed an expression of his or her “poetic nature” (“Age of Pictures” 144), he links the poetic nature to 15 On Emerson’s impersonal, see Cameron, “The Way of Life by Abandonment”; in response: Arsić, American Impersonal� 16 Cf. Voelz, “The Recognition of Emerson’s Impersonal.” 17 Which testifies to Douglass’s existential belief in the future. As John Stauffer puts it: “Douglass had to envision a sharp break from the past in order to believe in an impending new age of freedom” (“Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom” 129). 58 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr the matter of debate and sociopolitical self-liberation� “Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment,” writes Dewey. “[W]here all is plain there is nothing to be argued,” writes Douglass (“What to the Slave” 1237). The struggle of liberation vis-à-vis the forces of aesthetic freedom testifies to the productively irritating nature of creative democracy and its inherent demand for poetic intervention� At which point it is crucial to further dwell on the idea of the poetic in Douglass’s democratic aesthetics of pictures� Again, it seems to be Emerson who Douglass (an admirer of Emerson) most strongly complies with� In “The Poet,” Emerson writes about the gift of the poet that “Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language” (EL 452)� And it is Douglass who substantializes that metaphor when he notes in his lecture “Pictures and Progress” - and the Aristotelian undercurrent is all too obvious - that, generally, “man is the only picture-making animal” (166), but, in particular, “[p]oets, prophets and reformers are all picture-makers” (171). The poet as representative man, Douglass argues in direct reference to Emerson, “reflects, on a colossal scale, the scale to which we would aspire, our highest aims, objects, powers, and possibilities” (“Self-Made Men” 334). And against this backdrop, he contends that “all mankind have [sic] the same wants, arising out of a common nature” and that “[t]he power to make and to appreciate pictures belongs to man exclusively” (“Lecture on Pictures” 131). Fascinated by the aesthetic forcefulness of pictures as democratic media, Douglass sees an existential “superiority of imagination over reason,” as John Stauffer notes (Black Hearts 54)� In a romantic tradition, for Douglass, the transition from slavery to freedom, from objecthood to creative participation in a democratic society, is essentially dependent on the work of the imagination� “One had to differentiate freedom from slavery in one’s mind’s eye,” Laura Wexler writes about Douglass’s philosophy of the imagination, “before one could produce or procure it for oneself or others� The past, the present, and the future would have to be reimagined after slavery’s demise� The nation, too, like the former slaves, must be taught to discern the new facts of existence” (28f.). What is thus striking about Douglass’s understanding of said “superiority” is that he ties it to the promises of social reform and democratic equality� For him, individual and social freedom are inextricably tied to or, rather, grounded in aesthetic freedom: “The process,” Douglass writes, “by which man is able to posit his own subjective nature outside of himself, giving it form, color, space, and all the attributes of distinct personality, so that it becomes the subject of distinct observation and contemplation, is at [the] bottom of all effort and the germinating principles of all reform and all progress” (“Pictures and Progress” 170). Form and reform! Douglass has the foresight to understand reform not only in terms of sociopolitical reconstruction but also as a matter of poetic re-formulation - as an infinitely repeated form-giving play serving the laws of nature� To him, reform is the subject’s recurring mode of giving itself form, of formulating itself as subject, of giving itself form from the depths of pre-subjective non-form (and, as such, an existentially human non-conformity)� Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 59 And Douglass is, as Henry Louis Gates argues, “acutely aware that images matter, especially when one’s rhetorical strategy had been fashioned around the trope of chiasmus, the reversal of the black slave-object into the black sentient citizen-subject” (“Epilogue” 204; emph. H.L.G.). Douglass’s portraits, in this regard, are artistic through the aesthetic forcefulness of their subject� When being photographed, Douglass understood himself in the realm of art and within the aura of what one might want to call the liberating spirit of aesthetic power� In the photograph the subject of a creative process becomes resonant to itself as creative actor� Subject and object of photography activate each other and react to each other - they form and reform each other vis-àvis their social context and in light of their aestheticization� They are bounded in each other’s unboundedness� And this, for Douglass, is ultimately an act of individual and social reform in the face of a struggle for democratic participation� To link two of his ideas about the power of pictures, it is the “poetic and religious element of man’s nature,” his or her “dreamy, poetic, and religious disposition” (“Age of Pictures” 144), “wherein illusions take the form of solid reality and shadows get themselves recognized as substance” (“Pictures and Progress” 166). To sum up this section, the affordance of the picture (i�e� to bear witness to one’s aesthetic self-liberation) finds its political likeness in the equality of democratic government. In his 1871 essay “Is Politics an Evil to the Negro? ”, Douglass therefore writes: “The beauty and perfection of government in our eyes will be attained when all people under it, men and women, black and white, shall be conceded the right of equal participation in wielding its power and enjoying its benefits. Equality is even a more important word with us than liberty” (qtd. in Buccola 67). 18 “Wielding” and “enjoying” - creating and experiencing� For the spirit of equality (the order of the natural laws) reigns in aesthetic freedom, equality is existentially “more important” for Douglass� And as if he was responding to Douglass, Dewey stresses in “Creative Democracy” that “[t]he democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gift [s]he has” (226f.). IV. Conclusion As this essay has moved from Dewey’s plea for a creative democracy to Douglass’s politics of aesthetic freedom, democracy essentially appeared as a reformative, progressive, and, as such, as an utterly poetic set of forces� Having said this, this essay sought to contribute to current debates about the (im)possibilities of aesthetic freedom and the creative nature of democratic culture� It aimed to show that Americanist efforts to debate thoroughly the trials and tribulations of United States democracy might eventually benefit from the inclusion of aesthetic theory� And drawing on the established idea 18 Again, on the “beauty” of democratic government, see my remarks in Fn. 9. 60 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr that both Douglass and Dewey are significantly indebted to an Emersonian philosophy, I more specifically argued that their respective takes on nature, individualism, and creative being have been substantially empowered by Emerson’s post-metaphysical and proto-pragmatist position� “[T]he task of democracy,” Dewey writes, “is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute” (“Creative Democracy” 230). And both Dewey and Douglass know that a lack of freedom marks the impossibility of experience and therefore the impotence of creative agency� When Dewey furthermore writes that “[i]ntolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life” (227), we can almost hear Douglass reply, “[h]uman contact, not isolation, useful activity, not dull, monastic torpidity, is the mission to which the glorious fact of life calls the whole human family. […] We live most who experience most” (“Age of Pictures” 156). Dewey and Douglass understand that a democratic life can only come into full bloom under the regimen of active and innovative, communicative and equal participation and intervention� In times of an ever-expanding “creativity dispositive,” we may nonetheless not confuse Dewey’s and Douglass’s call for creative democracy as being tied to an exclusively romantic and/ or utilitarian understanding of creativity� 19 As this essay sought to show, Dewey and Douglass (and Emerson as well) raise questions about the importance of aesthetic freedom for the socio-cultural and political (co-)existence that today (perhaps more urgently than ever) have to be answered in diachronic and transhistorical perspectives� It is therefore important to press ahead with research on the aesthetics and dynamics of the aestheticization of life-worlds and to delve deeper into the cultural studies and philosophical discourses on democracy� In the end, this essay did not try to sketch an aesthetics of democracy, but to provide one angle from which to further determine the mutual interdependence of the aesthetic and the democratic� Works Cited Arsić, Branka (Ed.). 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