eJournals REAL 34/1

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

Reading for Democracy

2018
Laura Bieger
l aura B iEgEr Reading for Democracy Democratic culture, as a “whole way of life” in Raymond Williams’s sense, is shorthand for ways of doing and making that are deeply engrained in democratic societies, a living structure that is not only their outcome but also their nourishing ground� Such ways of doing and making are not superimposed by ruling elites; they are fabricated from within democratic life� As one of the oldest modern democracies, democratic ways of doing and making are deeply engrained in U�S� society (which is not to say that democratic ideals are, or ever will be, fully realized in this society). They define how people dress and carry themselves (in jeans and with the self-esteem of being free individuals); how they interact with each other (on the basis of a shared belief in equality); what they consider a good life (being free to do and say what one wants) and a good government (one that is of the people, for the people, and by the people)� And because these democratic ways of doing and making pervade all aspects of life, they also define (through the constitutional right to free speech, a free press, public schools and libraries, a commercial book market) what can be said, written, and read by whom, for whom, and to what end� These latter aspects of democratic culture in the U�S� lie at the core of my current work, and I am especially interested in those doings and makings that generate and institutionalize reading publics; that is, publics that constitute themselves through acts of reading� Reading is attracting lots of attention these days� Scholars are asking how we read differently now that we often read on screen rather than paper, how our cognitive and affective engagement with texts changes under the impact of the ongoing shift to an increasingly digital reading culture� And closer to home, how our understanding of the humanities (why they matter and what we should teach our students) is invested in ideas about reading (close and for meaning) that are historically tied to the medium of print, and that are, for precisely this reason, under much strain today� 1 Thinking about reading publics intersects with these debates in its commitment to matters of literary use; it enhances them with questions of democratic participation� Why, what, and how do people in democratic societies read, and what expectations and gratifications do they have when they read? What functions and values are ascribed to this age-old cultural technique and to all the actors (authors, publishers, critics, prize committees, readers, books, magazines, newspapers, 1 The debate is extensive and sprawling. See, for instance, Hayles, “How We Read”; the “surface reading” issue of Representations by Best and Marcus; Love, “Close But Not Deep”; Felski, Limits of Critique and Uses of Literature; the PMLA Theories and Methodologies section “Reading over Time” by Halpern and Rabinowitz; McNulty, “Literary Ethics Revisited.” 66 l aura B iEgEr blogs, tweets, smartphones) involved in it? What is at stake for a culture at large and a political culture in particular when an entire reading culture is being transformed as it is happening in our present day and age, where print ceases to be the unrivalled foundation of our reading culture while the public sphere is undergoing its perhaps gravest transformation since the invention of the printing press? Whose reading culture is and was being transformed now and in earlier moments of this history? What modes of democratic participation are being affected, and how? These are some of the questions I am trying to answer in my current work� The aim of this essay is considerably more modest� Theories of the public have assigned a formative role to acts of communication which are catalyzed and institutionalized by the production, circulation, and reception of texts, and I want to revisit some of these positions here with a special interest in how they view reading as a mode of democratic participation� Against the persistent ideal of communication as transparent, intersubjective exchange, I hope to show, through the public’s role as a reader, that its doings and makings are indeed more thoroughly mediated than it is often assumed� And eventually, I will offer some thoughts on what this means for our understanding about the public as a democratic institution� Ways of Doing and Making Things Public In the history of modern democracy, print has for the longest time been the medium through which texts were made available to the reading public� In fact, printing technology brought into the world new ways of making things public that prompted new ways of doing politics� Jürgen Habermas has explored this shift in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (published in English much later as Transformations of the Public Sphere), and one of his profoundest insights about modern democratic culture concerns reading� Printing increased the availability of reading material, yes, but the result was not merely that people read more� Through printing technology, reading became tied to political institutions and practices in unprecedented ways; in fact, one could say that it became a political institution in its own right� “Reading was relevant in a new way,” writes Michael Warner on the outset of his Habermas-inspired study of early American democratic culture, “because print discourse was now systematically differentiated from the activities of the state and from civil society” (Letters x)� Building on Habermas’s model of the bourgeois public sphere (to which I will turn momentarily), Warner examines the emergence of a new political discourse in colonial America at the eve of the revolution� One of the great virtues of his book is that it analyzes the transformation set in motion by printing technology as fully historical; that is, he shows how the meaning and function of political terminology such as “individual,” “print,” “public,” and “reason” were recalibrated through printed discourse by reconstructing these processes from within that discourse� Reading for Democracy 67 In doing so, Warner manages to make tangible the cultural dimension of the technological upheaval that was to generate “the political structures of modernity” (xi). Contrary to assumptions that “technology is prior to culture,” and against the resulting “retrodeterminism whereby the political history of a technology is converted into the unfolding nature of that technology,” he insists on the immanent meaning of writing and print in the culture of republican America and in the context of imperial enlightenment. How was print defined as a technology of publicity, having essentially civic and emancipatory character? How was the relation between subject and letters altered? What was the relation between the socially determined character of the medium and the texts produced in it? These questions are grounded in the assumption that “the cultural constitution of a medium (in this case printing) is a set of political conditions of discourse,” which “include the practices and structured labors that we call technology.” But Warner does not grant these conditions any ontological privilege over their political meaning; in fact, he treats political conditions and meanings as distinguishable� Technology, for him shorthand for “practices of technology,” becomes meaningful to the degree that it is structured, with its “meaningful structure [being] the dimension of culture” (9-10; my emphasis)� Approached this way, any attempt at understanding how printedness became the main currency of publicness, and how publicness gained a new political meaning and function at a certain point in the history of modernity must entail an excavation of this meaningful structure� And one crucial aspect about the transformed culture of letters in colonial America that we find with Warner as our guide is how reading print went hand in hand with “incorporat[ing] an awareness of the indefinite others” (“Publics” 65) to whom printed texts were addressed� Warner has called this feature of printedness the “normally impersonal” (Letters viii): readers did not simply imagine themselves as being directly addressed by (and in communication with) a text or an author; in reading print they imagined themselves in a relation with strangers with whom they may have nothing in common but being users - readers - of the same text� And this means that reading was indeed essential to fostering a self-understanding of democratic publics as made up of “relation[s] among strangers” (“Publics” 55) - relations that reside in the publicness of print� In fact, for Warner, the connecting activity of printed texts is what calls a public into being� Publics do not exist because people exist; they exist when people are bound together through texts, which essentially means through acts of reading� And this leads Warner to contend, against models of the public based on direct, intersubjective exchange, that the “doings” of printed texts (their linking activity, their modes of address, their ways of engaging readers) must factor into our understanding of publics as political agents� The usual way of imagining the interactive character of public discourse is through metaphors of conversation, answering, talking back, deliberating� The interactive social relation of a public, in other words, is perceived as though it 68 l aura B iEgEr were a dyadic speaker-hearer or author-reader relation� Argument and polemic, as manifestly dialogic genres, continue to have a privileged role in the self-understanding of publics; and indeed, it is remarkable how little even the most sophisticated forms of theory have been able to disentangle public discourse from its self-understanding as conversation� In addressing a public, however, even texts of the most rigorously argumentative and dialogic genres also address onlookers, not just parties to argument� (62-63) In insisting on the opaque surface of the text, which initially turns the public into a mere spectator - which must be read for the text to perform any of the mediating and connecting labor mentioned above - Warner assigns a key role to reading, yes� But he does so implicitly rather than explicating it� For instance, he deems the capacity of printed texts to address readers as publics essential to the existence of publics, but when further unpacking what this means, he limits his discussion to rhetoric (how is public address both personal and impersonal) and does not further consider the main activity - reading - that connects a text with those whom it is trying to address� Moreover, in stating that “between the discourse that comes before and the discourse that comes after, one must postulate some kind of link” (62), Warner seems to suggest that only the linking activity should be rethought in terms of the mediating activity performed by texts, and that public discourse exists in a space (or sphere) beyond these doings and makings somehow� So, as much as I side with Warner in his effort to unsettle deterministic media histories by insisting that any form and practice is inherently cultural, I am not convinced that discourse is the best tool for the job� The critical value of the concept hinges on poststructuralist analyses of the relation between power and knowledge, and as such, it is still relevant today� The problem I have with it in this particular context, however, is that discourse analysis can only account for those aspects of media use that spell themselves out as discourse� Lisa Gitelman’s notion of the protocols at work in implementing and activating a new medium offers a more nuanced alternative. In defining media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation,” Gitelman introduces the notion of the protocol to get a firmer grasp on the “vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere around a technological nucleus,” and which “express a huge variety of social, economic and material relations” (7). She illustrates her approach with the example of telephony, with its typical salutation (“Hello? ”), its monthly billing cycle, the wires and cables connecting one telephone with another, and so on� The associated protocols of print involve a similar variety of relations thickening around a technological nexus (which is in itself dynamic rather than stable), among them sales venues (book clubs, newsstands, bookstores), institutions (newsrooms, publishing houses, libraries, review journals), release cycles and modes of circulation, expectations about content and form Reading for Democracy 69 (high or low, fact or fiction, news item next to sales add), familiarity with certain types of genre (editorial, essay, sentimental novel)� For Gitelman, protocols are inscribed in media objects, and in drawing together sets of relations that exceed the symbolic realm, they prompt us to think even more rigorously than Warner’s discourse-based model about the manifold and historically specific ways of doing and making involved in activating and implementing a new medium� This is not the place to reconstruct in full scope how the associated protocols of print were involved in generating the new ideas of publicness that were foundational to the project of modern democracy� Rather, in turning to Habermas, I want to highlight one key aspect, namely, the share they had in turning the new medium of print into a virtual “training ground” (29) of rational deliberation for the modern democratic subject (which, for Habermas, was fully embodied in the rising bourgeoisie that was the main benefactor of the emerging order)� If print was essential to turning publicness into “the organizational principle for the procedures of the organs of the state themselves” (83) it is safe to say that the resulting new forms of governance were to a substantial degree engrained in democratic life because people read� In fact, with Habermas as our guide, we find that rule of law, one of the founding principles of democratic governance, is rooted in a public discourse that endorses an abstract and universally binding understanding of the law as a result of converging the literary and the political public sphere� With Gitelman we can see how the protocols of print were essential to making this happen� But first back to Habermas, who grounds his claims about the new political meaning and function of reading in an understanding of the bourgeois public sphere as a site that exists to the degree that private people make use of their reason in public� In modern societies, the private, intimate realm of the domestic sphere had become the site at which a new, audience-oriented mode of subjectivity was being forged; a mode of subjectivity trained by reading sentimental novels and writing letters and diaries, which turned out to be highly compatible and indeed very well suited to perform in the “coffee houses, salons and Tischgesellschaften” (51) that were formative sites of the literary public sphere in its early stages� And this brings us back to Gitelman� For how the private realm had become this new site was in part the making of the protocols which defined reading as an activity that one engaged in in the sheltered space of one’s home (ideally in the intimate space of one’s private room), and that thrived on an imagined web of “intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals,” authors and readers weeping over the fate of invented actors, and in doing so, they “themselves become actors who ‘talked heart to heart’” (Habermas 50). Interactions among family members became infused with this role, and salons held in private homes to discuss what one had read among a larger group of people extended it beyond the intimate sphere of the family� So yes, all these relations can be considered as belonging to the associated protocols of print, and the effects they had on the emerging social order have prompted Habermas to claim that the public sphere is indeed “an extension and completion of the intimate 70 l aura B iEgEr sphere of the conjugal family.” Just as the privacy of the family home was oriented toward the publicness of the salon, the newly emergent subjectivity, “as the innermost core of the private” (49), was from its inception oriented toward publicity. And for Habermas, a “literature that had become ‘fiction’” was crucial in conjoining these two strands� On the one hand, the emphatic reader repeated within [herself] the private relations displayed before [her] in literature� From [her] experience of real familiarity, [she] gave life to the fictional one, and in the latter [she] prepared [herself] for the former� On the other hand, from the outset the familiarity (Intimität) whose vehicle was the written word the subjectivity that had become fit to print had in fact become the literature appealing to a wide public of readers� (50) Both factors at work in bringing about this conjunction (the reenactment of fictional scripts by the reader, the reader’s familiarity with a certain masscompatible subjectivity) belong, once again, to the protocols of print rather than to printed discourse� And while this account of the reading process might reduce the reading of fiction to a reading for empathy, for a sociological study written more than fifty years ago it is remarkably attuned to concerns with literary use that have gained traction in our field in recent years. In fact, Habermas’s account of how, what, and why people in democratic (individualistic, capitalist) societies read is strikingly resonant with the idea of a fusion of horizons between the world of the text and the world of the reader that, according to reception aesthetics and reader-response-theory (to my mind the only systematic theories of reading in literary studies), is the main source of meaning production and gratification in the act of reading. What Habermas brings to this model is an acute awareness of how the publicness of print factors into the production and reception of literary texts� Reading, with its structural ties to forging a new audience-oriented subjectivity and generating public debate, prompts new ways of doing politics, which crystallize in the already mentioned shift in the understanding of law� The criteria of generality and abstractness characterizing legal norms had to have a peculiar obviousness for privatized individuals who, by communicating with each other in the public sphere of the world of letters, confirmed each other’s subjectivity as it emerged from their spheres of intimacy� For as a public they were already under the implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons, whose abstract universality afforded the sole guarantee that the individuals subsumed under it in an equally abstract fashion, as “common human beings,” were set free in their subjectivity precisely by this parity� (54) So yes, for Habermas reading is an essential catalyzer of the public sphere as a democratic institution, and of rational deliberation as the participatory element that sustains its existence� And yet, he seems to assume that this role can best be fulfilled in communicative situations - i.e. the aforementioned “coffee houses, salons and Tischgesellschaften” (51) - that allow for a presumably transparent and direct form of intersubjective exchange� And this means that the mediated activity of reading is relegated to the second tear, whereas direct intersubjective exchange is deemed to be the most valuable form of democratic participation� But does not Habermas’s own example Reading for Democracy 71 of how profoundly reading sentimental novels has affected the formation of an audience-oriented subjectivity imply that face-to-face communication is never fully transparent? That the language we use, the forms of address we choose, the modes of deliberation available to us, the purpose and aim of our speech, that all these features of communication are indeed deeply pervaded by our media use? This blind spot about the fundamental opacity of communication is all the more problematic, for it comes in tow with a wholesale rejection of modern mass media, of which print - in advancing the commodification of culture by catering to the appetites of the (predominantly bourgeois) reading public (29) - is an early harbinger� Curiously, even Habermas’s critics have not fully dismissed the ideal of transparent communication� For Nancy Fraser (who wants to salvage Habermas’s model as a tool that “permits us to keep in view the distinctions between state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic association, distinctions that are essential to democratic theory,” by pluralizing it) the public sphere “designates a theater in modern society in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” (Rethinking 57; my emphasis)� As we have seen, Warner (who also objects to Habermas’s lack of acknowledging the heterogeneous and inherently conflicted nature of the public sphere) takes issue with precisely this kind of conflation of public discourse and face-to-face communication� Even so, in bracketing what happens in the act of reading, Warner’s own model of public engagement keeps separate the linking (or mediating) activity of texts and the discourse flowing from it. (And if a future task of scholarship on the topic is to refine our understanding of the interactive, participatory thrust of the public as genuinely opaque and mediated, approaching the public through its investment in reading and it role as a reader is highly instructive�) Needless to say, giving thought to reading as a mediating activity that has been formative in shaping the public sphere must involve an understanding of reading as a social privilege� And while Habermas’s Stukturwandel can be criticized for a number of things, a lack of attention to this dimension of the public sphere is not among them� Reading publics, with their structural ties bourgeois values such as cultivation, privacy and individualism, are a staple of liberal democracy (or “bourgeois society,” as Habermas calls it), and as such they have been important catalyzers of empowering marginalized groups and individuals� But today, scholars are asking whether this agenda - which is, for some, essentially a liberal plea for diversity - has not foreclosed other possibilities of democratic mobilization, possibilities that are geared toward a radical democratic equality of means rather than a liberal democratic equality of opportunity� 2 The point is valid, and it aims at the heart and soul of the public sphere� How compatible is this institution with the project of radical or social democracy? Would reading still be assigned with a political role in these alternatives forms of democracy, and how would they deal with the problem of social privilege that is so deeply engrained in this 2 See, for instance, Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal� For an earlier quarrel with the same issue see Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity� 72 l aura B iEgEr cultural technique, its associated protocols, its democratic use-value? Just think of the difficulties that present “reading counterpublics” such as n+1, Jacobin and Public Books with their formative ties to Ivy League institutions have with divorcing themselves from the bourgeois public sphere� This is not the place to get into this important and timely debate� In stepping back from it we can see that in the kind of society which the rise of modern, liberal democracy has brought forth - the kind of society that we still live in today - public engagement has become a crucial touchstone of people’s self-perception and sense of belonging� In Warner’s words: “Speaking, writing, and thinking involve us - actively and immediately - in a public, and thus in the being of the sovereign” (“Publics” 52). But why is reading - the mediating activity that interlinks democratic ways of speaking, writing, and thinking - missing from this list? How ‘We The People’ Read If reading assumes a new meaning and function in the modern democratic culture the idea of popular sovereignty has been pivotal in this development. The power of “we the people” endorsed in the first sentence of the U.S. Constitution (the first one to be made public through print) comes in tow with a new set of responsibilities, among them voting for the candidate or party that best represents one’s interests, knowing what those interests are and how to prioritize them, and weighing self-interest against public interest� These responsibilities call for a culture of letters that is dedicated to cultivating responsible citizen-subjects - subjects who read as a way of engaging in critical self-reflection and public debate. For John Dewey, an ardent liberal democrat, parting public interest from self-interest is what summons the public into being, and as we shall see, he, too, assigns reading a crucial role in this process� But since this role is less of a leading role than in the other theories discussed so far, grasping it demands a brief rehearsal of Dewey’s general ideas on the public� For Dewey, the public comes into being in response to shared experience, with negative experience creating the strongest incentive for collective action� This is how he describes said process: Conjoint, combined, associated action is a universal trait of the behavior of things� Such actions have results� Some of the results of human collective actions are perceived, that is, they are noted in such ways that they are taken account of� Then there arise purposes, plans, measures and means to secure consequences which are liked and eliminate those which are found obnoxious� Thus perception generates a common interest; that is, those affected by the consequences are perforce concerned in conduct of all those who along with themselves share in bringing about results. Sometimes the consequences are confined to those who directly share in the transaction which produces them� In other cases they extend far beyond those engaged in producing them� […] Those indirectly affected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough to deserve a name� The name selected is The Public� (The Public 34-35) Reading for Democracy 73 Note how Dewey’s understanding of the public is inherently progressive� For him, collective response to negative experience moves democracy forward� In fact, the formation of the democratic state is an organic outgrowth of the formation of the public� “The public is organized and made effective by means of representatives […] association adds to itself political organization, and something which may be government comes into being: the public is a political state” (35). 3 Yet at the same time, Dewey’s public is an antagonistic force: “to form itself, the public has to break existing political forms� This is hard because the forms are themselves the regular means of institutional change” (31). In stark contrast to Habermas, who fails to acknowledge the plural, heterogeneous and conflicted constitution of the public sphere, its structural division into publics and counterpublics, Dewey’s public is nonunitary, diversified, oppositional by nature. Contrary to the Habermasian model, Dewey’s public does not move toward an ideal of consensus but from conflict to conflict, or rather, from experiment to experiment. 4 Conceived as a collective response to negative experience, the public cannot cease to exist� But it can cease to do the things that make its collective response to negative experience collectively felt and heard� The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for� […] Recognition of evil consequences brought about a common interest which required for its maintenance measures and rules, together with the selection of certain persons as their guardians, interpreters, and, if need be, their executors� (12-13) The crucial term here is recognition - “recognition of itself” (77) and recognition of its common interests� In fact, for Dewey, a public recognizes itself through its interests� “It is not that there is no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the consequences of social transactions� There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many publics […].” (137). Only when this public is sufficiently aware of itself and its interests can it properly function. For Dewey, this is “primarily and essentially an intellectual problem” (126) - a problem that can be solved by means of communication� And by this he does not mean the machinery of communication that interlinks science, the press, and the political system, but the art of communication that manifests itself in the dialogic process through which the people in a democratic society come to understand the nature of their interdependence through a system of shared meaning� The special role that Dewey assigns to reading is directly linked to cultivating this public and essentially democratic art� For Dewey (as for Habermas, who had not read Dewey when writing his book on the public but later acknowledged the kinship between the two models), communication makes up the core of democratic culture� In The Public 3 And, as Dustin Breitenwischer argues in his contribution in this volume, it is also an aesthetic state� 4 I offer a more in-depth comparison of the two thinkers in my forthcoming essay “The Public and Its Problems Revisited.” 74 l aura B iEgEr and Its Problems, Dewey specifies two components that impair the communication of his day: There is a lack of “symbols consonant with [the] activities [of the new age],” and the existing “physical tools of communication” (142) are not properly used. The symbols (about which he has significantly more to say than about the technology) are essential to creating the sense of shared experience that, according to Dewey, is foundational to generating the common interest through which the public can recognize itself� Only when there exist signs or symbols of activities and of their outcome can the flux be viewed from without, be arrested for consideration and esteem, and be regulated� […] As symbols are related to one another, the important relations of a course of events are recorded and are preserved as meanings� […] Symbols, in turn, depend on and promote communication� The result of conjoint experience are considered and transmitted� (152-53) So yes, symbols are crucial to making the flux of activity meaningful and experience conscious, communicable and collective� What Dewey brings to his diagnosis of the public and its problems here is an understanding of language based on his ideal of democratic communication that he had developed earlier, in Experience and Nature, where he writes: “Language is a natural function of human association; and its consequences react upon other events, physical and human, giving them meaning or significance.” And: “The heart of language is not ‘expression’ of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought� It is communication; the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership” (173, 179; quoted in Stob 239, 237)� To unleash the communicative capacity in and through language and foster the kind of language that is needed for the public to function as public, Dewey turns to the realm of art� In Art as Experience, which had been published two years prior to The Public and Its Problems, he uses the visual arts to develop a theory of aesthetic experience as an educational training ground for democratic citizens� For the problem at hand - the problem of generating new symbols and using them to transform the force of experience into collective action - he turns to literature: “Poetry, the drama, the novel,” he writes, “are proofs that the problem of presentation is not insoluble� Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation” (183). 5 The kindling is the public, and reading is the activity that can ignite it� So yes, not only does Dewey assign reading a vital role in 5 Dewey may have had Emerson in mind when writing these sentences� In an essay on Emerson called “Emerson: The Philosopher of Democracy,” he writes: “His own preference was to be ranked with the seers rather than with the reasoners of the race, for he says, ‘I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary; it will one day be taught by poets� The poet is in the right attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing�’ Nor do I regard it as impertinent to place by the side of this utterance, that other in which he said ‘We have yet to, learn that the thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself or no forms of Reading for Democracy 75 mending the problems of communication (and of democracy) of his day, he also has trust in its literature� But as his book draws to a close he reels back� Different from the presumably direct and immediate encounter that a recipient has with visual art, reading offers a merely secondary, derivative mode of experience� In Dewey’s words: Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained� But the winged words of conversation in immediate discourse have a vital import that is lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech. Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public� But it and its results are tools after all. Their final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take� (218) And this brings us to my conclusion - and back to the inclination of idealizing the face-to-face as immediate and transparent in theories of the public sphere� Dewey is especially emphatic in his endorsement of these ideas� Reading is essential in preparing the individual for the art of democratic communication, but to actually constitute a public it takes direct intersubjective exchange� Yet as clear and outspoken as the above quoted passage is in its judgment of reading as a minor mode of democratic engagement, Dewey is not fully consistent in taking this stance� In other passages he ponders over the possible benefits of new communication technologies - the “physical tools” mentioned above: “When the machine age has […] perfected its machinery, it will be a means of life and not its despotic master� Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is the name for a life of free and enriching communion” (184). In passages like these, which bring to mind recent debates about the democratic forcefulness of the internet (or at least the participatory internet 2�0), 6 it seems as if Dewey’s fundamental belief in democracy (which Hans Joas aptly compares to religious belief) 7 allows him to interpret practically anything as a potential strengthening of democracy, be it an old-fashioned cultural technique like reading or new technologies (in his day, most likely the radio)� Yet while it is crucial to differentiate where Dewey is invested in describing democratic procedures (which tends to be rigorous) and where he is projecting democratic possibilities (which is by default optimistic), in the face of today’s crisis of democracy there is something refreshing in his unwavering optimism� The state of perfect communication that lets public discourse flow freely might be achieved, according to Dewey, if both the art and the technology of communication are subsumed in a community’s democratic grammar and no plausibility can give it evidence and no array of arguments” (406). I owe this insight to Dustin Breitenwischer� For a concise version of Dewey’s argument on communication as an essentially democratic art see Dewey, “Creative Democracy.” 6 See, for instance, chapter 4 in Mounk, The People vs. Democracy� 7 See Joas, “John Deweys Theorie der Religion,” in which he contends that democracy eventually becomes a “secular religion” for Dewey, and in which he poses the question whether we should endorse him as a kind of prophet (153)� 76 l aura B iEgEr ways of doing and making� Achieving this state might be a utopian enterprise, but the value assigned to it and the measures undertaken by a community to approximate it depend on political will and democratic intention� Whether we are getting closer or further away from this state is a subject of heated public debate these days, and it is not clear if reading will still play a prominent role in the newly emerging order� 8 But perhaps our current media age has at least made us aware of the inescapably mediated nature of even our most immediate and intimate experiences ( - and how are we to mediate successfully these experiences without some kind of ‘reading’? ). If and how this awareness can (and will) transform our understanding of the public as a democratic institution depends on our willingness to let go of the persistent belief that the proper functioning of the public depends on the presumably unobstructed mode of the face-to-face� Any conscious act of reading might be an instructive exercise in this matter� Works Cited Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus, Eds. Special Issue “The Way We Read Now.” Representations 108.0 (Fall 2009)� Bieger, Laura� “The Public and Its Problems Revisited: Reading Dewey through Habermas (and Habermas through Dewey).” Special Issue „Truth or Post-Truth? “, Ed� Dustin Breitenwischer and Tobias Keiling� European Journal of American Studies 15�1(Spring 2020) (forthcoming)� Dewey, John. “Emerson: The Philosopher of Democracy.” International Journal of Ethics 13, 4 (July 1903): 405-413� -----� The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927� -----� Experience and Nature� New York: Dover, 1958� Felski, Rita� The Limits of Critique. London and Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015� -----� Uses of Literature. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008� Fraser, Nancy� “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/ 26 (1990): 56-80� Gitelman, Lisa� The Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006� Habermas, Jürgen� Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1964]� Trans� by Thomas Burger� Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989� Hayles, N. Katherine (2012). “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine.” How We Think: Digital Media and Technogenesis. 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New York: Harper Collins, 2017� 8 See, for instance, Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerburg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy; Mounk, “Is More Democrary Always Better for Democracy? ” Reading for Democracy 77 Love, Heather, “Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History 41�2 (Spring 2010): 371-392� McNulty, Tess� “Literary Ethics, Revisited: An Analytic Approach to the Reading Process.” New Literary History 49�3 (Fall 2018): 383-401� Michaels, Walter Benn� The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality� Metropolitan Books: New York, 2006� Mounk, Yasha� The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It� Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2018� -----. “Is More Democrary Always Better for Democracy? ” The New Yorker (November 12, 2018)� https: / / www�newyorker�com/ magazine/ 2018/ 11/ 12/ is-more-democracy-always-better-democracy Osnos, Evan. “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? ” The New Yorker (September 17, 2018)� https: / / www�newyorker�com/ magazine/ 2018/ 09/ 17/ can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy Stob, Paul. “Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the Public.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38�3 (2005): 226-247� Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14�1 (Fall 2002): 49-90� -----� The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America. 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