Abstract
Political theorists often depict the public sphere as a space free from power and public opinion as the result of the force of the better argument alone. Democracy’s Spectacle challenges deliberative conceptions of publicity by way of a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study of the elective affinity between consensus and coercion in antebellum American culture and politics. Greiman’s book ambitiously combines literature, political theory, visual studies, and cultural history to portray the mid-century public sphere as a source of both egalitarian ideals and tyrannical opinion. Public opinion policed society through the ritualistic performance of what she calls “spectacles.” Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of democratic tyranny, Greiman foregrounds the performative dimensions of majoritarian power as manifested in the unruly and violent assembly of crowds, rioters, and angry audiences. These spectacular eruptions of violence were not an offense to democratic consensus making. Rather, they were the states of exceptions of a racialized conception of popular sovereignty and its distinctively white public sphere.
This book consists of five chapters addressing the sources and consequences of racial popular sovereignty in the works of Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The first two chapters take Democracy in America as a guide to deciphering the relationship between popular sovereignty and democratic tyranny. In returning to Tocqueville as the starting point of her analysis, Greiman proposes to make an intervention in contemporary debates in critical theory surrounding the concept of sovereignty. In opposition to what she calls the “somewhat ahistorical” view of sovereignty as a state-centric form of power proposed by Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, Tocqueville offers a more capacious and nuanced account of sovereignty as a force that circulates between institutions, culture, and ideas in the public sphere (12). Scholars who look back on the antebellum period from the perspective of critical theory’s statist view of sovereignty, Greiman argues, risk effacing the historically specific operations of power they seek to analyze. The suggestion that Tocqueville’s sociological eye offers a more nuanced guide for making sense out of nineteenth-century American politics than the ruthlessly ahistorical discourse of the state of exception on offer in writers like Agamben rings true to this reviewer’s ears, although I do not imagine that this will be a very surprising or controversial claim to most scholars working in American political thought. What is surprising, however, is that despite organizing the book’s central thesis around this claim, much of the analysis of sovereignty in Democracy’s Spectacle remains beholden to the very ahistorical mode of the critical theories that Greiman seeks to decenter. For instance, when Greiman looks to explain the historical origins of the “newness” that Tocqueville reports in America she turns to Foucault’s College de France lectures as an authoritative source on “the reconfigurations of power and sovereignty in the midst of which Tocqueville finds himself” (44). Elsewhere, we are told that Tocqueville’s account of the tyranny of the majority illustrates “the ancient biopolitical ‘nucleus’ of sovereignty” that Agamben finds in the works of Aristotle (54). Political theorists should not be opposed to a methodological eclecticism that borrows from contemporary political and cultural theory to illustrate the stakes of arguments in a different historical contexts, but the heavy influence of the discourses of exception and biopower that permeates this book risks undermining its proposed interpretive project of bringing out what is hard to see and valuable to remember from historically distant examples.
Greiman is a scholar of comparative literature and this book is at its best when it backgrounds its conceptual claims concerning the nature of the public, the public sphere, and popular sovereignty and foregrounds its careful reading of the political texture of literary works. This skill is well on display in the very interesting chapter on Beaumont’s Marie: Or, Slavery in the United States. Greiman argues that rather than a secondary companion to Democracy in America, Beaumont’s novel marks a novel extension of Tocqueville’s analysis of American political culture by positioning race at it the very center of nineteenth-century public life. Through his depictions of the physical segregation of public theaters and the disruptive power of mobs to sustain the ideological stability of race in America Beaumont’s novel discloses the affective and aesthetic dimensions of democratic despotism overlooked by Tocqueville. Notable is the skill with which Greiman develops her account of what she calls the rituals of “punitive visibility” through which race is constructed and fixed in public life. This account elegantly weaves together a close textual analysis of Beaumont’s novel with the punitive practices catalogued in On the Penitentiary System in the United States and a historical reconstruction of the anti-abolitionist riots on which Beaumont modeled the novel’s climactic scene. What Greiman’s Beaumont shows us is that the violent spectacles of punishment that Foucault claims disappeared at the close of the eighteenth century take on an afterlife in post-Revolutionary America where spectacular rituals of punishment live on well after the people have symbolically cut off the king’s head.
What draws together Tocqueville and Beaumont with Child, Hawthorne, and Melville as analysts and guides to the public world of antebellum America is their shared use of metonymous language to capture the workings of sovereign power. Metonymy, we are told, was “the privileged . . . rhetorical mode” through which antebellum social critics “conceived and articulated the role of sovereignty in the shaping of public life” (26). The two associations that Greiman finds coinciding across these divergent writers to evoke the simultaneously internalizing-private and spectacular-public operations of sovereign power are those of the prison and the theatre. Together they illustrate the ways that popular rituals of performing sovereignty’s exception, ranging from forms of mass entertainment to anti-abolitionist riots, brought together individual and public modes of subjectification to sustain sovereignty’s coercive exception. The book persuasively demonstrates the coincidence of these images across the works of theses selected authors, but one could ask: Is metonymy really the privileged rhetorical mode amongst nineteenth-century social critics? A cursory glance across the rhetorical modes and genres of some familiar works of American writers should give pause to this premise. What about the withering irony, sarcasm, and reproach of Frederick Douglass’s ‘What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?’ Or the prophetic mode of the jeremiad? Or the melodramatic sentimentalism of much abolitionist literature? Here again one senses that the critical theory lens through which Greiman examines antebellum America brings a parsimonious account of sovereignty into sharp relief at the cost the historical context the book claims to evoke.
After a chapter dealing with Child’s account of the experience of finding oneself unwittingly complicit with the public’s racial inclusions and exclusions in her Letters from New York (Chapter 3) the final two chapters illustrate how American writers sought to unsettle the spectacular power of popular sovereignty through an aesthetic practice of “theatricality.” Glimpsed by Beaumont and Hawthorne, but only fully developed by Melville, theatricality is an aesthetic mode that deploys disruption, repetition, and excess to create a sense of “strangeness” within the reader as “a means of imagining democracy without the coercions of consensus or the exceptionalism of sovereign power” (195). Where the theatrical spectacle of popular sovereignty absorbs the spectator into the unity of the public, modes of theatricality estrange individuals from one another with the aim of cultivating a more generous public ethos defined by inconsistency and opacity. The final chapter of the book brings together a provocative reading of the poetics of Melville’s strange and estranging novel The Confidence Man with Arendt’s The Human Condition to recover an ideal of estranged plurality as an alternative basis for conceptualizing the public.
The book ends without a conclusion and one is left with the sense that Greiman has conceded too much to the Foucault/Agamben vision of modernity as nightmare of power with no way out short of making oneself illegible to the totalizing gaze of the public. There is of course an element of truth to such a pessimistic conclusion, but it only serves to highlight this reader’s central reservation with the book. Missing in this study of the democratic public sphere is an appreciation of the essentially contested nature of popular sovereignty, both in the antebellum period and today. Exactly who was authorized to speak on behalf of “the public” was more of an open question in pre–Civil War America than Greiman makes it out to be. If Douglass’s scathing irony is not given a hearing, neither is the fact that slaves, free men, abolitionists, feminists, and other “fanatical” egalitarians did not simply submit to the punitive visibility of public opinion as docile bodies. Rather, they authorized themselves to speak out on behalf of the public when they refused to remain complicit with the slave trade and organized both local and national challenges to the coercive force of the racial exception. There were many points during the reading of this book where I wondered how its depiction of the public sphere would shift if amongst the many scenes of racist mobbing and nativist riots Greiman had included examples of what one might call spectacles of democratic dissent, like those surrounding the arrest of Anthony Burns under the Fugitive Slave Law in 1854. After a failed attempt by an interracial abolitionist mob to rescue Burns from the Boston Court House, tens of thousands of people came together to line the city’s streets and bear witness to a manacled Burns being lead back into slavery by federal troops. Abolitionists transformed what was meant to be an orderly exercise of federal law into a spectacular civic funeral, covering the streets with black bunting, hanging flags upside down, and suspending a huge black coffin labelled “Liberty” above the city streets. Here we catch a fugitive glimpse of the kind of unruly democratic conflicts that take place when actors reclaim the title of the people and refuse the sovereign authority of state institutions and racialized publics that claim to speak in their name. I imagine including a place for these sorts of dissident performances of popular sovereignty might have put a wrinkle in the suspicion of democracy that this book’s panorama of reactionary spectacles evokes.