The Genius of Democracy. Victoria Olwell
map aspects of the same problem: a crisis in formulating an account of how the will relates to properly political knowledge and action. As Jay Fliegelman has argued, eighteenth-century rhetoricians addressed this crisis by privileging the affect of the speaker, expressed through the bodily and vocal performance of sincerity. By the mid-eighteenth century rhetoricians “favored a purified rhetoric of persuasion broadly understood as the active art of moving and influencing the passions.”46 Speakers were encouraged to set aside both the high Ciceronian style, which seduced the senses, and rational argument, which was considered too detached to move men to action or enlist their sense of civic belonging. As John Quincy Adams explained in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (1810), a speaker could use the “soft compulsion” of sympathetic voice and gesture to “‘charm’ consent.”47 This paradox of coerced consent was based in “the operations of sympathy, the faculty that puts individuals beyond themselves and their own self-interest into the realm of mutuality of feelings.”48 If Christie’s speech in Work had (somewhat anachronistically) followed the early nineteenth-century model, it would have limited its appeal to the sympathies. In doing so, however, it would not have represented a new rhetorical experiment in deploying sympathy as a medium for public speaking, as Hendler suggests; rather, it would have represented an extension of the dominant republican tradition of rhetoric.
This, though, is not the primary model for Christie’s speech. Instead her speech appropriates and transforms Emerson’s response to the problematic relation between collectivity and consent. While eighteenth-century rhetoricians advocated the “soft compulsion” of feeling, Emerson theorizes a different subordination of personal agency that becomes, in effect, the condition of agency’s political expression. The genius magnetizes not by asserting his own will, personal influence, or feeling but by excavating a belief that his auditors experience retrospectively as having been already there, as having assumed the shape of conviction in some disregarded past moment now brought suddenly to consciousness. The subjects “tyrannized” by genius are thus given back their original insights, which they can recover only because these insights are not merely individual, but rather representative and therefore collective. The tyrannized subjects are thus made available to collectively held commitments that also express their character as passionate commitments, leading the men in the hall to raise their five thousand voices in unitary agreement. Democratic disinterest lies in genius’s triumph over merely personal will, which atomizes the electorate and sinks voters into their immediate bodies and concerns. It thus also vanquishes the privacy of conviction, realizing with great passion what Elaine Scarry has called the promise implied by the etymology of consent in con-sentir: “sentience across minds.”49
Emerson’s formulation clarifies Alcott’s revivification and transformation of genius in Work. Christie’s speech clearly echoes the scene Emerson imagines. Like the genius Emerson describes, Christie is surprised and spontaneous. Just as the Emersonian genius says, “It is my own, and, It is not my own” (“G,” 80), Christie has at once a sense of “self-possession” (W, 332) and the sense that the speech “spoke itself.” In addition, like Emerson’s democratic genius, Christie’s speech is positioned against other modes; as the narrator specifies, Christie speaks with a “simple eloquence that touches, persuades, and convinces better than logic, flattery, or oratory” (W, 332). She even speaks, moreover, with “magnetism” (W, 333).
Alcott also amends Emerson’s conception of “Genius,” and therein lies her intervention in the project of framing discursive conditions that can facilitate women’s democratic incorporation. Whereas the men Emerson imagines in Faneuil Hall reconstruct their bodies as a figurative common “heart” and “voice,” Christie brings her listeners’ historical bodies, marked by their relation to labor, gender, and class, into the field of political representation. Christie also speaks a “universal language that all can understand,” but her universality takes no part in the neoplatonic “representativeness” that distinguishes Emerson’s model of genius. Christie’s “universal language” does not issue from her access to the “Soul of all women,” to paraphrase Emerson, but rather from her ability to recognize, represent, and mediate the different positions of identity and histories of experience that the women occupy. Through this work of mediation she draws needlewomen, typesetters, servants, intellectuals, activists, wives, and mothers into a collective identity capable of advocating for their civic betterment as women. Christie’s genius reconstructs, that is, “woman” as a political identity, realized in a coalition united by Christie’s ability to move among different discourses, experiences, knowledges, and bodies.
Hearing and seeing her, the women in the audience find their common identity not only created but also authenticated; they see in Christie, finally, a “genuine woman” and feel that she “was one of them” (W, 333). This identification remains, however, a complexly social, rather than essential, one; the connections she forges rely on the work of mediation, not ontology. The activists who organized the meeting “begged [Christie] to come and speak again, saying they needed just such a mediator to bridge across the space that now divided them from those they wished to serve” (W, 334). Her genius replaces sublated difference with coordinated difference and activates, rather than tyrannizes over, her collaborators’ political will as she helps form “a loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, each ready to do her part to hasten the coming of the happy end” (W, 343). In her speech universality indeed becomes the “receding horizon resulting from the expansion of an indefinite chain of equivalent demands” that Ernesto Laclau hopes for. Alcott supplies Christie’s speech in paraphrase. Her “universal language” may be “without necessary content or a necessary body,” but her work of mediation gives it here a particular content and a particular body, staged in relation to a universalized principle that permits the women’s entrance into political discourse—allows them, that is, to elevate their atomized pain into collective action. Her spontaneous speech forges connections between the women’s lived experiences of labor and the universalizing principle not of sympathetic identification but of “justice as a right” (W, 333). Her political genius then becomes general among the collectivity she has forged. As Christie speaks to the women, she provides an example, as the narrator says, to “inspire them” (W, 333).
What they will do with that inspiration is left to the future. Within the compass of Work, Christie’s newfound genius grounds what we might call, following Nancy Frazer, a subaltern counterpublic sphere. In Frazer’s well-known formulation, a counterpublic sphere provides an activist remedy to the normative exclusions of the dominant public sphere. If the dominant public sphere is based on certain discursive protocols (reasonable exchange, sanctioned political topics, and privileged forms of speech) and on certain bodies (white male bodies that seem to lose their specificity in their apparent universality), then a counterpublic provides a point of retreat where an excluded or stigmatized group can formulate its resistance and work out its discourse. A counterpublic, then, generates an eccentric political formation, a site of both exchange and insurgency conducted outside the political center. Christie’s inspirational speech transforms the pro-suffrage meeting she attends into such a counterpublic. While she sits through the speeches, the women are divided by their different discourses, their different histories, and their different cognitive styles. The speech she gives—the speech that overtakes her—bridges these differences and founds a common discourse and political impetus. As Frazer emphasizes, however, the ultimate progressive value of a counterpublic lies in its intention to use its new insights, language, and collective energy to return to and transform the dominant public sphere.50 Christie embraces such a possibility when she tells her activist friends, “We all need much preparation for the good time that is coming to us, and can get it best by trying to know and help, love and educate one another,—as we do here” (W, 343). What they “do here,” she hopes, they will also do “there,” in the civic arena that will one day fully incorporate women as citizens. Her counterpublic, in other words, aspires to abandon its eccentricity, to move back to and alter the center—to become, that is, centrally important.
Rather than failing to live up to the priorities and protocols of liberal democracy or attempting to make a public out of private values, Christie’s genius aspires toward a new political world