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8 dis-playing democracy: the rhetoric of duplicity Kristian Wedberg Toward the end of the nineteenth century, some European writers of literature saw themselves in a new political role. According to the influential Danish critic Georg Brandes, the vitality of a literary work from then on depended on its ability “to submit problems to debate.” It was a time when the specific pathos of Zola’s “J’accuse” evolved into the ethos of the public writer in general. Brandes’s motto is apparently in accord with Jürgen Habermas’s thesis that the politico-historical function of the modern literary institution was to create a space where issues were genuinely arguable. Literature, as presented and debated in eighteenth-century theaters, literary salons, and coffeehouses, for the first time assembled a true publicum. Its status as such was on the one hand presupposed by the socioeconomic autonomy of the new bourgeoisie (apart from the monarchy, church, and landowners), and on the other hand by the Enlightenment idea of the autonomous power of human reason (apart from the God-given, eternal authority of the king and the church). As we can see, it was no small part that literature was supposed to play; actually, it appears to be the firstborn child of modern liberal democracy. No doubt literary writers today are met with lesser expectations. However, some portion of this grandiose ethos still rings through: owing to what is, in Norwegian discourse, known as the poetocratic tradition, writers of literature are still “called upon” by the nation “in times of crisis ,” as one critic put it. The public still seems to listen when they speak. What is the content of, and the reason behind, the distinctness of these voices? Why do they resonate, and in what kind of room? And what has this to do with contemporary democracy? The premise behind these questions is that there really is a connection between literature, public space, and democracy. I presume that investigating literary public space will shed new light on present-day democratic culture, a presumption that resonates with Habermas’s aim in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: to get “a systematic comprehension of our own society from the perspective of one of its central categories” (1991, 5). As is widely known, Habermas developed a general theory of publicity based upon the historical study of European public spheres from the time of the feudal system up until late modernity. Among those spheres were what could be called “literary publics” (literary salons, Tischgesellschaften, coffeehouses, etc.). In this respect, my own investigation can be said to have a Habermasian discursive background, both thematically and empirically . However, I shall try to show that in order to grasp the phenomena in question one must pay close attention to aspects that tend to be neglected in the Habermasian discourse. Most important, one must consider the extent to which these public events are rhetorical performances as well as sociological symptoms. More specifically, the public texts and events must be viewed as rhetorical situations (as this concept is understood in the Bitzer-Vatz-Consigny discourse). This view entails the importance of considering and interpreting the concrete verbal and gestural conduct of the agents involved, as well as the details of the specific social setting. One might object that the focus on situational specifics and details sacrifices the social scientific goal of revealing regularities and reaching a level of universality. However, the approach of rhetorical close reading can be defended as a method of paradigmaticity. By this I mean that the readings serve as concrete examples, or paradigms, of that upon which our image of a cultural whole is sketched. It does not mean, then, that my study is antisystematic, only that it refrains from trying to construct an exhaustive discursive image of the larger public culture of which the readings are a part. In general methodological terms, my ambition is to sketch an image of overall contemporary democratic culture by means of descriptions of some of its possibilities.1 In sum, my analyses imply that Habermas’s general theory of publicity is insufficient as a regulative ideal in the sense of a model description and normative basis for understanding public sphere phenomena. Insufficient does not mean wrong; it means that Habermas’s basic sociohistorical perspective must be supplemented with a rhetorical perspective. Public situations have a fundamentally dual character: on the one hand, they are socially and culturally given; on the other hand, the meaning of a particular public speech act might be...

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