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[2] representing potentiality “to understand emerson’s writings, one must first see him at work as a lecturer,” the editors of the Later Lectures have stated with just conviction (LL, vol. 1, xx). My intent in this study is not to provide a historical study of Emerson’s role as a lecturer, nor am I claiming privileged status for those of his texts that come to us as addresses and lectures rather than as essays. My claim is a more indirect one, though perhaps that makes it all the more bold: my interpretations of Emerson’s writings, largely carried out in the mode of philosophical explication, are based on the historical awareness that the overwhelming majority of these texts were written for lecture audiences. I am claiming, in other words, a direct link between Emerson’s philosophy and his engagement as a public lecturer. Many of those who followed Emerson have left us their testimony of the listening experience peculiar to his lectures. Those who were not repelled by his typical lack of structure tend to point out the “uplifting” and “inspiring” effect his lectures had on them. It is, indeed, safe to argue that his career as a lecturer depended on just such effects. Few scholars, however, have attempted to connect these audience responses with his style of thinking. As a result, those scholars who have read Emerson as a philosopher have generally shown little interest in placing him in the lecture hall; those who approach him historically tend to shy away from the intricacies of his thought, implying that his audiences could not have cared for, or even been capable of following, overly fine distinctions . To be sure, the practice of reading philosophical texts differs from listening to a lecture, especially if that lecture was given in the U.S. lecture system of the mid-nineteenth century, and thus was situated, in the expectation of the listeners, somewhere on a continuum between instruction and entertainment. However, in Emerson’s philosophical style, distinctions, even overly fine ones, are rarely scholastic (or, as he would have put it, “pedantic ”) ends in themselves: they frequently produce contradictions as well as unexpected analogies, the operations chiefly responsible for creating the effects so often reported by his listeners. As I will argue, Emerson’s manner of Representing Potentiality 63 producing these effects cannot be sufficiently accounted for by describing disjunctions, contradictions, analogies, and the like as if they were mere ornaments to ideas that can be neatly summarized and traced back to various intellectual traditions. But if, following Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s style is his substance, then the “Emerson Effect” cannot be reconstructed without following him on his path of dramatizing the ambiguities of moral and philosophical idioms.1 Exploring Emerson’s theory of representation as an act of philosophical stylization conducive to the needs of the lecture hall is the main goal of this chapter; to get there, I will first contextualize Emerson in the institution of the public lecture. Emerson as Lecturer In an influential account of Emerson’s career as a lecturer in the Midwest, Mary Kupiec Cayton has argued that Emerson’s audiences of the 1850s to the 1870s—bourgeois, business oriented, and interested in a narrowly mercantile version of self-culture—created a simplified Emerson that neatly fit their class interests. Comparing news reports of Emerson’s lectures to the versions authored or authorized by Emerson, Cayton comes to the conclusion that midwestern audiences ignored or dismissed the essentially unchanged idealist backbone of Emerson’s message: “By applying [the laws of nature that transcended social convention, tradition, or proscriptive statute] to subjects that were ostensibly nonpolitical and nonreligious, Emerson seemed to his listeners to be merely passing along practical advice on practical subjects—the epitome of self-culture.”2 By providing such opportunities for misunderstanding, Emerson, probably against his intentions, helped reduce self-culture, understood in its fullest sense as the “active expansion of one’s faculties and the promotion of self-awareness,” to a narrower version of “culture,” that is, “the conspicuous consumption of people who were nationally and internationally defined as important intellectuals” (Cayton, “American Prophet,” 618). In effect, Cayton portrays Emerson as a hegemonic figure who ended up reaffirming the power of his own class by deceiving himself and his audiences: “He represented the paradox of a dominant culture that claimed to be dedicated to self-improvement but that increasingly took self-improvement to mean adherence to an ever-moreclearly defined body of standards and...

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