This drama of genius introduces, however, several complications—complications that Emerson openly flags with his metaphors as well as complications that we will need modern political theory to expose fully. The first complication has already been touched on: the collective will that Emerson frames here is possible only because of genius’s universality. Genius sublates difference. The array of possible differences erased through the simultaneous codiscovery of genius by the men in the crowd is unself-consciously minimized.37 The topos of the New England town meeting already populates the hall only with adult white men, whose difference is defined by the condition of isolated embodiment and a lightly drawn, unpoliticized class differential, as when the experience of having genius infuses “even the humblest hearer” (“G,” 83). The contours of this situation ensure that their specific identities as enfranchised white men can remain below the threshold of articulation.
At the same time, however, Emerson avoids ascribing any content to the genius’s speech. This allows him to maintain the representativeness of the opinions voiced by the genius. If Emerson gave the speech content, it would immediately reveal itself to be composed of opinions drawn from a field of other possible and perhaps defensible opinions; the genius’s speech would lie exposed in its merely historical or contingent character. As Ernesto Laclau reminds us, the vacuity of the universal is precisely what lends it its viability as a democratic trope. “If democracy is possible,” Laclau writes, “it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation. Society generates a whole vocabulary of empty signifiers whose temporary signifieds are the result of political competition.”38 Even if what Laclau suggests is possible, if universality can sustain its separation from a necessary body and a necessary content, then this is not really what Emerson suggests when he proposes the representivity of genius. Emerson’s conception of genius eliminates the need for the competition and dialogue that Laclau’s concept of “universality” is meant to sustain. The speech depicted in Emerson’s “Genius” must be not only embraced but also invented by all (or at least all here imagined eligible to participate). This ideal of representative universality thus denies even the possibility of dissent or competing interest. As a force that extends across minds, genius leaves no dissension to be staged or negotiated and no way to conceptualize irreducible differences and irreconcilable aims, let alone give them political viability. Under Emerson’s conceptualization, genius produces a collectivity oriented toward the political formalism of the vote precisely by eliminating politics.
A second complication emerges from Emerson’s paradoxical metaphorization of democratic genius as simultaneously the agent of freedom and a force of mind-control, a paradox staged also in Alcott’s formulation. The Emersonian genius holds his audience “magnetized”; he rules his audience by embodying its incapacitated desire: “The orator masters us by being our tongue. By simply saying what we would but cannot say, he tyrannises over our wills and affections” (“G,” 82). The auditors consent to the propositions expressed by the man of genius by surrendering their wills, rather than asserting them; the metaphor is specifically one of tyranny. How could this be a plausible expression of democratic community making? Such a way of tying liberty to tyranny has led Christopher Newfield to claim that Emerson advocates the “poetry of abandoned consent.”39
Such a concern, however, risks fetishizing the liberal notion of consent-as-freedom, at the expense of understanding the controversies that surrounded political subjectivity and discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Emerson’s moment, as in ours, consent was perceived to be a vexed matter. Early nineteenth-century debates about the proper modes of political and public address registered this difficulty. Emerson’s claim that the genius holds his auditors “magnetized” marks one particularly relevant location of contest. From its introduction in Paris in the 1780s, Anton Mesmer’s practice of “animal magnetism” sparked debates about the autonomy of the individual will and the relation of that will to democratic governance. Some French radicals saw socially transformative possibilities in Mesmer’s concept of an invisible fluid that connected all matter; other observers, including Benjamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France, perceived animal magnetism to be a threat to self-governance, and thus also to social governance.40 After quieting for several decades, debates about animal magnetism revived in America and Europe in the 1830s.41 Emerson links animal magnetism to his own transcendental project in Nature (1836), where he proposes that magnetism evidences the interconnections between outward Nature and the human mind, that it demonstrates “[r]eason’s momentary grasps of the sceptre, the exertions of a power that exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power.”42 For Emerson, it seems, animal magnetism suggests the unleashed potential of the mind’s open relation to a world of mysterious forces. Emerson had company in this thought. As the historian Alison Winter has revealed, the discourse on animal magnetism in the nineteenth century became part of a broad set of inquiries into the nature of the will, human consciousness, and authority. Both scientific and popular interest in mesmerism indicated instabilities in conceptions of the self and its governance.43
Controversies over the meaning of mesmerism for democratic discourse erupted in a wider context of anxieties over the terms by which political agency was either asserted or denied. To take one important instance, by the time Emerson delivered “Genius,” the tradition of neoclassical rhetoric had been under attack as a coercive style of political speech since the late eighteenth century. Based on the fine style of carefully crafted, ornate speech, neoclassical rhetoric was thought to dazzle audiences with Ciceronian eloquence, swaying them not because it convinced their reason or, like Emerson’s ideal genius, unleashed their conviction, but because it seduced audiences with its aesthetic excellence. Critics worried that audiences submitted involuntarily to the positions that a stunning speaker advocated simply because their senses had been overcome by eloquence, just as the audience of working women is overcome in Work by one of the speeches that precedes Christie’s.44
If neoclassical rhetoric subdued reason and preempted real conviction, then rational deliberation, the norm of democratic speech that set its face against neoclassical rhetoric, presented its own set of problems. Even as rational discourse maintained its position as the most authoritative mode of American political discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, critics believed it to leave the will undermotivated for action. By abstracting interlocutors from their particular identities and interests, rational deliberation promoted what purported to be a common search for the truth. Antebellum defenders of rational argument, though, had a great deal of trouble demonstrating that disinterested truth actually engaged the convictions of even those who accepted most fully the positions developed through rational inquiry. This was in part the effect of Enlightenment psychology, which opposed reason to passion while allying passion with the will. Where passion interfered with reason by attaching subjects to their personal desires, rational discourse, by contrast, subordinated passion. Because the will was attached to the faculty of passion, the triumph of reason was seen to attenuate the will. It therefore became difficult to imagine reason on its own motivating the convictions of either ideal rational deliberators or the public they addressed. Rationality depleted the passion necessary to move democratic subjects from the activity of intellectual judgment to the state of profound conviction.45
Historians have usually seen Enlightenment rationality and the mesmeric fads of the 1780s and 1830s as expressing opposing conceptions of agency and personhood, with the Enlightenment tradition advocating conscious, willed,