The Hypervisual Essence of American Democracy: A Multi‐Discipline Free Synthesis

Abstract

While scientific inquiry has as its ideal universality of laws and accessibility of all experiments and claims to a world community of scholars; and while there has been in modern age a relentless drive to pattern sciences and even humanities upon such methodological uniformity; still, most important question raised by humane fields of history, literature, philosophy. religion, and even politics can only be answered by confronting irrefutable power of what D.H. Lawrence called each society's unique spirit of place or Zeitgeist -- a dramatic self-identity that resists conformity or universalism. Indeed, in his famous and iconoclastic Studies in Classic Literature, Lawrence stresses, for example, the unthinkable gulf between us and -- a new consciousness belonging to the continent and to nowhere (1). is this new consciousness or uniqueness that is to be our focus throughout all that follows -- a nation's struggle for an identity free to manifest itself in its own sui generis forms and institutions, arts, and governments. And here, too, as we shall discover again and again, very essence of this unique self-determination and freedom is radical choice -- eschewing of all traditional means of understanding, of logic, of science, of myth, for bold reliance upon perfection of eyesight and concomitant social and individual values that arise in pursuit of this hypervisualized American Dream. Alexis de Tocquevilie recognized something of this unique visual twist in democracy in when he announced at beginning of part n of his famous investigation, like to discern object which engages their attention with extreme clearness; they remove whatever conceals it from sight, in order to view it more closely and in broad light of day (2:4). Emersoen would come to identify this same sight-geist as our quintessential prejudice: character is marked by a more than average delight in accurate perception (Matthiessen 51). D.H. Lawrence would intuit it as horrible hurt that must strike condescending Europeans: It is time now for us to open nay eyes (Symbolic 17, italics mine) to art and culture of New World. And Theodore Roethke would summarize it as rank dismissal of all traditional literary senses for pearl of great price -- aesthetic Unpardonable Sin stamped on every New-World breast: Take Tongue and Ear -- all else I have - Let Light attend me to grave! (8, italics mine) Hypervisuality, then, is paradoxical IT that Lawrence declared must master free spirit of place -- what Emerson described as our genius in America, with tyrannous eye (Poet 238, italics mine). The most intense extra-and introspection was to become, on parallel with Franklin's famous bi-focals, very foundation of not only the New-England mind but also ideal of private and public life. Here, Thomas Paine, in New World for only a short period of time, immediately grasped this peculiar crisis of common ocular sense -- obsession of fresh-eyed colonists yearning to be free of all Old-World ideology and political restraint: Independence is only bond that can tie and keep us together. We shall then see our object, and our ears shall be legally shut against schemes of an intriguing, as well as a cruel enemy (Common Sense 91, italics mine). O Say, Can YOU See why Emerson would declare of his own Age of Revolution that we had listened too long to courtly muses of Europe (American Scholar 79)? Americans do not listen, they see for themselves. I. America and Politics of Eye There are many who think Reagan's re-election campaign was a triumph of television in a nation of watchers who prefer superficial to truth. …