Abstract
What is often overstated by democratic theorists enthralled by the poetic vision of Walt Whitman is the extent to which he excised the self in order to exalt a world where the sensed and the sensing collapse into reversibility. Throughout “Song of Myself,” I argue, Whitman experiments with an arts of attention—which he describes as “witnessing and waiting”—that adapts the self to the surplus vitality immanent to perceptual and sensual experience. I contrast this with democratic theories of “relational surrender” that stress self-sacrifice as the precondition for democratic sovereignty. In particular, I contrast Whitman’s poetics of touch with Elaine Scarry’s theory of beauty, which favors what she calls “opiated adjacency,” a vivid pleasure experienced in self-loss. By contrast, Whitman discloses a vision of democracy that emphasizes “cleaving things asunder,” a sense of intensified awareness that forms in spaces of proximity that are also spaces of separation.
Highlights
Throughout “Song of Myself,” Whitman experiments with an arts of attention that adapts the reader to the “procreant urge of the world,” in ways that do not abolish the sovereign self, so much as refract and expand it
Exploring affiliative cleaving as a site of democratic world making is a hallmark of Whitman’s essays, in particular “Democratic Vistas,” but I take my point of departure from Section 4 of “Song of Myself,” where Whitman most clearly identifies his arts of attention as “witnessing and waiting.”
Whitmanian witnessing and waiting is a democratic art of attention that opens one up to the procreant urge of the world in ways that do not “decreate” the sovereign self so much as elasticize it, in ways that vivify the feeling of being in the midst of what is happening
Summary
Throughout “Song of Myself,” Whitman experiments with an arts of attention that adapts the reader to the “procreant urge of the world,” in ways that do not abolish the sovereign self, so much as refract and expand it. Exploring affiliative cleaving as a site of democratic world making is a hallmark of Whitman’s essays, in particular “Democratic Vistas,” but I take my point of departure from Section 4 of “Song of Myself,” where Whitman most clearly identifies his arts of attention as “witnessing and waiting.”. Witnessing and waiting, for Whitman, entail being actively embedded in an intimate relation to the world’s generous ways of happening Through this experience, the self is unmade and remade again, cast off and returned, caught up in a dynamic energetics of perpetual loss and recreation (“Round and round we go, all of us,/and ever come back/thither”).
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