Genius is primarily egalitarian: Emerson and the newspapers

 

 I read the newspapers like Don Quixote read his romances, fulmination and prophecies race through my brain and come out of my fingertips, perched on the keyboard, and I know that I am behind, utterly behind on everything in my life, that what I do is plunge into what avails not and what I don’t do is what does avail and must avail and this is my mortal sin, and then the night is here, quicker than I expect it to be, always.

With this attitude towards the newspapers, I have long held that not enough is made of the parallel between the literary culture of the moderns, from the 1700s on, and the newspapers, which have been the great angels of Chronos during this same period of time. Even now, as newspapers dwindle down like a pencil too often sharpened, we see the form find its home and bearings on the internet and the internet swell with it.

                                                               1

I like to think of certain coincidences. Emerson, writing about the London Times, in English Traits: “There is no corner and no night.” Emerson happened to visit the Continent, and especially England, in the wonderful and terrible year, 1848. Year of the Communist Manifesto, of the French revolution, which Emerson celebrates in his journal – seeing that this time it is about “socialism”. He notes that Carlyle, at that point still his friend, never read the newspapers until the Revolution broke out.

And after 1848, Marx, in England, becomes the great European correspondent for Emerson’s sometimes friend, Horace Greeley, whose newspaper, The New York Tribune, was the great American answer to the Times. Emerson and Greeley met on the lecture circuit. In 1851, the New York Tribune started publishing articles by the man the paper called “one of the clearest and most vigorous writers that country has produced—no matter what may be the judgment of the critical upon his public opinions in the sphere of political and social philosophy.”

At the time, Greeley was a Fourierist.

Emerson wrote about Fourier in an article in Margaret Fuller’s The Dial:

“We had lately an opportunity of learning something of these Socialists and their theory from the indefatigable apostle of the sect in New York, Albert Brisbane. Mr. Brisbane pushes his doctrine with all the force of memory, talent, honest faith, and importunacy. As we listened to his exposition, it appeared to us the sublime of mechanical philosophy; for the system was the perfection of arrangement and contrivance. The force of arrangement could no farther go. The merit of the plan was that it was a system; that it had not the partiality and hint-and-fragment character of most popular schemes, but was coherent and comprehensive of facts to a wonderful degree. It was not daunted by distance, or magnitude, or remoteness of any sort, but strode about nature with a giant's step, and skipped no fact, but wove its large Ptolemaic web of cycle and epicycle, of phalanx and phalanstery, with laudable assiduity. Mechanics were pushed so far as fairly to meet spiritualism. One could not but be struck with strange coincidences betwixt Fourier and Swedenborg. Genius hitherto has been shamefully misapplied, a mere trifler.”

                                                           2.

I have not found any hint in Emerson that Marx had crossed his intellectual path – although surely he read some of his articles in the Tribune. But the coupling of Fourier and Swedenberg predicts, mystically, the messianic Marxism of Bloch and Benjamin, which crosses Marxism with Klee’s angels.

There is something else in Emerson’s note on Fourier that is consistent with his notion of the democratic theme that runs through the newspaper form: the notion of an egalitarianism founded upon genius.

Our feeling was, that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely, Life. He treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid, or fluid, or gas, at the will of the leader; or, perhaps, as a vegetable, from which, though now a poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced, but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes all conditions, which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes and New-Harmonies with each pulsation. There is an order in which in a sound mind the faculties always appear, and which, according to the strength of the individual, they seek to realize in the surrounding world. The value of Fourier's system is that it is a statement of such an order externized, or carried outward into its correspondence in facts. The mistake is, that this particular order and series is to be imposed by force of preaching and votes on all men, and carried into rigid execution. But what is true and good must not only be begun by life, but must be conducted to its issues by life. … nay, that it would be better to say, let us be lovers and servants of that which is just; and straightway every man becomes a centre of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato, and of Christ. Before such a man the whole world becomes Fourierized or Christized or humanized…”

                                                                        3.

I love it when Emerson just rides. 

But to break back into thought from such motion and rhetorical glory - the newspaper or its form plays a central role in Emerson's intuition that genius is inherently egalitarian - that is, our private lights are, above all, new lights, new courses in the world marked by our ever anonymous and gigantic particularity. I am the we. And as this we, I must go back to the tabloid as Antaeus had to go back to the earth. It is my strength..