| Focusing on changes in the metaphorics of nation---making in eighteenth-century America, this study describes how politics became an object for aesthetic reflection by tracing the cultural origins of the United States Constitution. Prominent seventeenth-century images of government as a "body politic" declined in use and conceptual value in the late eighteenth century and faced competition from a set of metaphors that characterized government as a cultural product, politicians as cultural producers, and citizens as spectators and consumers of politics. By situating these metaphors in the context of their material referents, we can begin to appreciate why Thomas Paine called constitutions the "property of a nation" and why certain groups began to claim that the nation belonged to them. Chapter One describes how radical political writers personified the revolutionary nation-state as a politically unfree body while black slaves were dehumanized and denied the status and rights of personhood. Chapter Two suggests that emerging notions of an impersonal state figured as an architectural erection provided an unstable settlement between the flux of personal puissance and the foundationalism of art. The Constitution itself could not have been ratified, Chapter Three argues, without an appeal to its total beauty and a strategic refashioning of political consent on the model of aesthetic "taste." The tension between the document as verbal text and as visual image emerges more fully in Chapter Four, which contrasts an Antifederalist politics based on image and "likeness" (a concept drawn from the culture of miniature portraiture) with Federalist accounts of representation as a "transcript" of the voice of the people (a metaphor that informed the production of James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 and the genre of the written constitution itself). Drawing on a range of available contexts from the 750 United States imprints of 1787, and taking account of both the literary conventions that governed the production of the formal ratification transcripts and the place of aesthetics in the public print debates, this study offers historically based complications for the practices and assumptions of contemporary constitutional interpretation. |
