VISION AND VISIBILITY: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF POWER AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF*
Authors: Martin John Stephen 
Published: March 2011

This is a study of the dialectic of consciousness to be found in American fiction, and its relation to changing concepts of selfhood. Consciousness in the context of selfhood is usually expressed as the American notion of individualism. However, it is well to point out that "consciousness" is an ideological term as much as it might be a psychological experience or a philosophical concept.' The term "consciousness" arises in the post-Enlightenment world, which was casting off the last remnants of an authoritarianism that bound subjects to feudal positions of traditional power, and it referred both to the revolutionary skepticism of such traditional power as well as to the individual "rights" to personal power found in the Romantic concepts of universal Reason and Nature and withheld by despots from the common man (Minogue 4, 3, 152-54; Foucault 59, 39). To be sure, in the context of political philosophy, the terms Reason and Nature were very ambiguous, and they gained specific meaning primarily in the rhetorical strat- egems framing the terms which various ideologies used in the name of revolution and reform (Minogue 111, 138-141). However, in the American situation, the political ideology was accompanied by a social-economic revolution that made "power" arise from entrepreneurial individualism and become "visible" in commonplace experience (Hartz). Such experiential "consciousness" of the "powers" of Reason and Nature convinced Americans that they had found the means directly to tap the "powers" to liberate all men from the "false conscious- ness" of traditional authoritarianism. But strangely enough, an analysis of American literature indicates two subversive truths undermining the common ideology: first, if individual "power" to ignore the past authority was an effect of the "visible" daily life, literary protagonists were mere products of experience and had no individual moral intentionalism ("free will"); secondly, if this determinism was true, there was no way to account for the manifold human "visions" which since the Revolution sought to alter the traditional beliefs, manners, and activities in accord with the new notion of the "right" to freedom from such authoritarianism. Americans were thus caught in a dilemma of culture and civilization unique to themselves: they assumed they had a society in which the "power" to change was "self-evident" and justified, but they also were susceptible to doubts about this "power" when the "visible" world irritated them, failed to explain or support their ideological hopes, or openly oppressed their "inalienable" awareness of personal "visions." In this sense, the American experience of individualism—its "consciousness" of individualism—is itself an ideological struggle against what is assumed to be an ideological doctrine of the perfection of Reason and Nature in America. In short, there is a paradox of two truths which only a dialectic can harmonize; and it is this dialectic of "vision" and "visibility" which I see as best defining the American consciousness of selfhood, and which I will address.2