Dartmouth Events

This talk examines a Janus-faced political aesthetic that has intensified over the last fifty years across ever more cultural spheres.
The talk argues that this style is not simply a symptom of contemporary coarsening into incivility, but a key mechanism through which democratic culture both expands and turns against itself. On the one hand, disinhibited informalization lowers hierarchical boundaries by inserting the “low” into the “high,” widening access, visibility, and expressive freedom. On the other hand, it licenses aggression, contempt, and symbolic or physical violence against those excluded from the circle of equality. The talk traces this dynamic from recent cultural transformations back to the founding of the United States, showing that
it can already be detected in the Declaration of Independence. In this sense, disinhibited informalization is not a new disorder, but a recurrent political style in which democratic equality and freedom become inseparable from democratic violence.