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MONOLINGUALS tend to get nervous around people who speak strange languages. Spanish speakers are asked to leave bars; Chinese conversations grate on English-only ears; the polyphony of a place like Manhattan sounds like the Mad Hatter’s raving to people like Ron Unz, whose name plays the kind of bilingual game that brings translation close to philology and makes English play sounds-like games with German; it evokes the kind of intolerant populism that pits Us against Them.1 It’s not the foreigners themselves who bother Unz—he insists against xeno baiters—but rather their stubborn cultural ties that tangle the country in the “bilingual bind” (Unz). “They are talking about me” is one self-centered response. (Are you Amerdican citizen?) Self-centering seems self-evident in a powerful United States, where it’s enough to speak one language, because less powerful foreigners learn to speak English. Here monolingualism sounds normal: I am normal; others should be too.
A new sentimental education is on the agenda. It is a tall order for teachers, but an urgent one, because some of our inherited tastes and predispositions have become obstacles for democratic life. They were designed for an earlier, national period of history, not for this one of global movements of people and capital through multicultural states. In nineteenth-century Latin America and elsewhere, nation builders knew that personal desire would either promote or mire economic and political developments. So they launched a sentimental revolution. Eros and Polis (in their modern meanings of family ties and republican states) helped construct each other, since erotics accomplished the glorious mission of producing citizens and politics performed the tender service of protecting loved ones. Presidents, generals, and legislators were also national novelists; they trained people’s unproductive (colonial) passions toward (liberal) desires for consolidated republics (through interracial, interregional, and economic affairs). The training program took time, and the novel—in newspaper installments—was the preferred medium for a gradual republican sentimental education. National desire, constructed with the help of fictions and rehearsed from intimate to institutional encounters, is a preferential feeling for coherent cultures and for its gran familia, or “imagined community,” of overlapping sentiments. Belonging to a nation-state and to “natural” heterosexual alliances legitimated republics and trumped the authority of monarchs. These preferences have seemed simply natural and incontrovertible, but we know that they are relatively recent and may turn out to be rather brief.
Nations still exist, of course, but not necessarily in redundant relation to states. At the unraveling seam between the two, there is now a space, and an obligation, to imagine political preferences beyond the often intolerant ideal of coherence. The call to aesthetic action is apparently in the air, since several educators have already responded with proposals for naming and shaping a sensibility that can help feel and flesh out relationships and identities in complicated times. The Peruvian Antonio Cornejo Polar, for example, reconsidered his country’s most promising performances in an essay about its best-known bicultural novelist and concluded that migrancy is not simply a personal hardship and a social blight; it is also a dynamic aesthetic and political condition. Uncanny echoes of the argument migrate to my reading of Stephen Greenblatt’s meditation on “racial memory,” which suggests that Unheimlichkeit is the name for a kind of familiar homelessness, almost consolingly familiar in one’s life and across different lives. To these contributions toward a “migrant” sensibility, I want to add some specific considerations about language choice and thereby ground the project in everyday arts. And while it is fun to follow the games that migrants develop between home and host languages, I leave those literary pleasures to different essays and concentrate here on some responses by monolinguals, who may feel excluded by those games.2 Monolinguals, not surprisingly, tend to be nervous and hostile. Their reaction is normal, which means simply that it is common and predictable, but it is not necessary. Nineteenth-century philosophers of art put this kind of immediate and unreflective rejection of strangeness into a category; they called it primitive. A response of a second order could be to notice the surprise of losing control and to enjoy the experience of getting the fact that you didn’t get something. That perverse pleasure is called the sublime.
The sublime will help liberate us from the tyranny of totality, a general will, a single ideal type of citizen, all of which can misprize the internal diversity of contemporary democracies. Our postmodern republics will need to develop a taste for the unfamiliar, for surprise, even irritation. Some tolerance for a cross-cultural sublime (the thrill of incomprehension), as well as for humor, should spice out talk of aesthetics. Then particular subjects will recognize our own migrant condition of double consciousness as a normal outcome, even as an advantage, of flexibility and of creativity that plays between the codes and cultures. Most of us are, in fact, loathe to reduce two to one.
On Nervousness and Its Pleasures
Nervousness about bilinguals isn’t necessarily paranoid, if paranoia means an illusion of persecution, because—as the sociolinguist Ana Celia Zentella playfully admits—no matter how much we Latinos insist that we are not talking about the Anglos, sometimes, you know, we are. Even though these bits of indigestible conversation—spiced by asymmetries of intelligence that favor bilinguals—can cause trouble for the troublemakers, the taste of superior control is too delicious to give up for bland discursive diets. Blandness seems to be a prescription to suppress appetites for occasional control. If that disabling option seems not only cruel and unnecessary but also inimical to the spirit of nonviolent confrontations that a democratic culture promotes, one challenge for educators and intellectuals will be to imagine ways to reframe the fear associated with “paranoia,” perhaps toward what we might call a multicultural sublime, where pleasure depends, paradoxically, on the pain of losing control. That interpretive move might, in effect, mitigate the bite of bilingual performances and thereby undermine some possible aggressiveness. That’s not bad, since aggressiveness could then be recognized as playfulness, if we developed more readerly sophistication. The games of inclusion and exclusion (what linguists call gatekeeping) produce aesthetic effects that depend on a range of possible receptions. One way to get a joke is to notice that something was missed or that someone else got it differently. In other words, the days of the single, ideal or target, reader have already been numbered and spent. Readers are differentially in on the games, and out of them, so acknowledging that legitimate difference will be no small advance for education. Nor would it be a radical innovation for readers of literary criticism, say of Roland Barthes. His Pleasure of the Text depends precisely on getting us to admit that we are lustful readers, but neurotic enough to take (mildly masochistic) kicks from texts that are smart enough to tease us without delivering satisfaction.
The other response to strange languages is condescension. “Poor foreigners! If they spoke good English, they would be smarter.” Another version claims that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for everyone. And still another decries the loss of coherence in this beleaguered country but doesn’t notice that the slogan for unity seems so foreign by now that it needs translation: “How can immigrants identify with America if they can’t read Lincoln’s words in the language in which they were spoken? Will we devolve from E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”) to a multicultural boarding house, whose fractious tenants babble at each other incomprehensibly in a welter of tongues?” (Feder). As bold—and simple—as the equation American equals English is, it passes for axiomatic in a whole series of calculations for economic and intellectual developments associated with globalization. Another name for it is Americanization, something like the conflation of democracy and the particular name of a country that made Walt Whitman a hero for his populist interpreters. But some of us refuse to reduce cultural complexity, to choose and lose, in a calculus too narrow for the development of democracy.
Democracy depends on difference, not only of economic interests but also of cultural codes, cults, preferences, styles. These apparently prepolitical variations often locate fault lines in the exercise of otherwise admirable rules in the United States, as when legal procedures founder over intolerance for cultural inflection, in foreign accents for example (see Matsuda).3 Therefore the specifically aesthetic challenge—to reframe a fear of foreignness into an appetite for the games it plays with us—is part of another, more general challenge in which (as in Kant’s system) aesthetics becomes an entry point to a general moral economy. The challenge will be to distinguish between capacious procedure (including ways to appreciate a range of possible language games) and the mean practices that refuse invitations to engage.
As things stand now, our enlightened and romantic habit of identifying nation with state predisposes us to the goal of coherence. So difference looks like deviation rather than a democratizing incentive to coordinate cultural difference through politics. That’s evidently why the New York Times apparently predicted, or invoked, the current Congressional bill to cut bilingual education short by allaying the fears of critics.4 There were those who worried about Hispanic children not learning in English-only schools: “Two years after Californians voted to end bilingual education and force a million Spanish-speaking students to immerse themselves in English as if it were a cold bath, those students are improving in reading and other subjects at often striking rates” (Steinberg). This glibness about cold-bath cures, as if Spanish were dirt or a disease, doesn’t worry about other losses and the dangers that follow. There are three, and they are all disastrous. One loss is to the children and their families, since Spanish is not only a vehicle for learning lessons in school, replaceable perhaps by English; it is also an international code that could foster communication, commerce, and creativity with fellow Spanish speakers in almost two dozen countries. A second loss is something beyond, or alongside, the rational functions and advantages of a second language. It is the range of affective, respectful, intimate, and generally performative registers of a second, home, or subaltern language. “Indeed the conflict has been not just between two languages, but between two quite different conceptions of language,” explains Terry Eagleton about a different example of doubling; “since the English empiricist conception of language as representational has never had much appeal to the more linguistically performative Irish. The Irish have on the whole, in the manner of subaltern peoples, tended to see language as strategic, conative, rhetorical rather than cognitive, and there is a theological dimension to this suspicion of representationalism” (128). And a third loss has the broadest consequences for all of us; it is the loss of difference itself, one kind of difference that democracy depends on.
Democracy depends on difference, as I said, and needs the healthy side effects of homegrown diversity and immigration. Immigration, regional ethnic and gender rights, upset the stubborn compact between (ethnic) nation and the constitutional state, and they stretch liberal practices toward a greater realization of liberalism’s own promises. Universalism itself depends on difference, to follow Ernesto Laclau’s provocative formulation, shared by some critical legal scholars. The universal has survived classical philosophy’s dismissal of particularity as deviation and the medieval collapse of universality into Christ, and it has outlived a European Enlightenment that conflated the universal (subject, class, culture) and particular (French) incarnations. Today’s universalism is a paradox for the past, because it is grounded in particularist demands. These demands unmoor universalism from any fixed cultural content and keep it open to an “always receding horizon” (Laclau 107).5 The corollary paradox of democracy, Laclau admits without embarrassment, is that it requires unity but depends on diversity. Tension and ambiguity are structural in democracy, which neither Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of communication nor Jean-François Lyotard’s lament over an impasse can acknowledge. The point of politics is to win ground and rights from centers of power, not to dispense with the power that invites struggle. This is perhaps the closest political philosophy comes to appreciating antagonism as democracy’s normal condition, very close to Judith Butler’s psychoanalytic twist that makes personal subjecthood depend on opposition (Psychic Life).
There is no doubt that student advances in English should be celebrated; all of us share a space called America after all and a code of justice that should be coordinated among vastly different peoples. But the unfounded assumption that this is possible only with the loss of Spanish (or Chinese or other languages) begs comparative questions: Is bilingualism a liability if the other language is French or German? Are bilingual children at risk of learning in neither language if they come from the middle class?6 Or has Spanish been racialized and stigmatized, to the point that white speakers are met with inquisitorial skepticism because “they don’t look Spanish.” Training America’s ears to hear the same kinds of advantages of one language in the sounds of another may be an almost technical challenge, but it is one that can put in motion broad, conceptual rewards. At least this is the kind of technical work for democracy possible in our fields of language arts that cannot be done in others. And Spanish won’t be enough, for at least two reasons. One is simply that cultural difference is good for democracy, so reducing multilinguality to the two most common denominators overrides the difficulty of communication that could promote cautious civic behavior. Organic communities may count on ties of affection and concern for respectful interaction, but diverse societies like ours can respond to relative mutual opacity or indifference by developing civic relationships, regulated by norms and procedures that are not culture-specific. Without the problem—in a logic that echoes the fortunate fall of Christian theology—there would be no need for solution. Without cultural discontinuity there would be less urgency for civic arrangements. The other reason is more familiar: it is an already audible disgruntlement with what are perceived as Spanish-only policy gestures to immigrants and growth areas in the academy. President Bush’s Spanish speech sent off a range of angry and anxious responses that add up to “Bush’s Radio Address a Mistake”:
President Bush’s Saturday radio address in Spanish will guarantee that he will receive complaints from those claiming to represent speakers of Farsi, Khmer, Tagalog, and the 300 or so other tongues spoken in the U.S. Admittedly, political speeches in languages other than English are not unknown to American politics. But we now live in a time when America has turned its back on the importance of assimilation. A gentle hint that immigrants might have some responsibility to learn a minimal amount of English is considered beyond the pale of polite political discourse. (Boulet)
Agreed, although politeness—in mixed company—also depends on assuming a measure of chaste discomfort and the dangers of misinterpretation.
In Spanish, the concept of America has always been polyglot, complex, baroque, excessive, overloaded. The very fact of the conquest brought European cultures into crises of self-definition and produced the supplements that show how unstable or insufficient the “original” culture had been. European baroque art and thought were anxious responses to the shock of discovering America, a vast and variously sophisticated world that had no notice or need of Europe. Half a millennium later, after variations of migratory movements and of shifting borders (when the United States grew by shrinking Mexico and then overtaking Puerto Rico) have continued to refresh the baroque patterns visited on America, its culture and politics have become ever more complicated. To recognize them as aesthetically pleasing, we will need some training beyond a classical taste for unity. It will need a taste for irritation, for the unknowable, the threatening sublime.
A Subaltern Sublime
Immanuel Kant is in vogue again. In a world at a standstill morally, the mechanisms of historical dialectics have apparently tarnished or rusted. So moral philosophy makes a comeback, often through Kant’s system of categories that should move us by the sheer force of will or of responsibility for self-realization. Some neo-Kantians put his lessons on ability and responsibility to collective work, especially the lesson about “perpetual peace,” which they read for its global ambitions (see Cheah and Robbins). Others, the world-weary literary critics who have had too much of politics and too much of theory over the last thirty years,7 care less about morality and prefer Kant’s lessons about the purposelessness of beauty. Beauty is autonomous from goodness. If it were not, tastes and pleasures might appear to be so self-evidently contingent on morality as to preempt the value of affective response or the judgments made at that level of immediacy. But autonomy is not exactly independence, and the “purposelessness” of aesthetic experience has moral aftereffects (see Guyer). It is a pause, a necessary hiatus from overweening practical demands, like a flash of freedom that develops a taste for more freedom. Evidently, the weary are reluctant to follow the moral consequences of autonomy. But by forcing open a space for freedom and thereby for the responsibility of judgment, art’s autonomy promotes the disinterested reflection that links aesthetics to ethics.
This moment of reflection is most constitutive of the sublime, whereas beauty can get a simply visceral response. Beauty is immediately pleasing, the sublime initially frightening and a stimulus to reflect on fear. The one is available to all, the other to cultivated people who explore the causes and effects of feelings. Nature provided stimuli for both aesthetic effects for Kant, but most especially for the sublime as that which exceeds human capacities for comprehension or for imitation. Yet I invite you to notice the operation of a man-made sublime. Hardly a recent phenomenon, man-made surprises have a tradition even more venerable and classical than the romantic meaning. The sublime begins not as a response to incalculable Nature but as an artful effect of speech and writing. In The New Science (1744), Giambattista Vico was still defending the rhetorical surprise effect of the hyperbaton as sublime, although the metaphysical meaning was already gaining a vogue. He was reluctant, though, to name the trope hyperbaton, perhaps because “inversion,” as the figure was called then, seemed excessive and unnatural to his French colleagues.8 (Inversions and other rhetorical surprise effects that make up a “bilingual aesthetics” prompted Henry Abelove to cleverly comment that my project for a new sentimental education is to “queer language.”)
It was Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), attributed to the third-century Longinus but probably two hundred years older, that stretched the word beyond its early technical meaning of bold rhetorical effect toward the description of spiritual greatness. “Longinus” got an unfriendly translation by Boileau in 1672 but a much warmer reception in England and Germany, where the French neoclassical disapproval of excess brought an almost instinctive vindication of it (see Mothersill). Then the sublime took off during the Sturm und Drang of the eighteenth century, shedding its technical origins and acquiring the almost mystical meaning of greatness beyond comprehension. Kant had made that shift by 1790, in the Critique of Judgment. But I want to mark the transition from the artful to the awful in an earlier moment, when Edmund Burke wrote his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Characteristically, Burke was reluctant to sacrifice classical grounding to the Romantic times, and he kept the sublime effects of human agency as brakes on the runaway concept of uncontrollable passions and overwhelming odds. The Enquiry appeals to contemporary taste for the sublime as a stimulus for moral development, including Britain’s “Moral empire.” In that context, India—Burke argued—should be recognized as sublime. India’s culture, history, religion, and arts show both the (classical) signs of ingenuity and the (Romantic) effect of wonderful strangeness. India is doubly sublime and therefore worthy of respect, fair dealing, even sympathy (see Ashfield and de Bolla; Fudernik; Ferguson; and Suleri).
Burke’s feelings for India hardly make him a sexy bedfellow for the postimperial trysts in the United States between powerful nativists and subaltern newcomers, I know. But it is delightfully perverse to link onto his fascination with foreignness and then to move—on an inspiration from Barthes (and Sade)—toward frustrating the imperial fantasies of superior control by enjoying how the other (or the lover) refuses to submit. The perversion, reversal, choteo follows Burke in acknowledging an artful “subaltern sublime,” but it also underlines the intentionally irritating ways that India produced its stunning effect of strangeness on the Anglo authorities. In postcolonial times, the sublime need not derive from a grand and independent history of the human spirit; it can simply be the performance of commonplace in-your-face foreignness that disables nativists, in ways that make them outsiders to some games. “You don’t know me; you don’t own me,” is the message. A taste for the subaltern sublime might develop along the asymmetrical fault lines between producers and consumers of signs. To feel only resentment is to stay at a primitive level of response, in Kant’s line of thinking.
Apparently, there are constructions so strange, so incomprehensible, that they arouse fear and revulsion. Anxiety is the undeniable effect of irritations, and we cannot simply wish them away without wishing away the strangers. No talk of gradual assimilation or even of multicultural pedagogies that hope to domesticate strangeness into familiarity can eliminate frustration. Difference has a way of surviving domestication, especially when new and varied waves of immigrants keep upsetting the economy of tokens. Since irritation is unavoidable, the only practical question is what to do with it. A primitive response, as I said, is straightforward: it rejects irritating strangeness and forces assimilation (at best), as if continuity between oneself and the world were the only bearable relation to it. But a cultivated response would be to do a double take; it would be to feel fear and enjoy the pleasure of reflecting on that fear. Strangeness would inspire passion without getting stuck there, because reflection allows one to take pleasure in the intensity and in the moral capacity to abstract from it: “How thrilling is this incomprehensibly complex world! I’m humbled by the fact that the people on my block speak more languages than I could ever learn and that I hardly know when I’m in on a joke and when I’m the butt of it! It’s glorious to know how delicate the difference is and how clumsy we human beings can be!”
What does this make Unz and others who fear “foreign” talk and respond by wanting to remove it? It doesn’t make them bad; it just makes them primitive. And what might our response be to primitives with whom we share a polity? It cannot be removal or rejection in a democracy. So let’s try a sentimental training program that can turn dread into desire. This was Friedrich Schiller’s project, to nudge conventional responses toward freer and more creative relationships, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1759). The problem was how to budge intellectual conventions that are based on moral biases and also how to reform a morality that depends on intellectual ground. Schiller’s way out of the self-sustaining circle was to open up the “living springs” of both the intellect and moral feeling through the “instrument of Fine Art.” Because art, like science, is free from constraints and conventions (Schiller 55; Ninth Letter, points 1, 2, and 3). Schiller played loose with the Kantian categories, of course, because they don’t allow for process to get from the primitive to the cultivated. In fact play becomes a code word for aesthetic education, as the freedom to maneuver in the standoff between a “form drive” (for categorical abstraction) and a “sense-drive” (toward material change) (Schiller 97, Fourteenth Letter, points 3, 4, and 5). So if you admire Kant for tolerating opacity in Nature beyond the grasp of reason, perhaps you’ll object, as Paul de Man did, to Schiller’s tinkering with the sublime as if it were raw material for education rather than a limit to activity. Gayatri Spivak repeats the objection to Schiller’s willful derailing of philosophy into anthropology or history.9 She refuses this lateral escape route and prefers to derail Western philosophy from its Eurocentrism by outsmarting it on philosophical grounds. The critics are probably right, as far as Schiller’s philosophical credentials go. I mention them to preempt a hasty dismissal of Schiller on these grounds, because there are other, practical ways to read him. If willfulness can have dangerous consequences—de Man mentions the Nazi minister of propaganda Goebbles’s using Schiller to launch “art for the masses,” although stronger arguments against Nietzsche didn’t bother him (de Man 154)10—some drive and sustained attention to “the masses” are necessary to make social change thinkable. Goethe agreed with Schiller on this point. Their joint campaign “on behalf of haute vulgarisation, [. . .] to improve public taste, has suffered from a species of reasoning not uncommon in historical judgment: because the campaign proved unsuccessful it must therefore have been invalid (why not perhaps premature?)” (Wilkinson and Willoughby ci).
Did Schiller mistake Kant’s idea of predisposition to culture to use it as an endorsement for education (in the tradition of Burke and Shaftsbury)? Is his an aberrant reading because it takes a sidetrack from epistemology into empirical and psychological observation? Probably. But why not consider the “aberration” an opportunity, instead of mere backsliding? Having dismissed the wayward Schiller, Spivak can return to Western philosophy’s founding moment when Kant squinted at alterity, in order to trump him with brilliant and impertinent readings. So the game of culture and reflection remains an elite affair that apparently moves west to east, but not up and down through classes and levels of education where Schiller would take us.
Another point of resistance to Schiller might come from efforts to bridge aesthetics and morality by understanding their tensions. This is the tactic Elaine Scarry uses, as she veers away from Kant at the tangle where Schiller had played loose and Spivak plays coy. It is where the sublime invites us to nonbeautiful aesthetic experience. Scarry’s warm rush to level the difference between beauty and the sublime should give us pause in an asymmetrical and multicultural world.11 Through ardor and empathy, cultural and aesthetic distinctions fall away, whereas Spivak marks those distinctions by crossing and double-crossing the philosophical border patrol.12
As I have been saying, some notable Europeans had already developed routes for maneuvers inside, or alongside, imperious philosophy. And Schiller is a model for having purposefully confused Kant’s idea of a (categorical) predisposition to culture for an endorsement of (developmental) education. To dismiss Schiller’s tangent and then to criticize Kant’s stubborn Eurocentrism may grant multiple meanings of Kultur, but it won’t realign relationships through Bildung. And yet the promise of modernity and democracy is here, in education, where Schiller leads us in creative “misuses” of philosophy. Isn’t this the kind of unorthodox and ironic move that made Franz Fanon appeal to the Rights of Man, knowing that the doctrine was not necessarily intended for him? Wasn’t it also the ploy that Latin American statesmen used when they demanded United States protection based on a Monroe Doctrine meant merely to control them? Schiller may have misread Kant, to good purpose.
Encouraged by lessons in mischievous reading, I have wanted to engage Schiller’s critics of his “bad philosophy.” It is worthy of more interested attention than it has recently got, if only to remind us of the range of disagreement among European intellectuals, even during intense periods of colonial aggression. The disagreements, after all, showed lines of flight that have inspired colonial subjects to adapt Europe’s traditions and to turn them against Europeans. Schiller had responded to Kantian stable categories of opposition (raw/cooked, primitive/ civilized, naive/sentimental) with a preference for process. His sentimental education turns the oppositions into stages of development that makes differences amount to “before” and “after.”
Resend Letters: On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Despite the recent bad press, we’ll need to revive Friedrich Schiller for some urgent business. It is to imagine a new sentimental education that will take aesthetic and political advantage of multicultural societies, instead of just fretting about breakdown in communication and about group interests at cross-purposes. The dangers are real, but not necessarily damaging in democracies, because the threat of breakdown is both a measure of the freedom to dissent and an incentive to develop fair procedures (see Albert, Jacobson, and Lapid). Procedures are not enough, though, if citizens lack the predisposition to make them work. (Schiller’s Eighth Letter, point 5: “There must, therefore, be something in the disposition of men which stands in the way of the acceptance of truth, however brightly it may shine” [51]).13 Rules can be fragile, revocable, and vulnerable to ingenious or perverse interpretations. This is where Schiller comes in and where teachers of language and literature should take a lead from him.
Schiller proposed an aesthetic education, some say in response to Kant. Surely that’s true. You can say that I’m writing in response to Schiller, but my overriding motive is today’s social volatility fueled, to some degree, by an outmoded nation-language-state modern sensibility that makes trouble for multinational states and global times. Schiller himself was writing in the wake of a different modern breakdown, the Terror at the tail of the French Revolution, just as his once critical and then admiring English commentator Herbert Read reconsidered the Aesthetic Education to write Education through Art (1943) while modernity went mad in World War II. The challenge that Schiller proposed for himself—and for us by extension—was how to intervene in a disastrous world through the tools he had to hand: language and literature, the same tools that we wield. However successful or disappointing one judges his results, Schiller dared to put instruction in language arts on the real world agenda. And teachers of language arts who squirm at this move from aesthetics to civic education, imagining that it is philosophically derailed by a categorical mistake, are perhaps due for an alignment of focus that amounts to a self-examination of consciousness.
Those who steer away toward the left may object that the move deflects attention from the real material issues of class power and inequality. Striking that politically committed posture, language and literature teachers might ask themselves why they have pursued privileged careers in literary studies. If they come up blank, perhaps they can salvage some usefulness from their privilege and from aesthetic purposelessness. After all, it provokes moral aftereffects by taking a break from politics and enjoying a taste of freedom. And though steering toward the right avoids some of the bad faith of politically correct colleagues who discount the literary work they do, it doesn’t escape the dilemma of turning art into a medium of professional employment. The very defense of art appreciation as a calling and as a vehicle for teaching (taste, intellectual or spiritual development) brings one back to Schiller’s sense of opportunity (and therefore of obligation) to affect society through art education. This debt, or trap, interrupts Paul de Man’s otherwise monotonal tirade against Schiller: “Whatever writing we do, whatever way we have of talking about art, whatever way we have of teaching, whatever justification we give ourselves for teaching [. . .] they are more than ever profoundly Schillerian” (141).
Today, as I said, we need a re-education. Biculturalism hasn’t yet stretched our general sense of the beautiful or the sublime. The whole question can seem irrelevant for agendas in liberal education, either because aesthetics seems unfriendly for politics or because politics seems insensitive to art. But multiculturalism should be exciting for aesthetics, invited, after centuries of monolingual taste, into the banquet of bilingual creativity. It’s not that diglossia vanished from literature after the Middle Ages; anyone can name occasional experiments, like Pound’s, with the more-than-one language. And everyone knows that nineteenth-century Russian novels, for example, assume knowledge of French. Nor is immigration or mass displacement a new phenomenon. What is new are the great numbers, the visibility, and the postmodern cultural mood that makes multilingual experiments a significant feature of literary art. The creativity is de facto. Can we expand our critical tools to render the creativity visible, as legitimate contributions to American art? One net gain will be an expanded tool box that will refine other readings too. What, for instance, is the rhetorical name for a code switch that works like an escape route? What do you call purposeful mistranslations or the sounds-like associations between words of different languages? How would Wittgenstein have continued his investigations if he had described bilingual games? Are there genres of humor that Freud doesn’t dare to address? Does Charles S. Peirce’s third part of logic, “abduction,” along with induction and deduction, seem like a necessary addition to the critical vocabulary for reading bilingual texts that poach words from one language and feed them to another (see Peirce 1: 186-97, 2: 226-41)?
Another gain will be ethical, because recognizing art has the virtue of acknowledging the agency of an artist. Bilingual wit shows the particular intelligence that invents relationships where there had been none. Art performs the autonomy of admirable personhood; it literally becomes a persona that we can learn to hear, to acknowledge, and to enjoy even (or especially) if it plays games with us.
2I’m writing a book on bilingual arts for Duke University Press, with chapters on aesthetics, humor, language philosophy, and politics.
3Matsuda accounts for cases of cultural intolerance as the obstacle to justice despite perfectly reasonable laws, and celebrates cultural difference beyond the tolerance that liberals like Richard Rorty defend. Difference is a value in itself, a negativity that requires toleration and keeps democratic process lively.
4“Schools could teach non-English students in their native tongue for only three years before moving them into regular classrooms under legislation being considered by the House. The measure, which closely resembles a proposal in President Bush’s education plan, would require schools receiving federal bilingual funds to move students into English-speaking classes after three consecutive years of enrollment—a practice already taking root in many school districts but opposed by some bilingual educators” (Toppo).
5Judith Butler cautiously agrees that universality can be a site of translation: “the universal is always culturally articulated, and that the complex process of learning how to read that claim is not something any of us can do outside of the difficult process of cultural translation. The terms made to stand for one another are transformed in the process, and where the movement of that unanticipated transformation establishes the universal as that which is yet to be achieved and which, in order to resist domestication, may never be fully or finally achievable” (“Foundations” 130).
6Sander Gilman asks these questions too in “Learning a Foreign Language in a Monolingual World.”
7In 1994 the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics was founded because of “a deep and widespread concern about developments within the humanities that threatened to inhibit the freedom of the literary imagination. What was at stake for the founding members was—they said—the breadth and expanse of literature itself whose power to communicate to the human mind in its multifarious dimensions had been curtailed by a narrowing, often overtly political, within the discipline” (ALSC membership flyer). Austin Quigley, ALSC president for 1998-99, put it this way: “The goal of the association is to restore an intellectual terrain in which readers can exercise their capacity to think for themselves, rather than rely upon various kinds of theoretical/political machinery to do their thinking for them” (ALSC membership flyer). As has been said about the MLA, the problem is not the presence of politics at the MLA, but the absence of nonpolitics.
8I am grateful to Paola Gambarota and to her excellent essay “Vico: The Syntax of Passions”: “The modern controversy about these questions goes back to the Port-Royal Grammar of 1660 and lasts then throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. It engages philosophers such as Diderot, Condillac, Du Marsais, Cesarotti, Leopardi, Herder, and culminates in two positions mirroring each other. In the articles ‘Language’ and ‘Inversion,’ the Encyclopedie (1765) condemns the use of inversions as ‘contre nature’ but J. G. Herder reclaims ‘Inversionen’ as quintessential to ‘nature’ and in particular to the ‘nature’ of the German language and people. Inversionen express an original and uniquely German individuality (Fragmenten ueber die neuere deutsche Literatur (probably written around 1764)” (2).
9That gap is where Spivak stakes out her position in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Like a scar, it records the anthropological moment that both interfered with philosophy and grounded it—when Kant distinguished between raw fearful humanity and cultured peoples who can appreciate awesome Nature as sublime. Kultur, not Bildung, she insists. Europeans have it; others do not. Nor do they have the potential Anlage, “the structure of feeling for the moral” (Spivak 14). The great Western philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Marx) all needed a “native informant” to set off civilized subjects. But they also needed to foreclose that informant, lest she dare to speak intelligently and thereby derail philosophy toward anthropology. Spivak taunts Kant as his improper “mistaken” reader, the subaltern whom the critique would exclude from philosophy (9) and who dares to play informant too fully and freely.
10Aside from the elitism, the reference is also unfair. Quoting from the introduction by Schiller’s translators and editors, de Man blames Schiller for Goebbles’s program, but he cuts the editors short. They had continued the passage about the several ironies of reception with this example: before the Nazis used him, Schiller was condemned by both left and right as essentially apolitical. (See Wilkinson and Willoughby cxliii.)
11Dispensing with the sometimes perverse charm of baroque excess and collapsing the disturbing category of the sublime back into a pre-Romantic category of the beautiful, Scarry purges the term of cultural overloads. Multiculturalism becomes a series of translatable equivalences, not a field of resistant differends.
12On the ethical dangers of empathy see Sommer.
13See also the Seventh Letter, point 1, where Schiller says that political reform is untimely, because both the State and our current level of humanity are the problem (45).
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© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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