Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare

      De Copia

      Language, Politics, and Aesthetics

      Multiplicity and Aesthetics

      He’s still critical at the moment, but he might be stable in a few days. In the meantime we’ll have to run some more tests—

      —More test? Test fi what? You must think him inna school the way unu ah run test. And none of unu test can give me no result.

      …

      —Millicent … ah … how do I put this? I’m not exactly following what she’s saying. I mean, I think I have the gist but wouldn’t want to put one’s foot in one’s mouth, if you catch my drift. Can you speak to her?

      —Ah … sure.

      —Maybe in your native tongue.

      —What?

      —You know, that Jamaican lingo. It’s so musical it’s like listening to Burning Spear and drinking coconut juice.

      —Coconut water.

      —Whatever. It’s so beautiful, good God, I don’t have a damn clue what you’re all saying.¹

      This snippet of dialogue from Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) exemplifies the book’s swift movements between diverse registers of contemporary anglophony, movements that foreground the way that power imbalances glom onto these different linguistic forms. James’s sprawling realist novel encompasses the last fifty years of Jamaican and Jamaican diasporic history. In his fictional account, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe are stitched together by Cold War geopolitics, drug trafficking, and popular culture, specifically, the global phenomenon of Jamaican music. Formally, this means that each of the novel’s chapters is told in a different narrator’s unique voice.² James masterfully crafts and situates the idiolects of his diverse speakers. This is perhaps one of the reasons why his novel has won the Booker Prize for Fiction, arguably the most prestigious award in anglophone literature.³ In fact, James excels at a writing technique that many consumers of literary fiction have come to expect. Characters are authenticated through forms of spelling, vocabulary, and syntax that translate living forms of anglophone orality into print in explicit juxtaposition to Standard English. Representing one’s unique perception of orality in nonnormative writing is a celebrated way of aestheticizing both local identity and anglophone linguistic diversity.

      My invocation of a contemporary novelist in this book about the long eighteenth century is meant less to praise James’s work (engaging as it is) than to draw attention to a lineage between an earlier moment in aesthetic history and our own. James’s novel, which is sewn together from a diverse array of standard and nonnormative anglophone forms, makes literary “art” via the spectacle of linguistic difference on the page. More capacious than Burns’s 1786 volume of poetry, James’s novel draws the reader into aesthetic contemplation of an entire ecology of intermingling anglophone “dialects,” a term I use here with caution.⁴ In this respect, the novel joins a long and exciting tradition, but not a tradition that has always been seen as literary. This is because nonnormative language has traditionally had limited avenues for being perceived in aesthetic terms. To access revealing aspects of this tradition, as well as its contemporary visibility, one can start by examining the shifting aesthetic horizons of the long eighteenth century, a period when the reading public was coming into increased contact with nonnormative anglophone forms in text. Reviewers in this earlier moment of aesthetic history frequently met linguistic difference with skepticism, often concluding that a given work had literary merit in spite of its linguistic diversity rather than because of it, another reason why Burns’s quick and sustained popularity is a landmark aesthetic event.⁵ Most examples of nonnormative writing, especially nonnormative writing authored by women, were never treated in aesthetic terms at all. As I argue here and later, the disciplines of philology, dialectology, and ethnography grew up as discursive catchments for forms of anglophone writing like these that fell beyond the horizons of aesthetic evaluation.

      This is because the monolingual politics of language described in the last chapter delimited the eighteenth-century aesthetic realm such that it was difficult if not impossible to perceive certain types of anglophone writing in aesthetic terms. This politics of language also made it impossible to see certain embodied anglophone subjects as origins of original aesthetic practice—Phillis Wheatley’s state of exception. These are the two primary ways in which linguistic politics acted on aesthetic judgment in the period: the dismissal of nonnormative writing as aberrant and therefore nonliterary; and the dismissal of certain subjects as incapable of literary art. To understand our own aesthetic moment, which prizes linguistic difference mainly when it skillfully embellishes depictions of character, interiority, and place, it is necessary to consider why eighteenth-century texts featuring linguistic difference were not generally read in aesthetic terms, even if some signal works like Burns’s were. In other words, why does some eighteenth-century anglophone writing rise to the level of aesthetic contemplation while a great deal of similarly innovative writing does not? Relatedly, how can contemporary scholars project value backward onto texts that today look like points of origin even though they may have struck their contemporary readers as aesthetically inert?

      Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013) tries to chart the processes by which practices of representation come to qualify as aesthetic when previously they were invisible as such.⁶ For Rancière, “aisthesis” names “the mode of experience according to which … we perceive very diverse things … as all belonging to art.”⁷ In other words, “aisthesis” refers to a beholder’s engagement with the “sensible fabric” or “sensorium” within which diverse representative practices—theater, sculpture, architecture, dance, mixed media, the novel, et cetera—are all discernible as aesthetic rather than anaesthetic, a term that I use here to mean, “not rising to the level of aesthetic evaluation.” As a dynamic mode of experience and interpretation, “aisthesis” updates and alters the sensible fabric within which diverse representative practices are gathered. In this way, Ranciére’s intervention posits aesthetic categories as flexible and historical, always changing in order to match complementary changes in technology, media, and especially politics.

      According to Ranciére’s argument, “Art as a notion designating a form of specific experience has only existed in the West since the end of the eighteenth century,” a period that witnessed the gradual collapse of a longstanding distinction between the fine arts, which were reserved for leisured gentlemen, and the mechanical arts, “those material performances that an artisan or a slave could accomplish”—nonnormative language, for example.⁸ Dating contemporary definitions of art to the late eighteenth century’s social and political revolutions in this way, Rancière proceeds by describing fourteen moments of rupture in aesthetic history, from Winkelmann’s celebration of the fractured Belvedere Torso in Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764) to James Agee’s inventories of ordinary objects in impoverished homes of the American South during the Great Depression. Rancière’s goal is to demonstrate ways in which “a regime of perception, sensation, and interpretation of art is constituted and transformed by welcoming images, objects and performances that seemed most opposed to the very idea of fine art.”⁹ Under what conditions does a broken sculpture become more artful than an unbroken one? Under what circumstances can mundane household objects become artful assemblages? Rancière does not discuss representations of linguistic diversity, though his methodology is adaptable. “Dialect” or nonnormative writing—taken here to mean a technology of representing anglophone linguistic difference rather than actual anglophone speech—begins demanding “welcome” into “a regime of perception, sensation, and interpretation” during the eighteenth century. But how does it do so?

      Rancière’s