Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare
these “ceaseless redefinitions”? Rancière names this process “dissensus,” the operation by which political and aesthetic categories are made to change. Dissensus formulates new aesthetic criteria in just the same way that new political subjects come into being.10 In politics, dissensus refers to the process by which a group emerges by differentiating itself from (and thus reordering) existing constituencies, thereby bringing into being new forms of political subjectivation.11 In aesthetics, dissensus is the process by which objects of contemplation are suddenly taken to represent things that otherwise cannot and perhaps should not be seen. To provide an example of dissensual aesthetics in action, consider the slow but dramatic expansion of anglophone literacy over the mid- to late eighteenth century. Before its wider accessibility, literacy had been confined to a small group that was constituted by its exclusivity. Nonnormative anglophone writing cannot be seen as literary when Standard English literacy belongs to a small few. Only when nonnormative anglophone writing is viewed as constellating new but necessary representative and aesthetic possibilities can it become recognizable in aesthetic terms. Over the past two centuries, nonnormative writing has gradually appeared to anglophone readers as a representative technique that reorders and makes sense of lived reality. In this way, nonnormative writing has become cognizable and evaluable in aesthetic terms not in spite of but instead because of the ways it depicts linguistic difference.
In the present one can look at the multilingual forms of writing assembled by Dohra Ahmad’s fascinating anthology Rotten English (2007) and call them aesthetic practices without equivocation, a denomination that would have been unthinkable or at least avant-gardist until recently.12 Troubling unthinking use of the term “dialect,” as I do, because it is a disparaging bequest from eighteenth-century monolingual politics, Ahmad notes that the authors assembled in her volume “each challenge the hierarchy implied by ‘dialect’ versus ‘language.’… The codes they practice [must] be recognized for their strength coherence, and communicative capacity.”13 The anthology includes poets, short story writers, novelists, and essayists like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Louise Bennett, Zora Neal Hurston, Irvine Welsh, Junot Díaz, and Amy Tan, among others. From one perspective, the sensible fabric of aesthetic experience has altered in such a way as to permit the assemblage of these multilingual anglophone authors into one anthology. The criteria of inclusion are that these authors challenge monolingual normativity in anglophone writing.
The pedagogical aspirations of this anthology confirm that the anglophone languages of Ahmad’s authors are recognized to be aesthetically valid, vibrant, timely, and needed. Ahmad herself convincingly argues that “rotten English” has become sensible and significant, politically as well as aesthetically. As she puts it, “These authors write in direct opposition to all socially accepted institutions, whether school, church, various forms of the welfare state, or Standard English itself.”14 In other words, Ahmad sees a homology—visible from the present—between her authors’ subversions of linguistic normativity and their resistance to “socially accepted institutions” and modalities of institutional power. Aesthetic resistance to the politics of monolingualism is, in Ahmad, a political endorsement of multiplicity in all social forms. The editor’s focus on linguistic subversion paints anglophone writing as the aesthetic analogue of widespread resistance to contemporary forms of inherited normativity.
If in the present these “anti-institutional” anglophone forms of writing are acknowledged to have both aesthetic and political valences, I posit that there is a longer history subtending this collation. Certainly, the present has witnessed a dissensual change in aesthetic criteria that allows for and even actively desires the assembly of Ahmad’s “rotten English” writers into a coherent and meaningful category. The process has not been sudden. Ahmad herself acknowledges that a long history of aesthetic and political change is at work as she sketches the process of British and American colonial (and linguistic) expansion. In this respect it is instructive that the earliest figure appearing in the anthology is Robert Burns, whose “Auld Lang Syne,” “Highland Marry,” and “Bonnie Leslie” are included. Ahmad styles Burns anachronistically as an “ethnomusicologist,” one whose attention to the ballad form produced subversive works analogous to the anticolonial poetry of W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore. Burns’s predecessors and contemporaries—those who made his aesthetic coup possible—are noticeably absent from this anthology, however, as most of the figures are drawn from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In Rancière model, “the degrees of importance retrospectively granted to artistic events erase the genealogy of forms of perception and thought that were able to make them events in the first place.”15 In other words, the ways in which aesthetic events like Burns’s dialect poetry are remembered, commemorated, and reinscribed into aesthetic history through the processes of canonicity efface prior, contiguous, and adjacent practices that enabled the aesthetic event in question to be perceptible as aesthetic in the first place. The fact that Burns represents both a precursor to “anticolonial poetry” and an origin for the aesthetics of “rotten English” suggests that Burns’s work constellates and makes coherent a series of developments relating to language and identity.16 Burns’s larger linguistic environment makes additional lineages of nonnormative anglophone writing visible.
By way of transition, it is important to gesture toward the ways that writers can act on aesthetic criteria and political horizons through their work. Derrida includes a charged injunction to action regarding the politics (and aesthetics) of monolingualism, one that helps make sense of eighteenth-century anglophony. The injunction comes when Derrida is suggesting that one can defend a language while also attacking the language politics that accompany it. How, in other words, can one disable the politics of monolingualism in order to produce a counterpolitics of multilingualism and an altered set of aesthetic practices and criteria? For Derrida, the counterpolitical (dissensual) solution is as follows: “That jealous guard that one mounts in proximity to one’s language, even as one is denouncing the nationalist politics of language (I do the one and the other), demands the multiplication of shibboleths as so many challenges to translations, so many taxes levied on the frontier of languages, so many alliances assigned to the ambassadors of the idiom, so many inventions ordered for translators: therefore invent in your language if you can or want to hear mine.”17 A writer or “translator-poet” must “invent” and engage in the “multiplication of shibboleths” in order to arrest a politics of monolingualism, which Derrida later refers to semi-ironically as “patriotism.”
The thinking here is subtle. Derrida advocates for multiplying shibboleths, or markers of linguistic otherness, in order to “disturb” his “fellow [linguistic] citizens” with the alterity that is always already present in their seemingly unitary “national” language. Derrida seeks to multiply shibboleths as “so many challenges to translation” as “taxes levied on the frontier of languages.” One effect is to destandardize the “national” language in order to trouble the notion that language and nation are coterminous. Another effect is to “levy taxes” at a language’s borders in order to encourage translation practices that enrich a language’s health and expressive range. I take this to mean that Derrida desires translations that will stage a language’s unique capacity for being altered. Derrida’s challenge that translators multiply differences in language is not an argument for untranslatability or an argument in favor of the irreducible singularity of different linguistic systems. Rather, Derrida enjoins translators to “invent in your language if you can or want to hear mine.” Translators must be equipped to “invent” analogous linguistic forms that upset but also improve the target language.
On the one hand, this is an argument in favor of cultivating linguistic difference so that language is always different from itself and from what commonsense users think it is. Cherish language by inventing new and copious capabilities. Cherish language’s permanence by requiring it to evolve constantly, such that it is always different from itself. This is what Burns does, and what Marlon James does. It is also what Ahmad’s “rotten English” writers do. These forms of cherishing are political possibilities that open any language to its heterogeneous community of speakers. On the other hand, this is also an argument in favor of forcefully acting on the criteria of aesthetic reception. Seeming “nonsense” cannot be processed within an aesthetic sensorium unless