Bilingual Aesthetics: An Invitation

Author(s): Doris Sommer

Source: Profession, ofession (2002), pp. 7-14
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595725
Accessed: 18-03-2017 19:58 UTC

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Profession

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 Bilingual Aesthetics: An Invitation
DORIS SOMMER

Bilingual games are fan, and you're invited to play, whether or not you have
much of a second language yet. Don't let even embarrassing mistakes stop
you. Most of us make them, and they're part of the fan. Mistakes can get a
rise of laughter (a sun-risa)1 or give the pleasure of a found poem; always,
they mark the risk and the thrill of using language. Bilingualism, you can
already tell, is serious fun, because democracy depends on a tragicomic taste
for mismatches among codes and people, and part of the game is to develop
that taste for ambivalence. Taste can, of course, be trained, and the aes
thetic education of hearts and minds that promotes democracy is the kind
that appreciates free play, including some antics. If you had asked Abraham
Lincoln, he would have said that democracy depends on a taste for mirth
along with mission. "During the Civil War people complained about Lin
coln's fanny stories. Perhaps he sensed that strict seriousness was far more
dangerous than any joke."2 He knew that jokes interrupt the single-minded
zeal that makes no room for differences and that expanding our sense of
humor can make us better citizens?seriously, folks.
When imperfectly learned languages play jokes with you by unhinging
meaning from intention, don't writhe with embarrassment. Most of the
time, you're not even the butt of the joke but only a participant observer
who can join the laughter and also learn the (philosophical, political,
aesthetic) lesson: Languages, including your own, play hit-and-miss games
with the world. This lesson was the centerpiece of the modern university,

The author is Professor of Romance Languages at Harvard University. A version of this

paper was presented at the 2001 MLA convention in New Orleans.

7 Profession 2002

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8 III BILINGUAL AESTHETICS: AN INVITATION

in Wilhelm von Humboldt's design, because "in the study of foreign

tongues students best learned the humility that comes from never forget
ting [...] to negotiate the otherness of the world" (Holquist 78, this issue).
Learning to anticipate the interruptions and the mistakes that make you
feel funny leads to wariness about what you say and what you hear. And
wariness is a reminder that linguistic constructions, including politics, are
precarious arrangements that need periodic adjustment. Thoughtful peo
ple know this principle in one language too, but living in more than one
can refresh that sense of caution and responsibility with each missed com
munication. So bilingualism is good for the country, for reasons beyond
the obvious economic and security advantages?no kidding.
Think about the challenges to a democratic society in times of globaliza
tion, while both industrial and developing nations adjust to the internal
pressures of mass migrations and to the external constraints of international
agencies and networks (everything from courts and banks to terrorist grids).
The most obvious challenges are probably to balance the political process
between national cohesion and personal rights and to educate people in
ways that make the most of personal opportunities without making a mess
of social conditions. What if I said that multilingualism coordinated by a
lingua franca promotes fair procedure and effective education, while one
way assimilation derails progress on both counts? Would you be curious
about the arguments and perhaps willing to change your mind if you have
been feeling that bilingualism is irrelevant or even damaging? I invite you to
consider the cultural conditions for fair and fulfilling contemporary life. Or
maybe you already intuit the benefits of bilingualism. But if you're not curi
ous enough to hear and to heed arguments, that inertia may itself be a symp
tom of the monolithic system of language and cultural assumptions that we
inherited from an early and outmoded project for national consolidation. In
today's readjustments to global dynamics, monolithism is a malady (like
mono) of an adolescent stage of development for times that have outgrown
the one-to-one identity between a language and a people. Growing pains
can't be avoided in the process of maturing toward tolerance for a compli
cated world. How can we avoid them, while people and languages rub and
irritate one another? But surely there are ways to mitigate the pains instead
of aggravating them. One way is to recognize multiplicity as a medicine for
monolithism instead of dismissing multilingualism as confusion and then
wondering how we lost the ability to listen to reason in these complex times.
English as the shared language is an indisputable anchor, but Americans
should know at least one more language to put English on edge and create
some wiggle room for the anchor. Being on edge sharpens the wits, flexes
democratic systems, and generally spurs creativity. These advantages are

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 DORIS SOMMER III 9

known to many bilinguals (and to African American code switchers, code

switching aka signifying [see Gates]). Monolinguals don't always see the ad
vantages if they don't feel the effects that I invite you to consider. Why, they
ask, would anyone want to make English nervous and play games that risk
rights and resources? Better to be efficient and call el pan pan, y el agua agua.
Efficiency is the sticking point for most debates about language in
America: which policies promote language learning and which are wasteful.
The fundamental concern is education, though legal rights run in second
place. Aesthetic and intellectual stimulation have hardly mattered yet.
What's the best (most cost-effective and quickest) way to integrate immi
grants into the rights and obligations they came to exercise? The easy (effi
cient) answer is to teach them Standard English (or American, if you have a
real attitude about foreignness).3 English-only immersion programs follow
from the easy answer, since they save the trouble and the money "mis
spent" on bilingual education, translation, and so on. That money does
worse than waste resources and keep immigrants ignorant of English, by
this view; it panders to divisive ethnic pride instead of binding the nation.
One popular defense of bilingual education plays on the same theme of
efficiency, maybe to convince fiscal conservatives in their own rational
terms but also because many immigrants come to this land of economic
opportunity to make good on the American dream. They want to learn
English in order to maximize their prospects. But learning is a transitional
process, so saving money at the expense of multilingual programs looks ir
rational and inefficient to many immigrants and to their friends. Effective
assimilation, they say, is a gradual transfer from one language-culture to
another. It finally costs more to throw immigrants (few swim) in immer
sion programs than to teach them new strokes. Maladjusted "foreigners"
drop out of school, drain welfare budgets, and make more trouble. The
cold-turkey approach is worse than inefficient and mean, critics say; it's
also an embarrassment to democracy when "live free or die" (I'm writing
this from New Hampshire) sounds like a fair choice.
Another bid for bilingualism downplays efficiency and promotes richness.
Many languages represent social capital, is the argument. Bilingual pro
grams create value, not as scaffolding that gets immigrants into English but
through maintenance and development of our diverse social stock. Two-way
programs do in fact double the advantages for both natives and newcomers.
Diversification (varying stock is a sounder strategy than concentrating) can
venture some long-term risks and resist the narrower reasoning of efficient
transition. But even this defense of cultural difference as a source of diverse
values and perspectives stays stuck in market (or is it ecological-Romantic?)
metaphors. Lose a language, and you've impoverished the world, because

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10 III BILINGUAL AESTHETICS: AN INVITATION

each language constitutes a distinct "psyche of a people." The argument can

fail to convince even friends of bilingualism, let alone skeptics who know
how to abstract translatable value from variety. Let me mention one example
of this Herderian axiom about different strokes for different folks in order to
illustrate a range of examples that, paradoxically, follow the same broad
strokes. Speakers of Lakota apparendy notice a thingness about English that
reifies spiritual meanings into objects, such as "the sweat house" that stands
in for a mystical ceremony called inikagapi ("with it they make life") (Bunge
378, 379). This contrast between body and spirit is bogus, because it ignores
the heated mystical tradition in Standard English, where, for instance, com
munion means much more than wafer eating. The Lakota case shows only
that one tradition doesn't easily understand another; more significant for me,
it performs the essayist's cultural-political desire to value a particular lan
guage for its inherent qualities. Difference becomes content (thingness?)
rather than the effect of opacity for outsiders and satisfaction for insiders.
Differential effects are what matter. (Wittgenstein joked quite seriously
that the essence of language is grammar, relation, not the things language
can point to.)4 Even if I can say the same thing or idea in more than one lan
guage, switching from one to another performs points of entry or exclusion,
and it sets off different sounds-like associations or etymological echoes.
These are asymmetrical effects to reckon with. The days of the one ideal
reader have been numbered and spent in our segmented societies. A "target
audience" can mean the target of exclusion or confusion. And feeling the un
pleasant effect is one valid way of getting the point, or the kick, of a language
game. More basic than these hide-and-seek games is the fact that overloaded
systems unsettle meaning. When more than one word points to a familiar
thing, the excess shows that no one word can own or be that thing. Several
contending words point, each imperfectly. Even a proper noun like Hamlet
is game for competition.5 Of course, Hamlet worried enough about precari
ous arrangements (without code switching) to be an inviting target. "When
ever you were reduced to look up something in the English version [of the
Russian Gamlet]" Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin complains, "you never found
this or that beautiful, noble, sonorous line that you remembered all your life.
[...] Sad!" (79). Words are not proper and don't stay put; they wander into
adjacent language fields, get lost in translation, pick up tics from foreign in
terference, and so can't quite mean what they say. Teaching bilinguals about
deconstruction is almost redundant. ("Big dill!" Pnin might say.)6
Meanness about bilingualism, therefore, damages more than immigrant
transfers to America, though that's bad enough. It's harmful to use bilingual
education for language replacement, worse to cancel the programs that do
it gently. Worse still is the emotional stinginess of one particular language

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 DORIS SOMMER III 11

that cringes to hear others. But much worse even than these (arguably
transitional) offenses is the civic and intellectual rigidity that meanness
makes possible. Defenses of monolingualism stunt verbal maneuverability,
while learning a new language quickens the mind. Always a good mental
exercise (in retention and relational-grammatical flexibility), language
learning improves cognitive performance instead of getting in the way of it,
as was previously assumed (see Portes). A new language now turns out to
be especially good at an advanced age: it keeps the mind agile and prevents
senility. The uneconomical effort of learning a new language improves
general lucidity and also does something more specific: it opens routes of
thought that can detour around decayed or clogged pathways of a first lan
guage.7 America is mature enough to take this advice seriously.
When it was young, America practiced a bilingualism of sorts as it com
bined classical and modern political languages. Between those sources was
wiggle room for an iconoclastic republic. Skeptical about established mean
ing, the founders refused the absolute claims of divine right. Then, popular
reformers refused the conventional property restrictions for enfranchise
ment. How did the democratized republic manage to flex so far? I'd suggest
that the room for maneuver was opened and stretched by the pull of different
political languages. "Democratic republic" sounds familiar today, but the
term is practically oxymoronic. It braces together the language of equality
with that of freedom, preserving enough tension between the two to stay dy
namic and philosophically bilingual, code switching between John Locke and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contract and constitutional protection.8 The liberal
subject of politics (pluralist, variously associated) depends on this doubleness
or multiplicity of perspectives. Historically, liberalism counted on the ten
sions between church and state, public and private, to sense the thrilling and
risky emptiness of social arrangements that could be rearranged. This condi
tion is good and necessary for democracy today, but it needs refreshment
from another kind of bilingualism, cultural rather than political. When the
design work of politics was new and daring, iconoclasm kept the designers
vigilant about ready-made answers. By now the design has become a proud
and mature heritage, with an enduring constitution, weighty amendments,
and a history of trial and error that add up to the bedrock of national values
and practices. The emptiness at the core of liberal arrangements is today a
heuristic device to think through possible reforms, not a license to trash in
stitutions. (Brian Barry dismisses as anarchism the result of the thought ex
periment when cultural differences locate an empty moral center.)9
What will keep us agile and vigilant today, while the threat of theo
cratic terrorism sets off presidential moves toward a garrison state? De
mocracy needs more perspective on its besieged condition than it can get

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 12 III BILINGUAL AESTHETICS: AN INVITATION

from defensive reactions that would protect us by undoing constitutional

protections. Perspective on rights now comes sharply into focus around
speakers of foreign languages (mostly Arabic now, as it was German during
World War I and Japanese in World War II). Their violated rights signal
the precariousness of rights for the rest of us.10 We stay on edge by tolerat
ing unfamiliar languages while staying vigilant about the danger that they
represent and that monolingualism exacerbates. Learning those languages
might open a detour around racial profiling and mass detentions toward
distinguishing the blameless from the suspect.11 Long before Septem
ber 11, language differences were presenting the most audible risks and op
portunities for Western democracies. With mass migrations and stubborn
or dignified (perspective matters) defenses of particularity, differences don't
easily go away. They make both natives and newcomers uncomfortable and
self-conscious, maybe self-reflective. Is that bad for democracy?
I invite you to consider how good it can be.

NOTES =^
This essay is part of my forthcoming book, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental
cation (Duke UP).
^edro Pietri, I think, is the source of this joke.
2This statement is Saul Bellow's frame for Ravelstein. Bellow also says, "Odd t
mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often
case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it" (1). Later he add
"But I'm not about to involve you in my speculations on wit and self-irony in de
cratic societies. Not to worry" (2). Nevertheless, Robert R. Provine hears a more sob
tradition: "John F. Kennedy was unusual among U.S. presidents in having both a pr
ence of command and an excellent sense of humor" (32).
3"In 1923 Washington J. McCormic, a Montana congressman, introduced the f
official language proposal ever considered at the federal level; a bill to enshrine 'Am
can' in the place of English. As is generally the case, this language dispute was a sym
tom of underlying political tensions?Westerners versus New Englanders, and in som
areas, Irish Americans versus the British Empire" (Crawford, "Historical Roots"
During the protofascist Getulio Vargas regime, the Brazilian government almost pas
legislation to call the national language "Brazilian," still a popular usage.
^Essence is expressed by grammar" (371). "Grammar tells what kind of object a
thing is" (373).
5A grammatically proper name, Bertrand Russell would call it, because unlike logi
cally proper names those that are grammatically proper denote not particulars but com
plex descriptions and have no meaning in isolation.
^he pun is Maya Slobin's inspiration, in conversations with Greta Slobin, author of
Remizovs Fictions.
7"Doctors say new mental challenges?learning a second language [the first among
several others . . .]?help map out new pathways in the brain. The effect is likened to a
driver who knows only one route to work. If that road is damaged or filled with traffic,

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 DORIS SOMMER III 13

he's stuck. But if the driver learns several different routes [or different words for the same
thing], he can still get to work even if certain paths become blocked" (Parker-Pope).
8John Rawls, for example, can simplify the terms of the "conflict in democratic
thought" by juxtaposing "the tradition associated with Locke, which gives greater weight
to what Constant called 'the liberties of the moderns,' freedom of thought and con
science, certain basic rights of the person and of property, and the rule of law, and the
tradition associated with Rousseau, which gives greater weight to what Constant called
'the liberties of ancients,' the equal political liberties and the values of public life" (50).
9"This is clearly a vision of society that owes a great deal to anarchist thinking. The
story about the emergence, in the absence of any political authority, of a normative
framework to regulate the use of common resources is one that anarchists like to tell,
and Kukathas explicitly says that his suggestion is 'that the same process can account for
how [the] public sphere emerges out of the interaction among groups or communities
whose differences lie less in their conflicting interest in land-use than in their differing
moral beliefs.' Thus, the underlying assumption of'toleration' is moral anarchy. There
are no overarching norms by which groups and communities can be judged?or at any
rate no such judgements can legitimately form a basis for the exercise of political au
thority" (133).
10President Bush's order to create military tribunals, with jurisdiction over twenty
million noncitizen residents, "was an act of executive fiat, imposed without even con
sulting Congress," Anthony Lewis emphasizes.
11 "There are perhaps a million people in this country of Arab descent, but many
don't speak Arabic. Bilingualism, considered normal not only in Afghanistan but in most
parts of the world, is not valued in American culture and has sometimes been actively
discouraged in schools and workplaces. Of those who do maintain their Arabic, many
who apply for jobs with the security agencies are likely to be rejected as potential secu
rity risks. To translate Arabic or Pashto for the FBI, you must be an American citizen
who has spent three of the last five years in this country and you must renounce dual cit
izenship. What about training our native speakers of English to speak Arabic? Overall,
foreign language study is in decline in the United States. In 1998, only 6 percent of stu
dents enrolled in American colleges were taking foreign languages. Enrollment in Ara
bic was on the rise even before September 11, but the numbers are still small. [...] The
first step in addressing our language deficiencies is a national recognition that they exist.
[,..] If we really want to understand the words of our enemies?not to mention those of
our friends?we need to put more emphasis on learning languages and show more re
spect for the bilingual people in our schools and communities" (Baron).

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 14 II BILINGUAL AESTHETICS: AN INVITATION

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