Multilingual Arts and Sciences

Garment workers' strike in New York Ci!y, 1912. By permission of Brown Brothers. Multilingual Arts and Sciences DORIS SOMMER Mostly, modern humanists, social scientists, philosophers, and other language professionals work in one language at a time, probably to get focus and clarity in a complicated world. But focus can fail to take in the fact that most people live in more than one language. Even monolinguals can hardly avoid the complexity as their cities and suburbs fill with migrants who speak languages citizens :may not understand or want to hear. It's natural to want clarity, as late-modern life lets the loose ends of identities and values dangle without a sign of arranging them in any pleasingly coherent weave. Amid the messiness of porous state borders and contested political boundaries , the unraveling doesn't stop to tidy up, no matter how long we wait. Waiting had seemed like a cure for everything, as long as the social sciences had faith in social evolution, while religion preached progress from creation to salvation. But like secular history, the sacred story has apparently lost its way, or taken a detour while monotheists fight each other to establish the one truth and the one way. All the stories we have been telling ourselves wear out with the movements ofpeople across borders, interrupting national projects and reclaiming religious identities. It's natural to be nervous. But staying nervous shows little cultivation, as ifthe world acted on us and we merely reacted. Cultivated respOonses include delayed reactions, after reflecting on raw feeling.. Maybe the only reasonable response to the lasting unpleasantness is to develop a taste fOor incomprehensibility. I don't ESQ !v. 50 !lST-3RD QUARTERS! 2004 121 DORIS SOMMER mean an inclinatian taward irritatian. A desire far samething wauld cancel the aesthetic effect af disinterested ar surprising pleasure. I mean a faculty of judgment that caunts an apenness taward surprise and readiness ta pracess interruptian far effects beyand frustratian.] Then the pain af feeling unsettled ar overwhelmed cauld became a source af pleasure and a graund for reflectian. Think about it. If canditians will nat change, we can at least change aur receptian and adjust beleaguered bodies ta strike mare graceful pastures. ~ Why nat acquire saUle paise ta play amang the laase ends, exercise human skills far maneuver and appreciate the irritatian that keeps us creative? Why nat? Perfectly serious peaple have tracked this very rnave fram anxiety ta enjayment. Immanuel Kant was one master af the mave and Friedrich Schiller fallawed up, nat to mentian other (neuratic) aesthetes like Gearges Bataille and Roland Barthes. Their hurts-so-·goad game was sublime, even if that saunds funny. Aesthetics is aften ajake. I mean that thinking abaut artistic effects is a lot like thinking abaut the psycholagical science af humar, seriausly falks. We cauld, I suppase, cantinue ta consider how this Colincidence between humar and aesthetics links up with a Kantian mament af freedam fram selfinterest , a mament Hannah Arendt stretched inta the birth af a public sphere. Her classical taste far disinterested palitics would prabably resent my painting ta the palitically tendentiaus ways in which wit and art disturb mechanisms of repression ta make public fun afprivate secrets. I wander what Arendt wauld make af today's particularist agendas that challenge liberal theary. Or dOl they exercise liberalism and keep it limber? I consider the alternatives in "Irritate the State."3 But here, let's generally natice that prying apen the madern preference far monolingualism unhinges familiar discourses of arts and sciences. Aesthetics has periadically strayed taward palitics, but naw it alsa shaws affinities with humor. Forrnalist Victor Shklovsky was serious too when he found his favorite examples of aesthetic "estrangement" in the funny, smutty passages af Tristram Shan