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CHAPTER 2

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 claim that a culture’s aesthetic fabric or sensorium “ceaselessly redefines itself,” admitting certain practices while others remain invisible, begs an important question: what produces 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 one makes space for “nonsense” to take on sense and to be seen as aesthetically meaningful. Another critic, Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien, is exactly correct when she points out that reading contemporary multilingual writers as inscrutable or resistant to interpretation is exactly the wrong way to read them. “These writers know that being on the margin of communities starts when they are considered inscrutable or untranslatable. They also know that those who call them untranslatable are excusing themselves from engaging in acts of interpretation.”¹⁸ So too eighteenth-century anglophones. Reading them as inscrutable is no reading at all. Reading them in Derridean terms as always estranging language from itself in the interest of the linguistic community is more useful.

This is the interpretive attitude that I bring to the wonderfully “rotten” and “weird” works of long eighteenth-century anglophone writing. I believe it is incumbent on us, as scholars and students of Standard English literature as well as anglophone literatures and histories, to rethink the history of our aesthetic sensorium so that it is truer to aesthetic creations of the past and the present. It is in this spirit of expanding our sense of the historical multiplicity, incommensurability, and aesthetic importance of linguistic difference and diversity that my critical intervention seeks to dephilologize, dedialectologize, deethnographize, and depathologize texts and subjects that literary posterity has relegated to anaesthetic discursive traditions that cast little light on contemporary linguistic, political, and aesthetic issues.

Anglophony and Standardization

Dictionaries have in all Languages been compiled, to which, as to Storehouses, such Persons may have Recourse, as often as any thing occurs in Conversation or Reading, with which they are unacquainted, or when they themselves would speak or write properly and intelligibly.

And as such Helps have been thought useful in all civilized nations, they appear more eminently necessary in the English Tongue; not only because it is, perhaps, the most copious Language of any in Europe, but is likewise made up of so great a variety of other languages, both ancient and modern, as will plainly appear to any one who shall peruse the following Dictionary. Of the Reason of which Mixture, and by what Accidents it was brought about, I shall give the following Account.¹⁹

The eighteenth century, and in particular the second half of the eighteenth century, is unprecedentedly generative for the production of discourses about anglophony, almost all of which allude to the language’s “Mixture,” as in lexicographer Nathan Bailey’s description of dictionaries included above. For the rest of this chapter and the next, I describe the production of two of these metalinguistic discourses, standardization and translation theory, in terms of how they relate to the evolution of aesthetic criteria in the period. I emphasize how standardization and translation theories arise out of and interact with their eighteenth-century linguistic environment. Central to standardization is a concern with remediating anglophone multiplicity. Central to translation theory of the period is controlling the effects global linguistic multiplicity has on Standard English. The discursive ferment surrounding anglophony was—especially as it relates to standardization and translation—crucially conditioned by a pronounced interest in internal and external linguistic multiplicities. An example of this can be seen in the coupling of local and global that Bailey performs when he ratchets up his initial description of Standard English as “the most copious Language of any in Europe” toward the more bombastic claim that Standard English has “become the most Copious and Significant Language in Europe, if not the World.”²⁰