Some Words in Reply

With Moving Words, I set out to describe some of the ways people struggled to make life literary across a variety of spaces in a city each called Berlin. I was interested in how people lived with literature, how it accompanied them, how it was involved in the process of making life livable and and, at times, denying it. I found that this would require rethinking methodological conventions in anthropology, not least because starting from a rigid definition of my ethnographic object—a general proposition about what makes something literature and for whom—inevitably ran up against very real contests over meaning I encountered in everyday life. Instead, I had to discover what counted as literature at every moment, to see where it took hold and where it didn't, to trace something of the crisscrossing networks of its use. It certainly isn't particular to the concept of literature that it proves impossible to ground the word's relation to the world. But what was striking to me about life in Berlin was how much ongoing work was invested in trying to do just that, to transcendentalize one view of what counts and what doesn't, to treat it as a metaphysical given. There is a normativity embedded in our use of words, in our ability to see something as something, in this case to see something as literature, because our use articulates a claim, namely that I am using the word with right, and that it should have sense for you too (even if we disagree in our opinions about it). There's no promise that the claim will be accepted, so what counts as literature shows itself to be deeply bound up with the question of who is made to count and who isn't. Reassuringly, all the commentators in this forum, each in their own way, are attuned to the political questions at the heart of the project. Sometimes, this is easier to get a grip on than literature itself. A series of interconnected problems lies at the center of the book, the contours of which are frequently overdetermined by conventional social theory. One of the most urgent was that academic research on Germany, especially on literature (and very much like German popular discourse), still tends to reify Germanness through a self-evident canon, one tied to the state's language. In his insightful reflections, Francis Cody brilliantly brings out how this is supported by an enduring liberal language ideology, a certain picture of how language itself works. The idea is that linguistic and cultural worlds implied by literatures are discrete entities, internally homogenous, and separated by borders that are “obvious and based on lack of mutual intelligibility,” that they were property, nameable, and typifying of those who speak them (Gal 2006). If this problem is by now well known to linguistic anthropologists, I was struck by how firmly writing on human mobility and “migrant literature” tends to reproduce this picture while performing critiques of the state and its policies. It is a very old problem of cultural anthropological knowledge, too. It says we know there are people called Germans and people called migrants, and it can be taken for granted that they are clearly delimitable, so the ethnographer must be there to study these groups, as though the use of these names isn't the product of power-laden processes. In this way, the figures of the German and the migrant are doubles, and respective members are assumed to share something like a general history and a social location. This is on full display when someone avers that all the “migrants” I met in the field shared my biography, and that foregrounding them comes at the expense of German and Germans. Of course, a deep inequality of languages lies behind the insinuation, since German always poses as the master arbiter and imagines itself (desires to be) “immune” to the agency of those against whom it is distinguished. But this Orientalist fantasy notwithstanding, we know there never were unmixed or isolated languages, and that the traces left by texts and people the discursive regime locates elsewhere (foreign books written by foreigners) have left profound marks. Needless to say, there are also whole histories of genuine attraction, interest, and influence elided by the essentialist stories some want to talk about these societies. My own way around this “methodological nationalism” (Schiller, Çaglar, and Guldbrandsen 2006) ran along the same tracks as my approach to what counts as literature; rather than taking categories for granted, I tried to describe how they arose in small, ordinary moments of life, where they had friction, and when they were resisted, transformed, or accepted. As Cody's illuminating comments show, the two problems—about what counts as literature and about who counts in Germany—are intimately braided together and service the state's management of mobility. My approach sought common ground between ordinary language philosophy and linguistic anthropology through their shared emphasis on language-in-use and the particularity of expressive contexts. If, as Cody notes, the political dimensions of the former are often obscured by some of its philosophical reception, here attention to the microphysical conditions of ordinary language is front and center. At the same time, the philosophical grammar I trace, the criteria that govern our use of a word like “literature” and our capacity to project it into new contexts, “should be conflated neither with linguistic grammar (though the latter can often guide our investigations) nor with a closed repertoire of static forms given prior to use, but instead signals something where a detail can travel, fading away or re-emerging in new contexts, plots and arrangements” (p. 28). This is perhaps where shades of difference in the two fields emerge. A related issue concerns the ideological uses of translation and its limits. Armanc Yildiz picks up this theme in his extremely astute comments, which focus on the logic of commensurability through which the translation regime operates. Yildiz justly wonders whether White Germans really believe others are ever truly commensurate. No doubt this is the characteristic move of the discourse; cultural and literary commensurability, premised on the model of commodity exchange, holds out (European, Christian) standards of authenticity that are always just out of reach. In other words, as he argues, a dominant conception of untranslatability and of infinite translatability is conjoined. I completely agree with his assessment that this is a tool of governing difference. Something is said to be outside the bounds of intelligibility, even sense. Whether or not writers were willing to perform their alterity according to anticipated forms of expression to avail themselves of the social and political “welcome” carried profound stakes. It could mean the difference between access to and refusal of a livelihood, legal status, and even housing. Understandably, some chose to accept these stipulations. But there were also those who refused or resisted translation on these terms, choosing instead to remain unknown, to wait, holding for the right context in which they could express themselves. Yildiz not only shows how this contemporary situation is embedded in a long ideological history but also how expressly that history is summoned today and wielded against languages it deems foreign (like Turkish) and their speakers in order to preserve a racial imaginary. At the same time, I tried to make the case that this discourse didn't exhaust the possibilities for people racialized differently. Equally important to me as the critique of the translation regime was an effort to show how other ways of picturing movement in language were yet available and articulated by many. One could think, for example, that it is the physiognomy of words, their feel, their touch, and their taste that guides their movement. We can describe them as pawned or stolen. We can speak about finding our footing in language, rather than knowing a language like a book of rules. I also tried to show how, like the culturally Other, the suffering of the Shoah is said to be inexpressible, a failure of ordinary language to word the world. In both cases, literature was often held up as a magical remedy. Tobias Kelly's edifying thoughts on the “stultifying capacity of guilt” speak powerfully to these issues. Because of the impossible burden of making their pain known, the Jewish victim of Nazi violence was evacuated of their concreteness and made into an exemplar, an extraordinary, metaphysical standard against which all other suffering was made to measure (and by rule, failed to do so). Countless daily acts of memorialization and public debates about generational guilt contribute to a theological excision of Jews from ordinary reality; they also obscure the racialized exclusions perpetrated by and in its shadow. There is something distinctly urban about this landscape of guilt, Kelly observes; something about its rhythms and embodiment that is also expressed in attendant forms of literariness, as we see with the reemergence or rethinking of the Flaneur, but also in its anxieties, the constant worry that we always lapse into mere cliché when talking about the Holocaust. Kelly helpfully points out how the “self-conscious virtue of regret” comes in lieu of reflection on moral responsibilities in the present. Literature, and its institutions, show up at the center of this management regime (in prizes denied to critical voices, in disinvitations, in closed doors) and in its resistance, often in small ways. Right now, we are witnessing just how quickly free speech (and speech about the genocide of some other Semites, no less) is quashed in deference to what a liberal chancellor called their raison d’état—the supposed security of Israel. The recent rise of the far-right in Germany is just cause for serious worry. But German liberals who seem convinced they stand above morally repugnant quicksand ought to consider just how much of the world they share. The same can no doubt be said about the US. As Veena Das (n.d.) has put it recently, it is “not a matter of a universal guilt or a general reproach against life, but the simple acceptance of the striving to allow oneself a response, knowing that it will never be enough”.1 Fiori Berhane offers a different take on what's behind my method in her perceptive and powerful remarks. Thinking with films that speak back to self-congratulatory cosmopolitans and the work of activists she has come to know, Berhane asks whether migrants will ever be able to speak for themselves, and if so, who will listen? When their voices appear to be given space, it is usually on condition that they slot themselves into aesthetic gaps anticipated by metropolitan discourses, their pain into models set by its institutions, and through selective history, and that Europe's role in creating conditions of suffering is conveniently obscured. Berhane foregrounds the words of a poet, Najet, whose response to German evasions figures centrally in one chapter of my book and reorients us to the importance of care in anthropology. The word is apt. I want to counterpose spectacular performances of liberal pseudo-interest in the culture and suffering of others with ordinary acts of care, small gestures of solicitude, and often invisible efforts to repair and make life livable. As I argue in that chapter, the two visions—one marked by the penetrating desire to know another for one's own purposes and the other a vulnerable acknowledgement—are gendered modes of responsiveness. We can each of us have our own picture of anthropology, but mine is more closely attuned to the latter and its interrogation of the former. Like literature, anthropology is a human activity in the world, a practice of knowledge born from and often summoned to participate in regimes of domination. But as I understand it at least, anthropology can also afford us resources for contesting those regimes, not because it stands outside or “transcends” the conditions of our speech, but because it calls attention to the role such conditions play in human conversations; and not because we become transparent to ourselves by announcing our intention to be more reflexive, but because we cultivate a style of thought that tries to remain open to the world, and cares whether or how we receive the words others entrust to us. I am heartened to find companions in this work who are so careful, insightful, and committed. This forum has helped clarify for me how deep the methodological questions run, how much more there is to do in rethinking available anthropological vocabulary, and how urgent the implications.