Moving Readers

Whereas literary ethnography has long proven its vitality, the ethnography of literature has remained relatively tentative. The reason being, perhaps, that the answer to the question, “What is literature?” (such that it might be studied ethnographically) is slippery at best. Andrew Brandel makes a virtue of this problem, however, seizing on the ambiguity of the term to write a book showing readers that literature can be approached as a broad field of language practices without a prior rigid conceptualization of the very object of ethnography. This might sound like a risky gambit, but Moving Words is a beautiful example of how ethnography can move readers via words through multiple worlds, where the main topics, “literature,” “migration,” “memory,” and the location, “Berlin,” emerge as what we might, borrowing from Gilbert Simondon (2017), call “meta-stable” trans-individual and relatively durable facts only as an effect of movement itself. An expert tour guide, not unlike some of the neo-Flâneurs he writes about, Brandel takes readers along paths through the city—producing the city as such through walks, S-Bahn rides, pausing to absorb lieux de mémoire, and on to visits to literary events, publishing houses, and bookshops—where different sensibilities and temporalities jostle for attention. Along the way, we learn to discover new entry points into a number of classical questions in social theory about language, publics, migration, memory, and urban placemaking. Let's begin with language. A recurrent theme in Moving Words is how to reimagine language, not as something used primarily to refer to, represent, and describe a world outside of itself, but instead as integral to our experience of the world. This is an old problem, often having to do with object-like qualities of language itself. We might even go back to Jean-Paul Sartre, who, in trying to answer the vexing question, “What is literature?” distinguishes between words as signs, where language is instrumentalized in the service of thought, and words as things, the latter dimension chosen by what he terms the “poetic attitude.” His binary imagery is stark and would probably strike most anthropologists as hopelessly reductive, even violent, in how it couples human will with mediation as transparency: “For the ambiguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified or turn his gaze to its reality and consider it as an object” (1949, 12–13). But even this hard distinction, between reference and mediating object, still resonates with many contemporary discussions of the poetic qualities of literature, where the object-like quality of language is no longer conceptualized as an obstacle made subservient to the imposition of will and instead experienced as a medium of distributed agency. Take, for example, Thomas, a character who was trained in German literature and musicology, whom we meet in chapter two of Moving Words. Thomas argues that a poem is made, as such, by the “sound lines, rhythms, and the sensuousness of spoken language,” such that one need not immediately understand the semantic dimensions of what is uttered for it to register in the body. This quality of poetry is what makes it an event-based art, transient in its effects and yet working as a sensual repository of memory. Language, as poetry, works on people through a time-bound relation, mirroring, Brandel notes, the transient “prosody of social relations” built through a connection to events of poetry recitation in Berlin. Thomas and his ethnographic narrator are not alone in co-theorizing the triadic relationship obtaining among poesy, event, and memory. Nearly a decade after Sartre's book on literature, surrounded by the cornfields of Indiana, the Russian “Prague School” linguist-in-exile, Roman Jakobson (1960), had drawn on a lifetime of engagement with formalist aesthetics, giving analytical structure to an event-based approach to speech in his famous “Closing Statement” on linguistics and poetics: here, he breaks down the event of communication into six constitutive factors, theorizing their corresponding functions, in a sense inaugurating the problematics that animate what was to become linguistic anthropology in North America. The most well-known of these functions was none other than the poetic, not limited to poetry but found across genres of verbal artistry, where the message for its own sake becomes the focus of attention, or what Jakobson (1987, 378) elsewhere calls the “palpability of language” is foregrounded. As it turns out, what makes language maximally entextualizable, so as to detach from its context and act as a medium of memory, is the very object-like character of language itself, made salient in emergent structures of parallelism whereby the Saussurean syntagmatic, linear axis of combination is doubled with the paradigmatic axis of selection. Brandel's interests in what he elsewhere characterizes as the “feel of words” (171)—when thinking with the writer Yoko Tawada's literary imagination—speak more directly, however, to the question of literature as experience than semiotic approaches have tended to. Drawing on a different lineage in thinking through the relations between words and the world—one indebted to the ordinary language philosophies of Veena Das (2007), Stanley Cavell (2015), and Sandra Laugier (2013)—Moving Words develops an analytic in which language can be “pawned” or “stolen” as we live with and through it in the form of literature. In fact, across chapters, the book draws a compelling parallel between its argument against a view of literature that would render it as a specialized domain of language that is somehow removed from the world it would describe and the accompanying argument against conceptualizing languages as discrete national units that are brought into contact with one another through something called “literature.” The critique of language ideology is brought into dialogue with the discourse on ordinary language, such that the everyday, here, takes on a political quality not always found in its more philosophical formulations. And in this book, boundaries between migrant expression and German literary establishments are not predetermined. The question of difference emerges, instead, in encounters where claims to Berlin's rooted cosmopolitan self-image fail in their embrace of the migrant writer even as the literary capital exerts its magnetic pull on those who have made it home. Brandel's text, because of the worlds it is moving its readers through, is in fact haunted by the impossible promises of “world literature.” Not only Goethe's formulation, as originally devised to combat the emergent nationalisms of his time and more recently revisited to ground theoretical debates on comparison in literary studies, but perhaps just as importantly Marx and Engels's (2018, 27–28) invocation in the Manifesto, at once sardonic and genuinely excited. Literature, as an intellectual correlate to material transformations, has taken on a cosmopolitan character as the bourgeoisie works to “make the world in its own image.” While the claim is to have transcended what the great masters call the “national one-sidedness and narrowmindedness” that are becoming impossible to maintain under the sway of the recklessly leveling logic of capital, this equalizing tendency is also homogenizing, exposing a series of intractable contradictions. In the book trade, “the same culture that Berlin proudly markets itself as fostering, of welcoming people from the world over … appears in paradoxical opposition to the need to remain in a close, socially bounded space” (131). When it comes to urban geography, the city would have to lose the very character that gives it distinction and allows it to foster a massively subsidized literary professional field, as we see in the stories of gentrification that cut through Brandel's narrative, if it were to truly be a center of world literature, even while one of Berlin's very claims to greatness is cosmopolitanism itself. In the realm of literature, as such, recognition of the difference that would shore up the claim to cosmopolitanism happens only on the terms offered by literary capital. It becomes the job of the migrant to make their literary difference serviceable to Berlin's aesthetic requirements. To borrow from Elizabeth Povinelli (2001, 330) in a different context, the burden of commensuration shifts “from the place it is generated (liberalism) to the place it operates on.” This is now a familiar enough dilemma, and Angela Merkel's famous 2010 declaration that multikulti had “utterly failed” in Germany could even be thought of as a right-wing political articulation of the failure of cosmopolitanism itself, as the place that the burden of commensuration operates on will inevitably be marked by failure to do so in the terms being offered by a place like Germany. What makes Moving Words work as movement, as it were, is how Brandel weaves a series of much more interesting and less easily categorized narratives through the weft of the otherwise monochromatic fabric of liberal capitalism and its strategies of assimilating the other to consolidate itself. This warp is where wholly original insights about publics emerge. For example, when Brandel, drawing on his engagement with a poet who had lived in Berlin for 20 years, Chih-Wei, distinguishes between the “invisibility” felt by the migrant of Chinese origin and the “privilege of remaining anonymous” accorded to the urban European subject. The former is experienced as a kind of deprivation, a false promise, while the latter is the figure of a subject who is “dissolvable into the anonymity of the crowd associated with modern sociality (epitomized by the bourgeois dandy strolling down the boulevard)” (47). The insights that come from taking the perspective of the place where the burden of commensuration operates are endless. The Tunisian poet, Najet, who resisted the demand for transparency that would require her to read her Arabic or English verses in German translation, explains: “I feel pity on my poem” (70). Fidelity to the words themselves, to language as experience, is here articulated as the refusal to render one's suffering and political struggle into a literary commodity form, exchangeable with others within what Brandel elsewhere calls a “translation machine” (124): this engine that would require a migrant's trauma to be measured against the proverbially immeasurable suffering Germany wrought upon the world in the Holocaust. The injustice of this demand is clear, but the response is not obvious ahead of time. It is in the restricted spaces of movement, imagination, and creation inhabited by these authors that we can catch a glimpse, by moving through them, of worlds beyond the requirements of difference-on-demand.