Researching Multilingually in German Studies: A Brief Retrospective

• Published in: German studies review Vol. 39; no. 3; pp. 529 - 540
• Main Author: Gramling, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.10.2016
• Subjects: American English; Applied linguistics; Bilingualism; Cultural identity; Culture; Discourse markers; Embodiment; Essays; German language; German literature; Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744-1803); Language history; Language teaching methods; Linguistics; Literacy; Loanwords; Logic; Metonymy; Modernism; Morphology; Multilingualism; Neologisms; Ontology; Philology; Politics; Racism; Reading; Register; Scholars; Second language instruction; Second language learning; Studies; Teaching; Terminology; THE DISCIPLINES; Word meaning
• ISSN: 0149-7952; 2164-8646; 2164-8646
• DOI: 10.1353/gsr.2016.0086

So, is it time for a new turn? In applied linguistics, global South-based scholars like Setiono Sugiharto have looked askance at the supposed eventfulness of a "multilingual turn" in North Atlantic scholarship, asserting that European Unionstyle multilingualism's bid for contemporary preeminence "denies the existence of multilingual practices which were and have been highly vibrant not only in Western countries, but also in most postcolonial countries worldwide."8 Likewise foregoing the temptation to appeal for such a "multilingual turn," the Luxembourg-based scholars Till Dembeck and Georg Mein have instead reminded us of the suggestive power of romantic and early Enlightenment philological methodologies, which had always taken messy translingual investigation to be a practical and moral virtue, and presumed no such need-to-know foreclosures on language expertise as those inscribed in Cold War area-studies bilingualism.9 With his 2015 essay on "reactionary multilingualism," the anthropological linguist Robert Moore further pointed out that Europe's recent programmatic investment in multilingualism does not guarantee linguistic justice either for new or autochthonous Europeans, and may instead exacerbate racialized hierarchies upon which certain kinds of European speakers gain ever-more access to symbolic cosmopolitanism, while others are cast as recidivistically failing to get with the multilingual program.10 Nonetheless, claims Moore, the European Commission's 2007 "Maalouf Report" (officially: "The Report of the High Level Group on Multilingualism") is all but Jacobinist in its faith that reshaping the European polity according to an orderly, communicative vision of the multilingual citizen-subject will obviate the continent's protracted security, superdiversity, and integration problems.11 Pursued in this way, the societal ideal of multilingualism has found itself under ever greater performance pressure from legislators and interior ministers who have themselves rarely if ever struggled under adverse conditions to learn, teach, or fund foreign language curricula. While GSR research throughout the 1980s did indeed stake out an overtly geopolitical theater, predicated on concerns about "third world" poverty, nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation and Middle East oil, these early articles did not often engage with source materials beyond English and German. They did however often take the liberty (without the benefit of Russian-language sources) to make metonymic claims about "how Moscow sees things."16 Indeed, what seems to have precluded much foreign-affairs research of this period from being multilingual in design and scope-even when it treated a patently translingual landscape-was the manner in which its methodology suppressed linguistic phenomena altogether, in favor of intellectualist conceits like "views," "ideologies," "antagonisms," "perceptions," or "relations," which were then taken to be themselves linguistically unmediated. Hans Mommsen's 1983 essay on "History and National Identity" exemplifies this kind of behaviorist approach to conceptual history, in which "language" tags along (usually at the end) as one among many ostensibly sovereign domains of cultural transaction and transformation. Mommsen for instance writes: "The cultural divergence between the two Germanies is not only evident in the cultural sphere, but is manifested in language, terminology and patterns of social behavior."17 Here, culture is understood as the primary plane of evidence, whereas language is an epiphenomenal domain that registers "effects." It is useful to contrast [Hans-Adolf Jacobsen]'s summative tips about diplomatic conceptual disagreements across language barriers in 1978 with latter-day GSR research on multilingualism in its contemporary contexts of use and mutation. Katrin Sieg's 2015 study "Facing Blackfacing" turns Jacobsen's rational-actor logic of "understanding differently interpreted concepts" on its head, tracing instead the translingual uptake, in the contemporary German theater world, of the widely disavowed US-based dramatic practice of blackface. Sieg pursues a detailed conceptual critique of the morphology of the loanword "blackface," and of the repertoire of potential meanings to which German users of this American word may or may not have access. Sieg shows how German dramaturgs' preference for the word "blackfacing" over its translingual predecessor form "blackface" serves as a discourse marker helping nonnative speakers of American English to distinguish between the theatrical practice and everyday Black embodiment. "This confusion," she notes, "would arise among Germans with linguistic but insufficient cultural literacy." Sieg nonetheless also indicates how the strategic political neologism blackfacing "made it more difficult to grasp the specifically German history of blackfacing as more than an imported, American practice that drags behind it American discourses of race and racism."30 This tableau points to the possibility that the contemporary celebration of multilingualism may in time lead into a kind of frenetic, technocratic meaninglessness or empty glossodiversity in public and institutional spaces.36 Martin Blumenthal-Barby's 2015 essay on Harun Farocki's "cinematography of devices" presents us with yet another possible endgame to all this multilingual incitement, namely a complete divestment from language as a relevant category of experience: "Farocki understands himself as a scholar of images," writes Blumenthal-Barby. "It is thus that he turns his attention persistently to those 'images without spectator' that he calls 'operational images,' images that are entirely absorbed by their functionality and whose peculiarity Virilio anticipated when he spoke of 'images created by the machine for the machine, instrumental virtual images . . . according to which (as an intertitle says in the installation's third part) they 'are not really intended for human eyes.'"37 This line of object-oriented thinking-of machines without human beholders-is also increasingly epitomized in big-data interlingual transactions that require no actual speakers, transactions engineered upon cross-linguistic algorithmic ontologies that steer the global traffic in intellectual property in compliance with what Farocki might well have appreciated under the aegis of "operational multilingualisms."38 Reading [Julia Kleinheider]'s and Blumenthal-Barby's pieces in parallel, we may ask: Are the experiences of confusion and alienation that Kleinheider attests to in European institutional spaces-the human sensory gauntlets of comeplled xenolalia-fated to give way over the coming decades to a kind of multilingualism without speakers?