Dialogism, et al.

Zehra Çirak’s poem, “Kein Sand im Rad der Zeit [No Sand in the Wheel of Time],” from her collection Fremde Flügel auf eigener Schulter [Foreign Wing on a Familiar Shoulder] (1994), plays with the referentiality of the lyric “I,” the poetic speaker. Çirak’s status as a minority writer in Germany was established when she was awarded the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize in 1989 (for young writers whose native tongue is not German). In this “thing poem,” the speaker is a bicycle. However, it is not just any bicycle, but a bicycle circulating dialogically between her work and the tradition of political lyric poetry in Cold War and post-Cold War Germany. Çirak’s poem references two others, Bertolt Brecht’s “Der Radwechsel [Wheel Change]” (1953) and Günter Eich’s “Sand im Getriebe [Sand in the Gears]” (1960). These two poems have a status beyond their texts—Brecht’s poem became an example of the postwar notion of “political” art (art that is political because it refuses political content); lines from Eich’s poem are well known and have even become a slogan for the anti-globalization organization Attac. By pointing out its intertexts, I read Çirak’s poem in dialogue with other works dealing with the relation between the literary work and society, between literary referent and social reference, because this, roughly speaking, is the terrain of dialogism. With Brecht and Eich as points of reference, Çirak’s poem can be seen to raise questions about how ethnic literature speaks the language of a national literature, even as it takes place in the gap between the things and words of a national language.

In approaching this instance of intertextuality through the notion of dialogism, I mean to highlight a structure of identification and dis-identification that is at play in the figure of the poetic “I,” and which refers to the lyric subject’s otherness to itself. I argue that Çirak’s minor poetry eschews its expressive function vis-à-vis national literature and actively constructs the ambivalence of the lyric “I” through a transformational dialogue with that literature concerning the things of culture and the poetic language that purports to refer to them. This raises a central question: how does the ambivalence of the ethnic, dialogic, and lyric “I” invite us to think differently about the politics of identity in the lyric speaker? Thinking about “ambivalence” as a matter of dialogism, I take up the insight that the lyric speaker is at the same time an individual (monological) moral subject and a collective (dialogic) social force. In “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” Julia Kristeva describes this ambivalence as the work’s being constituted by both monological and dialogical spaces. Ambivalence is another way of thinking about the radical alterity of dialogism, in contrast to mere opposition of author and character.

My readings of Çirak develop these ideas about the ambivalence of the lyric “I.” Çirak engages with this gap in referentiality because in writing and speaking about her poems she eschews the particularity of culture in favor of more universal questions about identity, violence, and embodiment. As an author who dis-identifies with her status as a minority writer, an attitude that is shared by many artists and writers who refute their Turkish-German or other hyphenated identity, she presents the central paradox of this dialogic referentiality as how to read the ambivalence of ethnic identity within a national tradition. As John Kim describes, and as bears out in scholarship on Çirak, this trend to read “the specter of the autobiographical ‘self’ when reading the figure of the ethnicized narrative ‘I’” (333) extends to reading Çirak’s dis-identification with this identity as a part of her poetry. Çirak scholar Marilya Veteto-Conrad presents a good example of this when she describes this conflict that was there for Çirak between her poems being read for “aesthetic value” versus primarily for their “ethnic origin.” Although I arrive where Kim does in thinking how the parallel structures of ethnicity and irony lead to the self’s “absolute negation in ‘being’ nothing” (349), I find that dialogism allows the question of the ambivalence of this poetic identity to be raised as an ethical and political question.

If, as I argue, the terrain of dialogism is the relation between literary referent and social reference, Çirak’s play with the referentiality of the poetic speaker shifts the coordinates of subject and object with German lyric poetry. The critical discourse of Migrationliteratur challenges common understandings of dialogic communication “as a process in which readers and characters engage as representatives of discrete worlds.” In The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature, Leslie Adelson proposes that such dialogism be understood instead through the “riddle of referentiality,” a phrase that she uses to indicate the chiasmic relation between figuration and referential meaning. Adelson describes how this takes place as a dialogic encounter “between an object of analysis and its interpreter, one that seeks to bridge a gap inherent in the initial relationship” (24), but as she claims, critical work should aim to keep open this gap rather than to close it. In poetry, the lyric “I” takes place in this gap as a reference that arises in the ambivalence of thing and word.

Theoretically, these thoughts draw on the limitations of Bakhtin’s theory for dialogism, which originate in his distinction between poetry and prose and his insistence on the non-dialogic aspect of poetry. Paul de Man’s reading in “Dialogue and Dialogism” of Bakhtin’s distinction between the “expressive” aspect of poetry and the dialogical aspect of the novel resolves into a “separation of trope from dialogism.” De Man thus points to how expression forms a limit of the dialogic work, returning to questions of referentiality explored in thinking about the literal and figural grounds of metaphor. Developing the critical work of Adelson and Kim on referentiality, I advance this thinking about why poetry does not count as a form of dialogism to think about why the dialogism of migration and minority literature so often reduces the “I” to an expressive voice. Another point of reference is Peter Hitchcock’s Dialogics of the Oppressed (1993), in which he proposes that Bakhtinian aesthetic activity, which involves this structure of identification/dis-identification (first as the author puts himself in the place of the character and then as he moves away from this identification (47)) makes the theory of dialogism particularly apt for thinking about what he calls “subaltern subjectivity” (xi), of those who are oppressed on the basis of race, gender, or class. Building on this critical theoretical work, I argue that reading minority poetry dialogistically illuminates some of the problems of the expressive subject, in particular, assumptions that surface about the politics of identity in poetry.

another side

Yuksel Yavuz's film, Kleine Freiheit, was so engrossing I didn't even think about knitting. There was something utterly seductive about it, about the way that it constructed mobile, exterior space and left you sitting around in interiors that you should have exited or never been invited into. The film is framed by video footage of Baran's grandfather in southern Turkey, footage which Baran watches repeatedly during the course of the film, all the while also recording excerpts from his life in Hamburg. The film is intended, we learn, for his younger sister, who, like him, was left orphaned when her parents were killed in clashes between the PKK and the Turkish army. This loss constitutes the film's aporetic center, a loss which was not merely a casualty of "war," but an injustice, a result of betrayal and torture, as is revealed when Baran meets the "traitor" who reported that his parents had taken in a wounded PKK guerrilla in the streets of Hamburg. This acute and still vivid loss is brought into contrast by Baran's new friend, Chernor, who doesn't know where his parents are. Chernor is illegally in Germany from somewhere in Africa, but we also never know where. Unlike Fatih Akin's recent popular films, which present the effacement and unreliability of identities constructed in terms of binaries, like Turkish-German, an identity which Akin also eschews, Kleine Freiheit doesn't even go there. It presents the problems of diasporic life not in terms of cultural acclimation or integration (i.e. Turkish with German), but political conflicts and violence at home persist in the diaspora. Yavuz also, and importantly, seems more interested in showing their morphed and distorted forms of expression, the intelligibility of these acts to those who are both members of the same diasporic group, on the same side politically, or even in the same family, and the intelligibility then to others, figured in the final scene where Baran goes to the police with a gun to protest against the arrest of Chernor. Chernor, who has before called all Kurds "crazy," yells at Baran, "what are you doing?? you're crazy!" The issue is not the fact or lack of intelligibilty; the film presents the audience with a sympathetic view of assorted acts of violence. We are asked to understand some supposed perpetrators: the restaurant owner who fires Baran, the traitor who ends up crying in the street, Chernor's "friends" who attack him for being gay, Baran's cousin who accidentally shoots his friend in the stomach. Others, however, are hardened as leaders of the oppressed in their various forms: the guy who lets Chernor and his friends rent from him, and the police, including the plainclothes policemen who come upon Chernor and Baran. The power of these individuals is flaunted, and self-referential. Their violence does not refer to or seem to have any other reason; it is generated by playing the system, by being the system, to a certain degree. This, then, is the border, the edge that is shakily perceptible in Yavuz's film; the edge that Baran seems to cross psychologically at the end, and the border that both he and Chernor will be forced to cross back across.

picture: Cagdas Bozkurt in Kleine Freiheit (2003), from the Deutsches Filminstitute Bildarchiv

here and there

The margins of my notebook from the past weeks contain phone numbers, instructions to self, shorthand knitting patterns, arrows, reminders, and squared off, boxed in words. The pages, similarly referential, pointing to things that should take me somewhere else, consist of notes from Sara Guyer's Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007) and Brigid Doherty's lecture, "Rosemarie Trockel's Monsters" (UCLA, May 10, 2010). I can't decide whether this represents the paucity of my own intellectual work, a desire to return to old work after writing out some notes for a paper on Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite, or the emergence of new connections between both, all, none. Not that it's necessary to decide, it's more a matter of enumerating possibility at a point when it seems incredibly slim. And more, perhaps, it seems to signal, on my own behalf, the deep and riveting need for continuity, for a sense that there is in fact a getting from here to there.

At the end of her winding, suggestive, and image-laden discussion of the artistic works of contemporary German artist Rosemarie Trockel, I asked Brigid Doherty, if she could say a litttle more about the relationship between her own development of a logic of ambivalence (or the value of ambivalence) throughout, something akin to the logic of disavowal that she described or even the logic of liquidity which she alluded to at the outset in her introduction of Trockel's wool works, and her discussion of animism at the end of the lecture. I am not reading my question as one which simply asks for some elaboration on how the here to there was gotten. I think that the question was just like the one asked before it (about the relationship between the wool pictures and castration), which underlined the need to have continuity underlined. So Doherty's response, which among other things, struck me as the conveyance of a kind of deep-seated belief in referentiality, continued this vein of my thinking by indicating that Trockel's work "frames sites at which subjectivity comes to a stop." The suspension of subjectivity occurs through the works' play between artifice and convention, which effects the ambivalence of the boundary between discursive and non-discursive moments, what might also be called the referent. Doherty, who described animism as where live objects equal death, characterized Trockel's work as reminding us that "we can lose the capacity to make contact with live objects." What, in her response, she describes otherwise as the "metaphorical concept of the castration complex [that] takes us to the threshold of certain experiences." The limits for experience are also what is at stake the opening parts of Sara Guyer's book, although differently. The coincidence of these two texts lies not just in their discussion of the figure of the Gorgon, the Medusa's head, but in the attention given to the details of figuration: on the one hand, the artistic and technical aspects of construction that play at the art object's artifice; and on the other, the prosopopoetic nature of testimonial language which designates its ultimate conjoint with lyric poetry.

Guyer begins by linking lyric and guilt, after Auschwitz, and already here the relationship between the performative and referential functions of language is at stake: "Levi's poem can be understood, on the one hand, to incorporate the performance of a guilt for which the poem accounts, correlating the guilt of a survival with the guilt of writing poetry (even poetry about Auschwitz); and on the other hand, it can be understood to dramatize the claim that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz in an altogether different sense: poetry belongs to another time, for "from now on" poetry will be from before Auschwitz" (4-5). The correlative passage follows some thirty pages later: "Yet, de Man also recognizes subjectivity as a tropological structure, that is to say, as an initially substitutive structure (i.e. I as referent, I as referee, whose substitution marks autobiography) that confounds the distinction between performative and referential language" (37). I think it is a similar shift (perhaps not in nature, but in tone) that Doherty wants to effect for the spectator of Trockel's art, that is, to suggest that the liminal experience of her artwork is a reimagination of spectator and author that correspondingly emphasizes the way in which the id/es/object world impinges upon the identity of the second-person "you" in poetic, artistic, testimonial texts.

picture: Rosemarie Trockel, Eisberg (1986)

Aleatory

In "Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event," Lauren Berlant searches for a way to talk about what she calls the "historical present." She argues that the present has undergone some serious neglect and defamation in theories that prioritize the past, the future, or that mark the present as simply an effect of these pasts and futures. Instead, her theory of the present is one that also argues for a notion of "embeddedness," in contrast to structure or agency. Berlant's argument for a strong, substantive third is unmistakable--that is, for the substantiality of an alternative option. Perhaps this is what I have been struggling to describe in posts and project-beginnings since the more or less formal completion of my dissertation, a work which, I must add, I'm still sorry to be done with, even as I realize that being done only means that I must also pick it up again and continue along. Since it seems that being "done" means that the anticipated liberatory feeling of being able to now write about anything has actually been experienced as not that.

The third, as it occurs in Berlant's work, is an argument for ongoingness, one that could be seen to complete with Brodsky's argument for building, as the equal meeting of theory and praxis in technology. These are, however, different forms of materialism. Berlant writes, "But Cayce is no modernist flaneuse: the aleatory is a professional style by the time of Pattern Recognition" (857). Referring to William Gibson's 2003 novel, Berlant implicitly compares the protagonist here with Lila Mae Watson in the other novel she discusss, The Intuitionist (1998). In the time of five years, then, and given the crises to which Berlant also refers, namely 9/11, the mode of sensory detection inhabited by Lila Mae has become something not just to make a profit on (Berlant suggests that Lila Mae's profession turned non-profitable at the point where she experienced the crisis), but to make a career out of. Berlant does not emphasize or discuss this point, but sees professionalization as an outgrowth of an earlier mode of inhabiting the present, and indeed of seeking ways of theorizing, although not actualizing, utopia. Such a career based on the style of the aleatory, however, is perhaps a way of returning to some of my earlier thoughts on Fatih Akin's films. Here, the first word that came to mind was "aleatory," "dependent on chance," in particular the notion as it occurs in Althusser, as "aleatory materialism," the materialism of the encounter. What Berlant reminds me of, even as she discusses the move into professionalism of a mode that is attached to chance, is that embeddedness has a price, at least, as the story goes.

picture: San Diego Zoo, built chimpanzee environment (eternal present)

Here

I have had the experience, in the past couple of days, of feeling okay where I am. It seems like a new feeling, or at least one newly experienced after months of bad moods, bitterness, and unjustness. I don't know why; I mean, nothing seems to have changed, and chances are, the old will return tomorrow, but here it is. The coincidence of this state with my continued reading of Claudia Brodsky's In Place of Language has led me to think about the significance of this feeling for Brodsky's discussion of the immediacy of the present--the pastness of present words--involved in what she calls building. Brodsky describes the non-metaphorical qualities of building, how it does not transfer anything, carry anything over, or exchange one thing for another; instead building, in the first part of her discussion, refers to building as a form of technology, and to the technological grounds of freedom that arise from theory and praxis becoming "at once" one another (57). Brodsky wants to get at an "ungrounded" place, that is, the inessential aspect of the deictic act (which is itself essential), which marks "here" as here, "there" as there, and "here and there" as here and there. This is the meeting of poesis and technology, of "poetry making," in her marked Heideggerian discussion. Brodsky writes, "Rather than a body or an idea, technology dazzlingly embodies the break with bodies and ideas, the caesura that allows these to be stored and transferred at will" (53). The referentiality established here, not unlike the contested hyphen of identity, imagines the freedom that is offered by the "here and there."

entanglement

Nejat’s conversation with the owner of the German bookstore in Istanbul is one of many exchanges that occurs within the paradigm of Turkish-German entanglement in Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite). The conversation sticks out in my mind as a moment in which Akin speaks. Commenting that it would truly be remarkable for a German man in a bookstore in Istanbul to meet a Turkish man who is a professor of German, the bookstore owner expresses a naïve wonder at the serendipity or irony of such a form of cultural exchange. Nejat’s response, a slight nod and glance aside, assures the viewer that the stakes of the exchange do not reside in the apparent referentiality of this here and there. In other words, Akin redirects our attention from the apparently ambiguous and unstable relationship of here and there—in short, the problem of the hypen in “Turkish-German”—towards something else. Relocating the problem of here/there, self/other, homeland/diaspora, Akin’s films nonetheless remain composed of these dyads of cultural and national belonging, the problem of identity and activity. I should like to think about what Akin looks aside to, about how his construction of global Germany suggests some alternative conceptualizations of contemporary film that attempts to navigate globality. This thinking is situated somewhere between Leslie Adelson’s desire to get out the “inbetween” of two worlds. I understand the problems of this model, and would like to take up Adelson’s initiative to find other ways of thinking about this space. However, I cannot help but feel that much contemporary writing which seeks to describe film as something mobile, transient, transitional, interrelated, entangled, etc,… somehow serves to flatten out the radical nature of global rotundity. It seems tantamount to discovering, all over again, that the earth is round—a second, or third, Copernican Revolution.

In her book, The Turkish Turn in contemporary German Literature: toward a new critical grammar of migration, Leslie Adelson develops a model of Turkish-German literature that stands as an alternative to what she calls the “two worlds” approach. She criticizes, in this way, the standard interpretation of hyphenated identity as being “in between” two rigid and fixed cultural identities. Indeed, in part, it seems like what she is arguing for is a dialectical understanding of ethnic and national belonging. She calls the model that she develops and discusses “touching tales,” to emphasize the entanglement of cultural identity that she finds at play in the literary works she reads. Adelson’s notion of “touching tales” involves an understanding of “referentiality,” which she defines as “the conjoined effect of literary figuration and narrative development” (17). Such tales allow for an added dimension of the imagined relationship between textual and lived worlds (Adelson here refers to David Hermann’s Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative). Adelson directly refers to (and disputes) Katrin Sieg’s discussion of her notion of referentiality, because she disagrees with Sieg’s reading of the relationship between the literary referent and social reference. Adelson writes, “I apparently did not make it clear enough that the combined effect of figuration and narrative in the novel precludes social reference indexing political claims tied to ethnic identities or anti-racist coalitions” (19). As she moves into a discussion of Claudia Brodsky’s writing on referentiality, it occurs to me that these discussions of the cosmopolitical claims of a “transnational aesthetic” (see Cosmopolitan Screen Schindler and Koepnick) are in this way a matter of the problem of the referent, or of referentiality, more generally. The problem of the referent takes place, as Claudia Brodsky describes, in the form of “demarcation” rather than “signification.” As I hope to develop, this problem involves, at its heart, the contradictory relationship and confusion between reason and cause (see the discussions of Wittgenstein and Freud—Richard Allen, “Psychoanalysis after Wittgenstein”). Adelson’s critique of Sieg seems to emerge out of her perception that Sieg does not make a similar distinction between representation and demarcation. For Sieg, the importance of referentiality is that it is able to exceed, but nonetheless fix, “the representation of clearly recognizable social and ethnic milieux” (see B. Venkat Mani’s discussion of Sieg and Adelson in Cosmopolitical Claims). This is the construction of the “here and now.”

In the context of questions of the cosmopolitical (that is, the negotiation between universal and particular identity and difference), this question of referentiality also takes on the question of the extent to which self-referentiality constitutes a model of referentiality at large (re: analogies between individual and cultural models of psychoanalysis). In East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature, Arlene Teraoka asks, “If discourse about others is self-referential, how do the specific Third World constructions of these authors reflect reciprocal, imaginative constructions of German or Europe?” (1). Teraoka’s question, and her project, reflect the inescapable grounds of Goethian Weltliteratur: the imposition of humbling self-reflection that arises from a concern that one’s own environment would become too narrow. For Goethe, this cures the writer of his feeling that he himself is great (i.e. his realization that he is one among many). Indeed the problem of self and other referentiality introduces to the discussion of general referentiality a tension, which, it seems to me, makes inadequate the argument that pits the undialectic “two worlds” approach against the entangled dialectic of touching tales. For the problem of self-referentiality helps us to think about the way that such a notion of entanglement becomes ascribed as an essential, rather than referential, reality of something called a transnational aesthetic, or, as B. Venkat Mani writes, the “accelerated human mobility” that becomes characteristic of the relationship between nation and diaspora. As a way of working through the tension that arises from self-referentiality, I should like to turn to Kant’s essay on cosmopolitanism, “On Perpetual Peace,” in which he describes global living as a result of geographical space: “Since the earth is a globe, they cannot disperse over an infinite area but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company” (106). He continues to describe the repercussions of global living in his definition of cosmopolitan right, of a universal community “where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.”

In Auf der Anderen Seite, globality is figured not just by or through or as transit, but as the missed meetings, passing non-recognitions, as when Yeter is pictured passing by Ayten, her daughter, on a train, or when the coffins of Yeter and Lotte pass by one another as they are unloaded from the airplane, or when Ayten is sleeping in the corner of a room where Nejat is giving a lecture. This globality, a specific version of "modernist travel," one could argue, could be considered in its rotundity, something that might give form to the impossibility of entanglement.

picture: the MIssisssippi River, from the air.