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

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.

chance

Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite Fatih Akin, 2007) opens and closes with scene--a trip to the Black Sea made by Nejat, one of the film's six main characters. Nejat is a professor of German literature, whose father, Ali, is imprisoned after killing a woman whom he paid to come and live with him. This woman, Yeter, has a daughter, Ayten, who escapes from a protest in Turkey to Germany where she meets up, and soon falls in love with a university student, Lotte. The sixth of these characters is Lotte's mother, Susanne (played by Fassbinder's "muse" Hanna Schygulla), who watches on as her daughter follows Ayten to Turkey, and finally travels there to collect her daughter's belongings after she is killed by some Kurdish children who steal the gun that Ayten had hidden. Just in these few sentences, the raveled nature of the plot can be seen. As Thomas Elsaesser suggests, we should assume that Akin knows what he is doing. Elsaesser's evidence for this is the way in which some of the hard, empirical facts of Turkish culture enter into this otherwise serendipitous plot line. Unlike Tom Tykwer's Die Krieger und die Kaiserin (2000), however, the chance encounters made possible do not pan out. Whereas Tykwer's film suggests that coincidence (Zufall) is something that allows for a second chance, Akin does not draw this equation between coincidence and second chance, much less between coincidence and chance.

Elsaesser, a Brecht scholar (and also a scholar of Fassbinder), suggests that some of Akin's other devices, such as the band which plays at the beginning, end, and interludes of Head On (Gegen die Wand 2005), distance and estrange to allow for critical reflection "on the social forces" behind things. This "self-reflexivity," which Elsaesser notes Akin also wants, seems to be what is most aroused by the "intersecting" but not "converging" nature of the parallel lives in the narrative. If it is self-reflexivity that is the result, then, of chance, how does this relate to the fact that seemingly little else is produced by coincidence?

Awareness certainly seems to be one of the things up for grabs in the film. I also happened to watch another film that deliberates (albeit on a different level) on the role of chance, Puccini for Beginnners (Maria Maggenti, 2006), which ends with some commentary on the role of chance--that Freud's comment that there are no coincidences is certainly true because our capacity for awareness is so much greater than for registration. This is my rephrasing, at least. In The Edge of Heaven, awareness refers to both the characters' fated missed passings and their relationships with the social world around them. This is most pointedly portrayed in the contrast between the level of political involvement held by the two women who are together at the end of the film, Susanne and Ayten. In their first encounter, Ayten rails against her for her seeming lack of awareness of how things really are for Turkish people. Susanne's tired, worn gaze tells us more, however, so that the type of political and social awareness that the film is after is here held in tension.

picture: LA in gray/Urban Ocotillo