https://utorontopress.com/9781487543686/moving-words/

Setrag Manoukian: Your fantastic book is rich in both stories and concepts–both of Berlin and from Berlin–detouring the reader and anthropology towards many new openings. If I were to pick one thread to start with, it seems to me that Moving Words is telling us to stop rehearsing the trite idea that life and literature are separate, perhaps even incompatible: that either you live or you write. To counter this motto, you provide a rich path across several Berlin scenes and a parallel conversation in the endnotes, arguing instead that life is literature, or rather that there is no point in conducting an ethnography of “texts and contexts.”

Andrew Brandel: I agree; this is the opening gambit and a signal theme of the book –people live (with) literature in all kinds of ways, and it is lived as a component of the real. I am committed to the view that we don’t know ahead of time where or when we might find that something counts as literature. Ethnography, as I understand it, requires an openness to these possibilities. The first artist we meet in the book insists that what matters is what could be the case. He is giving a tour of a well-known street in Berlin, points to an apartment window, and says, perhaps that’s the apartment where Nabokov wrote Mary. In the opening scenes, I juxtapose this statement with another writer who talks about how different ghosts that live in Berlin are compared to those in London (and about the whiteness of those stories). Alongside these two figures, there is Nabokov’s own Berlin writing. (How) Do they share a city? Rather than starting from a definition or from rigid ideas about the places and people for whom literature matters or how it matters, I tried to make a methodological case for staying with possibilities that can’t necessarily be gathered into a single, unified story. We have no choice but to look in every case to see what it means and to whom.

There’s a moment in the middle of the book where a writer with whom I have worked especially closely for several years starts telling me about a character in a novel she’d been writing and who she finds very difficult to live with. I don’t take her to be speaking metaphorically here. Nor is she speaking exclusively about the text she’s writing – the things the character does, or desires, or experiences in the novel. It is in a sincere mood that she tells me that this character insists she eat in certain restaurants, that she buys certain clothes and not others, and that she visits with this person rather than that one. The character irritates her the way people sometimes irritate us. This is the kind of experience I felt called for description. Her words apply friction to a tendency in scholarly writing (to say nothing of public discourse) that assumes it knows where things belong and how to separate them out. Here is an act of imagination, there is reality; here is a literary phrase, there a mundane expression. And, as I go on to argue, here a migrant, there a German.

As you imply, I am reading anthropological approaches to language that have had a lot of important things to say about context. But I also find myself thinking in the company of a handful of philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cora Diamond, Jocelyn Benoist, and other so-called contextualists, who offer a somewhat different tack. Charles Travis, to name another, often talks about a context or occasion-sensitive view of words. In a related vein, I write in the book that “the whole of our life in language [is] contextual…language in its entirety is already world bound.” I am objecting to a view that the meaning of words transcends the contexts in which they are used. I am also responding to the idea that it is only certain portions of language that touch the ground, or more emphatically, to the idea that something must be done to fasten words to the world, that language needs securing to a context. In other words, I don’t see that there is a gap that needs to be closed between a text and a context. They come into being together.

Setrag Manoukian:  The sense of possibility pervades each ethnographic situation that the reader encounters in Moving Words. This is also what makes the book such a complelling read that cannot be easily summarized in a few formulas as is too often the case. But precisely for this reason, one should not assume that your book is structured around a simplistic “it depends on context.” There are no fixed contexts. People, things and words are on the move. Languages are far from stable and bounded entities. At the same time all these movements proliferate into a variety of effects to the extent that it is ideas about languages as self contained structures that foster a set of interconnected assumptions about the relationship between people and places. Ideas that have political and economic bearings. Your book details how a series of intertwined ideas contribute in shaping what you call “dominant liberal linguistic ideology” but also a projection of Berlin’s cosmopolitanism that is also about exclusion and marginalization via literary means. You show how translation as discourse and as practice is often the vehicle of such ideologies of difference and much more, as in the case of the writer mentioned earlier that you discuss in Chapter Three. Language and political economy could not be closer. This is how you discuss the relationship between literature and migration, but also how you engage the role of cultural anthropology (since Herder !) in these projections.

Andrew Brandel: You have put your finger on a critical point where several threads are densely knit together. In Berlin, cosmopolitan welcome is often extended under the sign of translation. The translation(s) on offer come with terms; writers have to make themselves legible as writers according to European and Christian models. To put it differently, welcome is conditioned on the performance of scripts of authenticity that are impossible to reach and already anticipated by European discourse. So, on the one hand, life elsewhere is posed as just out of reach (something is always lost in translation). On the other, literature is habitually invoked (including by some anthropologists) as providing a magical bridge over the gap, getting us a little closer to the other shore. In the chapter you mentioned, I wanted to convey a sense of the profound political stakes of accepting or refusing these terms. I hasten to add that translation isn’t the only way of picturing movement in language. But there is a rush to insist on the paradigm of translation. And this has political uses, not least because it is a favored metaphor through which mobility is managed.  Often, this is achieved by appealing to a troubling history (one that, as you note, incorporates anthropology) that harkens back to figures like Herder, Goethe, and Humboldt. I try to argue at the very end of the book that the hegemony of translation notwithstanding, the ethnography tends to show other possibilities abound.

I also wanted to show how that regime of translation was intertwined with the rise of trauma theory as it developed in the wake of the Holocaust. Like the culturally otherwise, the suffering of the Shoah is said to be inexpressible, outside the bounds of ordinary language. An abject failure to word the world. Because of the impossible burden of making their pain known, the Jewish victim of Nazi violence is evacuated of its concreteness and made into an exemplar, an extraordinary standard against which all other suffering is made to measure (and by rule, fails to do so). Auschwitz comes to mark the destruction of language. Didi-Huberman writes that “to speak of Auschwitz in terms of the unsayable, is not to bring oneself closer to Auschwitz. On the contrary, it is to relegate Auschwitz to a region …of metaphysical adoration, even of unknowing repetition of Nazi arcanum itself.”  The abominable treatment of literary and scholarly voices articulating concern for Gazan lives is a clear consequence of this logic. The metaphysical tone of Chancellor Scholtz’s recent proclamation that the German raison d’etat is Israel’s security is another.

Setrag Manoukian: As a counterpoint to the potential reification of these linguistic ideologies, the book takes the reader through a series of ethnographic conversations and encounters that you describe in terms of networks bringing together writers, booksellers, literary critics, and others living even more precarious lives in Berlin. The captivating expression “the prosody of social ties” which you coin in Chapter Two to show the set of fleeting relationships that make a literary workshop and perhaps literature more generally, could be used to describe the relevance of relationality in your account. In addition, as I understand it, and given what we already discussed above about context, the term “social” here encompasses writing as well. Can you say something about your approach to relations?

Andrew Brandel: My sense is that this has to do with the importance of description in anthropology. Dwelling on description allows us to see the warp and weft of various textures of social relations that express themselves in everyday life. If social theory has long assumed, indeed reinforced, certain hierarchies – for example, that enduring relations are more important than fleeting ones – that isn’t what we find borne out in these scenes. It was important for me to show, moreover, how uncertain social relations can be. How uncertain the social world can be. Prosody came as a way of talking about not only the diversity of kinds of relations but also their shifting intensities and rhythms. People are moving in and out of spaces like the workshop I describe in that chapter, and their relationships are regularly changing shape, but we needn’t regard their ephemerality as a sign that such social ties are merely degraded forms of more durable ties.

I think of the social as bound up with the question of what is and isn’t considered to be a human form of life, a human language. To borrow a philosopher’s phrase, the two are mutually absorbed; form and life. In the introduction, I put it this way: “The question that arose time and again was how far the ‘naturalness of certain ways of being in the world that are recognized in one’s culture’ could be projected into the lives and practices of those in different social groups.” When do we accept something, however strange or disagreeable, as the sort of thing a human does or says? When, and for how long, do we imagine a future together?

Setrag Manoukian:  Berlin is such a space of the imagination, and perhaps of geo-imagination in the sense you also describe. You trace many of these geographies of movement through the city, but overall perhaps could one say that your book is an anthropological Produkt der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft ? In the sense that you intersect a certain pragmatist approach, most notably in Stanley Cavell’s version, with European concerns about the relationship between language and being. One could venture to say that the book addresses the question “what is Europe?” from this angle. The book is definitely not a Goodbye to Berlin but a long-term engagement with the intersection between North American anthropological concerns and a certain intellectual way of life that finds in Berlin one of its mythological high grounds. What do you think?

Andrew Brandel:  Friendship is an apt word. I hadn’t thought about the connection with America until it was suggested to me by Sandra Laugier. I think it has to do with the several senses in which the book is also autobiographical. Moving Words is dedicated to my grandparents. I am the child of a family of survivors of the Shoah who took books with them to America. I reclaimed German citizenship during my fieldwork. That is one sense.

You mention Cavell, to whom I often turn for inspiration and for whom America provokes a question about inheritance; in the Carpenter Lectures, for example, he diagnoses a certain anxiety in Wittgenstein about whether “Europe itself will go on inheriting philosophy” – that is, whether one’s words or thoughts will be inherited by someone. It is a worry too about what gets excised – who counts and who doesn’t. One story Moving Words tells is about my relationship with anthropology up to this point. It is a complicated relationship, though no doubt, as my teacher Veena Das famously put it, it is also a love affair. It is thanks to her work that an attraction to anthropology in Cavell’s thought (and indeed Wittgenstein’s) has been made most apparent. I think it is true to this picture of inheritance to say that one finds their voice in borrowed words. You pick up an idea or even just a phrase, and you find it expresses you and where it takes you. A quote is never simply a repetition, though. Perhaps a new direction is opened. Some may be closed. The book then, like any really, bears the traces of the company I have kept, the people, the books, the fleeting encounters, even when unmarked or when invisible to me. This is something that is perhaps clearest in what you, I think rightly, called earlier as the “parallel conversation” happening in the notes. What I have inherited is something like a style of thought. This is another sense.

As you point out, Berlin poses several questions about the uncomfortable inheritance(s) of Europe. There is no doubt the city occupies a place of privilege in mainstream social and political theory, not least in theories of cosmopolitanism, but also because of its association with names like Benjamin and Brecht. And there has been a lot of left-liberal excitement about the city for related reasons. Part of the burden of this book is to show not just the limits of that enthusiasm but also what it can mean to live in the shadow of these – oftentimes triumphalist – stories.

Yoko Tawada (whose writing I talk about in the final chapter) says in an interview somewhere, “Europa gibt es nicht.” Europe doesn’t exist. Of course, when people use the word, they do so with the right. They mean what they say. And it has real, and most often terrible, effects. Her point is that there is no metaphysical essence that determines its meaning. Unsurprisingly, I agree. I find myself taken by David Scott’s sentiment that “Europe is bedeviled by its unreconciled pasts,” on its recurrent insistence on its presumptive historical innocence. Maybe we should speak of what Frantz Fanon called the end of “European game.” At the very end of Wretched of the Earth, he writes: “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the comer of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.” (p. 311) Talking of Man means talking about Europe. I suppose my interest is in the sort of ontological commitments belied by the never-ending talk.