drawn from Literature in Late Monolingualism, Bloomsbury 2024.

[Handout from a keynote address at the German Literature Archive Marbach, June 26, 2024]

  1. Much as Werner Sombart deployed the term “late capitalism” in 1902–1927, and later Ernest Mandel in 1972, the purpose of the term late monolingualism is to show that monolingualism is a changing, surprising, and historically sedimented—though not necessarily declining—system.
  2. Its “lateness” refers not to an eventual demise, but to the unanticipated and resurgent intensity and innovativeness with which its defenders seek to uphold it—often through discourses of so-called “multilingualism” (Moore 2015) or “bilingualism” (Katznelson and Bernstein 2017)—even when those defenders are not ideological nationalists in any conspicuous sense. A provisional dating of the end of high monolingualism would be at 1948, with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Kellman 2016).
  3. Late monolingualism means the historical era, from the late 1980s to (presumably) the mid-twenty-first century, when modern colonial and nationalist (i.e., high) monolingualisms have been suspected of general ineffectuality, irrelevance, and operational exhaustion, and which have yielded nonetheless oddly fortified new supply-side forms that correspond to fewer and fewer people’s lived realities and desires.
  4. Late monolingualism angles to Symbolically fortify its implied stakeholders against the post-postmodern dread that maybe things themselves (countries, societies, ecosystems, meaning) may really be falling apart in a damaging (rather than a liberating or creatively disruptive) way (see Chapter 1 on Dorthe Nors’s Amatka novel).
  5. Late monolingualism reflects a reluctant but unequivocal truce with the interests of global capitalism and economic anti-protectionism which, it acknowledges, have won out over nationalist attempts at cultural sovereignty and decolonial protectionism expressed through language (see Slobodian 2018).
  6. Late monolingualism is an age where a set of about 100 major global languages of commerce—what de Swaan (2004) calls “central” languages—becomes technologically fortified to facilitate unobjectionable and efficient content-distribution across language barriers.
  7. Late monolingualism is one of many sociopolitical domains where intense practical investment in an ideology does not necessarily reflect actual credence or substantive conviction among its adherents and engineers.
  8. Colonial processes of translocal linguistic commensuration of meaning (Hanks 2010)—which had begun at scale in the earliest 15th-century plantation “factories” and amid colonial evangelization efforts, and was enshrined only later in 17th-century monolingual conceptions of well-developed languages—is not a bygone, benighted infrastructure.
  9. Rather, monolingualism is only now in the 21st century reaching a new, full velocity of fortification and systematization.
  10. Late monolingualism is a collusion among anti-protectionist political economies, transnational manufacturers, and state administrative policy actors who rally, often unwittingly, to make monolingualism great again—to refortify monolingualism with new technologies, policies, affects, comforts, accessories, curricula, and citizenship protocols so as to protect so-called “monolinguals” from globalization and the destabilising effects of other language repertoires and their meanings.
  11. Late monolingualism is a prophylactic structure that idealizes a certain kind of speaker, primarily so as to commoditize all of the revenue-rich routes of symbolic access to that idealized person’s artificially constrained attentions.
  12. In both cases, high and late, monolingualism comprises dual and mutually quickening ideologies that are relatively independent of speakers’ actual beliefs and practices. It is devoted to the premise of lingualism (i.e., that bounded and totalizing languages exist and are the natural basis for planetary linguistic ecology; Stockhammer 2017) as well as to the premise of monolingualism itself (that one language is enough, and that exhibiting more or less than one language-in-use for a particular task indicates an alarming deficiency, inefficiency, circumstantial exception, or symbolic excess).
  13. Placing a slash in mono/lingualism suggests that there is a mutually reinforcing relation between monolingualism and lingualism. In 1991, the historian Jonathan Dollimore used the slash, rather than hyphen, in a similar way in “post/modernism” to indicate that “post” was not a temporal distinction from a preexisting modernism so much as a recursive relation between modernism and an incredulous or critical rejection of modernism.
  14. A late monolingual style’s swoon may be egged on and redoubled by the authorial subject’s ever-mounting and dazzling tantrums of rebuke, remorse, panic, denial, purification, fear, anguish, and nostalgia about mono/lingualism (Stockhammer 2017).
  15. A late monolingual literary mode will muster for itself unrealistic, delirious, and unrighteous rights claims, when it finds it is staring down a new AI-driven global language–industrial age.
  16. Late monolingual style often scoffs at abdication and divestment from its long-beloved illusio (Heidegren and Lundberg 2010)—here, the modern “game” of aesthetic monolingualism and its subtle but deeply consequential rules of play.
  17. Literature in late monolingualism doubles down. It fortifies into an aesthetic style that forges a new life of forms sovereign (i.e., out of touch) from the multilingual Real, which has since mid-century thrown itself urgently at literature and at scenes of literature-making.
  18. Striving to understand the moody, foreboding hunch in the air about a linguistically belated state of things in the age of Artificial Intelligence, which expresses itself in the novels of some globally marketed, Eurocentric authors.
  19. Li-fi (linguistic fiction) novels, like Amatka, suspect that they must themselves do the work of studying monolanguage(s), speech acts, and translation as a “hidden abode of [global] production” (K. Marx [1867]) in the Anthropocene, when other expert epistemic traditions like economics and earth sciences seem unwilling to do so.
  20. Self-translated novel like Tidbeck’s Amatka go about theorizing the extractive frontiers of urgent, cheap meaning in the age of late monolingualism. In a kind of phenomenology of commercial-linguistic austerity, the novel thus lived and relived this disciplined—sometimes cruel, sometimes resilient—linguistic piety in the composition process, which her own protagonists were subjected to within the world of the novel.
  21. Amatka is a novel that theorizes the affects of austere (trans)linguistic compromise as a socio-commercial virtue, and the way this virtue expresses itself in performativities-under-pressure.
  22. Tidbeck’s textual style in Amatka dramatizes the studied repertoire of practical plain-language strategies (linguistic and nonlinguistic) that such a strong coordinated interest in monolingual and translingual commensuration entails.
  23. Literature in late monolingualism strains awkwardly in its attempts to dignify the linguistic capacities of the human body—the always comparably modest linguistic repertoire of any human writer, editor, translator, or publishing scout—when set against an AI-equipped globalized political economy that now cannot countenance being managed in only one, or even in a mere handful of, language(s) at once.
  24. Novels that work consciously within the conditions of late monolingualism express a particular stamina to stay with the trouble it has caused (them), to contemplate its very form and historical implicatedness, and to uncover the internal structures that in fact tend to preempt speakers’ voluntary divestiture from monolingualism in various social and institutional spaces.
  25. Some recent novelistic literature is sensing, lately and moodily, the limitations of its own traditionally single-language formats and rationales.
  26. Late monolingual novels advance “a new sentimental education” (Sommer 2003) around late monolingualism, around its confusing effects for readers and writers, and its as-yet uncomprehended impact on this age of literary writing.
  27. A key feature distinguishing late monolingualism from high monolingualism is that, to the extent its mundane operations are now wrapped up in the mystified realm we call Artificial Intelligence, late monolingualism is accelerated by the supply-side financial instruments that govern computational technology today.
  28. “Supply side,” monolingualism means the ways in which designs, premises, and products for language management are being promoted to comply and align with what technology innovators (suppliers) foresee as imminently possible and deliverable, rather than with what users (i.e., “demand”) actually are saying we want and need, including in literature.
  29. Endemic to this age of late monolingualism is the supply-side management of global multilingualism through pathways that primarily serve commercial clients, security agendas, and borderless-market stratagems, by reducing the time and expense necessary for translation and other forms of cross-language conviviality.
  30. In this age, presses frequently design readers, and design for readers, who, they presume, needfully subscribe to wall-to-wall monolingual expectations: namely that a single named language is presumed credibly sufficient and ultimately optimal for managing all the meanings necessary for a worldly and capacious human life.
  31. A future-proofed linguistic infrastructure for global trade seeks unobjectionable outcomes that are indifferent to linguistic vividness, expressive precision, and accurate local meaning (imperium) if these cause any friction in the linguistic supply chain.
  32. Late monolingualism aims to secure managerial flexibility and constant value-creation throughout the linguistic or literary commodity’s operational life.
  33. Much contemporary published literature is compelled in some ways to emerge through and “in” late monolingualism, in the sense that it is subjected to publishers’ and distributors’ heightened anxieties about how to effectively service the global supply-chain infrastructure’s just-in-time demands on the manufacture of meaning for multiple end-user monolanguages.
  34. For the texts and authors they contract with, the vast majority of presses who can afford it will speculate on a future perfect of unproblematic translated access—i.e., what we could call, with Quinn Slobodian (2018, 123), linguistic “xenos rights”. Slobodian’s use of this term “xenos rights” derives from Hayek, and is not—as we use it here—intended for linguistic purposes, but rather for the rights of capital and property owned by foreigners/xenos, “guest-friends,” so that they can expect, as Hayek foresaw as essential for global market equilibrium, to be “assured individual admission and protection within an alien territory” (cited in Slobodian 2018, 123).
  35. Literature in late monolingualism lives in the busy shadow of this escalated assertion of linguistic and symbolic xenos rights.
  36. A novel can be monolingual while praising and prizing multilingual subjectivity, just as it can be multilingual in practice while abetting monolingualism on an overt ideological level.
  37. There is no “gotcha moment” in critically studying late literary monolingualism; it is never out to catch literature in some kind of bad, as in monolingualist, behavior we may imagine it claimed to have risen above, or sworn off, in previous ages.
  38. Like any anxiously foreclosed system, like any set or repertoire that has identified its constitutive outsides, late literary monolingualism industriously cultivates a new and interesting future for itself, and a new set of epistemological challenges.
  39. Monolingualism and literary novels are deeply and somewhat furtively joined at the hip, in historical intensities that do not quite pertain as intensely elsewhere in social life.
  40. In the end, “being in” monolingualism—being subject to it in a compulsory way—is neither a necessary diminishment of a novel’s aesthetic quality overall, nor a mark against its potentially revelatory cultural politics around language and linguistic diversity. It simply means that most novels that succeed in publication and dissemination are still routinely implicated somehow in the refortification process that contemporary supply-side monolingualism demands.
  41. Being “in” late monolingualism also doesn’t mean that a text is docile, flat, defenseless, servile, or compromising. Rather, often enough late monolingualism activates and stimulates these texts to do things differently, to forge critical and aesthetic routes that would not occur to authors unwary of monolingualism’s active, practical demands on them.
  42. Subject as they themselves are to these transformations, novelists are increasingly alert to the thickening political instrumentalizations of linguistic citizenship lawfare around the planet, and curious about what it would mean for literature to give up its own monolingual privilege at all stages of literary production.
  43. Far from being aloof, many authors’ literary work increasingly recognizes and critically textualizes “the assumptions nexus” (Ramanathan 2004, 37) around ascendant linguistic ideologies in the publishing industry, and, because of that nexus, around “how much of our knowledge and imagination is a priori preselected” (Pandey 2016, 25).
  44. Most literary artists since the corporate–transnational turn of the 1980s, particularly those who write in a language other than English, have experienced (to differing intensities and in different constellations) the profound impacts of the automatization and coordination of multilingualism, and not just the effects of late capitalism more generally on literature.
  45. If the mine is an upside-down city (Brechin 2000), the plain-language monolingual novel guards against its own cavernously multilingual preproduction underside—of commensurations, compromises, elisions, and impoverishments.
  46. (Literary) monolingualism has grown quite grandly exhibitionist (Pandey 2016) in recent decades, such that the ample social demand for alternatives to monolingual literary storytelling and knowledge-sharing has been as yet unable to defray the Global North’s ceaseless supply of monolingual literary products.
  47. An ascendant mode of literary acquisitions has taken hold since the 1980s, one that favors foolproof translatability over endogamous aesthetic particularity as the gold standard for literary scouts, executive editors, supply chains, and prize juries to trade on. This alleged dullness (Parks 2010) works somewhat like the literary version of a Special Economic Zone—utterly reliant on (while dismissive of) concentrated multilingual life and labor, and, nonetheless, unwilling to divest quite yet from the nation-state order altogether (Slobodian 2023).
  48. Monolingualism as a true “-ism” because it is a tireless ideology, an energetic idealization—one with a zealous and practical ambition in mind for any potential domain of work, conviviality, or expression. It is designed to make any respective “other language” unnecessary in a given context—frequently by nearshoring or friendshoring language expertise (El-Erian 2023) in ways that ensure that the needfully adjacent, though assiduously ignored, other language(s) will remain readily serviceable as needed.
  49. Literary dissemination today is largely a supply chain of human relationships requiring a logistically sophisticated manufacture for the least expensive conveyance of meaning to allegedly monolingual end users of literature. Here we see emerging a corollary to sociologist Jason Moore’s (2016) conception of “cheap nature”—in the literary provision of cheap meaning.
  50. Monolingualism’s resulting product, cheap meaning, is likely thus the eighth “thing” to add—alongside nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives—to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2018).

  51. Since Hayek in the 1940s, microeconomics has suspected that information-sharing is likely the “chief efficiency of competitive markets” (Farrell and Rabin 1996), such that ordinary, informal talk plays an ill-recognized but profoundly material role for the near- and middle-term structuration of global economic activity. Since even the eighteenth century, workforce strategists and workplace designers have aimed to refine forms of “cheap talk” across local languages (Farrell and Rabin 1996; see also Dudley 2017) that will yield optimal economic results across translingual markets—what economists sometimes call Pareto-optimal Nash equilibria (Farrell and Rabin 1996).

  52. Today’s late monolingualism—for all of its ultimate disinterest in the kind of cultural specificity and national sovereignty that an earlier, nineteenth-century-style high monolingualism often sought to exalt—fulfills these market aims of “cheap talk” miraculously well—by deploying machine translation, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) technologies that are good enough to “get the whole job done” for well-paying client corporations, and to jam through whatever fuzzy imperfections crop up along the way. For the moment, monolingualism-by-automated-multilateral-translation is the simplest and most alluring way to model global cheap talk for the cascading multiplicity of markets that suppliers and clients wish to saturate.

  53. Presses frequently presume and project the common-sense telos of a monolingual end-user reader, who awaits monolingual books. This artificial telos allows the overall multilingual infrastructure of dissemination to work in an orderly way for global value chains (Suwandi 2019).

  54. Monolingualism must innovate ever more aggressively from age to age in a bid to capture our imaginations and affections, often through literary and aesthetic means.
  55. Human linguistic subjectivity will always be both more, and less, than “mono-” lingual. Monolingualism has always been just too NARPy an idealization to last on this planet, but it’s going to hold on exactly as long as we allow it to. (The word NARPy comes from the HBO television show Industry (Dir. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay), whose leading character Yas (Marisa Abela) uses it to describe people whose style and language suggest they might be Not A Real Person.)
  56. In future, monolingual novels can share the road—the literary traffic in meaning (i.e., the infrastructures of meaningful uptake and dissemination, Pratt 2002, Yeager 2007)—with texts that translanguage and resile linguistically in many of the everyday, unbridled, and virtuosic ways that the peopled world already quite capably does and desires to do. It is worrisome that multilingual literature has not yet garnered a sturdy lane in which to emerge in commerce as “better literature”, crowded out as as it is by certain economies of monolingual overproduction, translational austerity regimes (see Chapter Two on Dorthe Nors), and low expectations about readerly pleasure and comprehension.
  57. Novels are always, among other things, powerful idealizations about human communication and human being. Whatever one’s critical orientation may be, we cannot sidestep the fact that novels project a durably immersive world of meaning and meaningfulness, of sense and senselessness, which in each case intends to solicit our desire, our ambivalence, and our eventual amplification through conversations with our friends. Like good conversations, novels are, at their best, “visions of sanity” for us (Tannen 1981). Overproducing monolingual projections of the world, through novels, will thus reliably constrain and skew what count as plausible and desirable forms of meaning-making socially. The monolingual metaform of the Eurocentric novel can socialize us into harsh and unnecessary foreclosures about what kinds and combinations of language(s) are and are not eligible for meaningfulness and credibility, even in nonliterary arenas of social practice.
  58. Fierce critical rebellions against ethnic subjugation, white supremacy, and nationalism that had been gaining political ground since the 1990s seemed to have roused large swaths of the Anglophone white-identifying US population not to disavow and deplatform those pernicious structures, but rather—in a kind of “late style” of their own—to grotesquely reelect and refortify racialized political monolingualism (Gramling 2019), sensing well enough all the while how decrepit and irreal such structures had become on their tongues.
  59. The Trumpist era’s intersectionally transphobic, xenophobic, racist, and opportunistically disdainful late monolingualism was best expressed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, at the July 2023 Family Leadership Summit, when he and Tucker Carlson frothed together about a terrifying future “where our kids or grandkids are memorizing thirty-seven different pronouns in Mandarin” (Date 2023).

  60. Every time someone apologizes nervously to another person in a public forum for having “butchered their name,” monolingualism hovers knowingly in the background—admonishing those present that such a mess could have been avoided if only the name and its exhausting pronounceability hadn’t insisted on being there in the first place. The always avoidable, and yet gruesomely routine, phrase “butchering a name” calls to collective consciousness a scene of physical violence in which this name in question bears its natural portion of shame for the indignity of having turned an otherwise conscientious host/speaker into a butcher, and for necessitating from them an otherwise uncharacteristic act of violence. The literature of late monolingualism offers much practical, “dirty theory” (Connell 2007) about these everyday discursive moments of monolingual consolidation, much as feminist and queer movements have always helped us to see how the everyday (dys)affordances of gender are ever in need of our untiring, collective, hard-won critical interventions.