Utopianism of Multilingual Art

The Tower of Babel usually acts as a symbol of noisy multilingual confusion because it evokes the chaos of languages that ensued from God’s angry destruction of the tower. However, as G. W. F. Hegel observes in Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, the underside of the Babel story reveals the tower’s origins in unity, in a human drive to unite through the icon of a work of art. Hegel quotes tower of Babel as the first example of such unifying power of architecture: “built in common, and the aim and content of the work was at the same time the community of those who constructed it” (638). The common goal and the symbol thus erected unified people, as did the very immensity of work accomplished together. Thus, as an icon of a binary opposition at play, Babel represents both unity and its lack. It symbolizes both the utopian ideal of universal communication and the dystopia of its impossibility.

Drawing on examples from art (the anonymous “You Are Beautiful” project), literature (Ntozake Shange) and music (Manu Chao), this paper investigates the utopian impulse behind multilingual aesthetics, which usually hopes to represent and foster international cosmopolitan communities. However, multilingualism often encounters the paradox of Babel: can it contribute to greater international understanding with an incomprehensible mix of languages? I argue that by showing the resistance of the foreign to the influence of global English, multilingual artists strictly distinguish between two forms of unity: the totalizing one that would like to see the whole world as a sea of sameness achievable through translation or a universal language, and the cosmopolitan one which finds a universality in difference.