Critical Translation Studies 9781315387864

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
List of figures......Page 9
Preface......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 18
Critical Theses on translation 1: Sakai circa 1997......Page 20
1 Liu reading Marx......Page 52
2 The double-bind of Translation Quality Assessment......Page 86
Critical Theses on translation 2: Sakai and Solomon circa 2006......Page 96
3 Walter Benjamin’s Intentions......Page 119
4 What one reads when one reads Heidegger......Page 132
5 The socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi......Page 146
Critical Theses on translation 3: Solomon circa 2014......Page 160
References......Page 199
Notes......Page 209
Index......Page 220

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Critical Translation Studies

This book offers an introduction for Translation Studies (TS) scholars to Critical Translation Studies (CTS), a cultural-studies approach to the study of translation spearheaded by Sakai Naoki and Lydia H. Liu, with an implicit focus on translation as a social practice shaped by power relations in society. The central claim in CTS is that translators help condition what TS scholars take to be the primal scene of translation: two languages, two language communities, with the translator as mediator. According to Sakai, intralingual translation is primal: we are all foreigners to each other, making every address to another “heterolingual,” thus a form of translation; and it is the order that these acts of translation bring to communication that begins to generate the “two separate languages” scenario. CTS is dedicated to the historicization of the social relations that create that scenario. In three sets of “Critical Theses on Translation,” the book outlines and explains (and partly critiques) the CTS approach; in five interspersed chapters, the book delves more deeply into CTS, with an eye to making it do work that will be useful to TS scholars. Douglas Robinson is Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. A scholar of language, literature, translation, and rhetoric, and a translator from Finnish to English since 1975, he is author most recently of Schleiermacher’s Icoses (Zeta Books, 2013), The Dao of Translation (Routledge, 2015), The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle (SUNY Press, 2015), Semiotranslating Peirce (Tartu Semiotics Library, 2016), and Exorcising Translation (Bloomsbury, 2017), and editor of The Pushing Hands of Translation and its Theory (Routledge, 2016).

Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies

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For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

10 Multiple Translation Communities in Contemporary Japan Edited by Beverley Curran, Nana Sato-Rossberg, and Kikuko Tanabe 11 Translating Culture Specific References on Television The Case of Dubbing Irene Ranzato 12 The Pushing-Hands of Translation and its Theory In memoriam Martha Cheung, 1953–2013 Edited by Douglas Robinson 13 Cultural Politics of Translation East Africa in a Global Context Alamin M. Mazrui 14 Bourdieu in Translation Studies The Socio-cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt Sameh Hanna 15 Ubiquitous Translation Piotr Blumczynski 16 Translating Women Different Voices and New Horizons Edited by Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad 17 Consecutive Notetaking and Interpreter Training Edited by Yasumasa Someya 18 Queer in Translation Edited by B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett 19 Critical Translation Studies Douglas Robinson

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Critical Translation Studies

Douglas Robinson

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

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© 2017 Douglas Robinson The right of Douglas Robinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-22983-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-38786-4 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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For Sveta, and converging paths

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Contents

List of figuresviii Prefaceix Acknowledgmentsxvii Critical Theses on translation 1: Sakai circa 19971 1 Liu reading Marx

33

2 The double-bind of Translation Quality Assessment

67

Critical Theses on translation 2: Sakai and Solomon circa 200677 3 Walter Benjamin’s Intentions

100

4 What one reads when one reads Heidegger

113

5 The socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi

127

Critical Theses on translation 3: Solomon circa 2014

141

References180 Notes190 Index201

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Figures

1.1 The “social act” tower 53 1.2 The shadow coauthoring of the tabooing of 夷 yi65 2.1 The structuralist emptying-out of borderlands as abstract borderlines85 3.1 Opposed explanatory channels for Benjamin 103

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Preface

This is a book about a school of thought about translation that doesn’t exist. The scholars exist, of course; they have even published together. But to my knowledge they don’t have a term for their approach to the study of translation, and may not even think of it as a unified approach. They do not call their approach Critical Translation Studies: that term, abbreviated in this book as CTS, is my own coinage. I base it on the term Critical Translation Theory, which is how Lydia H. Liu, one of the prime movers in the group, names one of her research areas on her Columbia web page – on the model, presumably, of Critical Discourse Analysis or Critical Legal Studies, with an implicit focus on translation as a social practice shaped by power relations in society. To my (perhaps biased) mind “translation theory” is always “critical theory,” always strongly oriented to postNietzschean studies of power; to me, therefore, “Critical Translation Theory” sounds a bit redundant. Approaches that call themselves “studies” or “analysis,” by contrast, may be purely formalistic, making it a decisive Nietzschean move to append the adjective “Critical” before them. That, at any rate, is the thinking behind my title, for the book and the approach it delineates. The actual pioneers of the approach that I seek to present under the rubric of Critical Translation Studies or CTS consist of two groups of scholars loosely confederated around the leadership of Lydia Liu and Sakai Naoki (who publishes in English under the Western-resequenced name Naoki Sakai), in the monographs Liu (1995) and Sakai (1997), then the essay collections Liu (1999d) and Sakai and Solomon (2006), then converging in the special issue of translation coedited by Sakai and Sandro Mezzadra in 2014 (containing articles by Liu and Solomon). What struck me about this work as I began reading it was how little TS scholars know about it – to the point of almost total ignorance. Chinese TS scholars tend to know Lydia Liu, because she’s Chinese; but they don’t seem to know quite what to do with her work. Sakai Naoki has been moving recently into the peripheries of TS scholars’ awareness, and was asked by Siri Nergaard to coedit the special issue of translation; but again, TS scholars who do know his work seem to be mostly at a loss with it. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious TS work that can be done with it. The work he does with it, beginning in 1997 with his study of the eighteenth-century creation of the Japanese national

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x  Preface language, doesn’t seem to be TS work; the contribution of Jon Solomon in Sakai and Solomon 2006 seems to push his thinking about translation into the world of political economics, and Solomon’s contribution to Sakai and Mezzadra (2014) is even more overwhelmingly a high-level retheorization of political economics, with only passing references to translation. For twenty years, then, these scholars have been theorizing translation, and translation scholars have not known (much) about them; nor, for the most part, have the CTS scholars been reading us. Sakai (1997) mentions Benjamin (1923/1972), Jakobson (1959), and Quine (1960: 27–79) – all major TS texts, of course, especially the first two, but not exactly indicative of an intimate familiarity with the field over the last half century. In Translingual Practices Liu (1995) mentions a double handful of TS scholars, including me, but very much in passing, as if by way of due diligence;1 by Tokens of Exchange (Liu 1999d) she has pretty much written us off, hinting in rather terse break-up lines (“we can no longer talk about translation as if it were a purely linguistic or literary matter” [1999a: 1]) that TS has nothing to offer the approach she is developing – without giving any indication that she has actually read anything in the field, except Jakobson (1959). The same refrain appears in Liu (2004: 110), and again in Liu (2014: 149), her contribution to the Sakai and Mezzadra special issue of translation: Secondly, there is a formidable obstacle to overcome if we decide to undertake this line of investigation in translation studies. The obstacle, which often stands in the way of our understanding of the political, is the familiar mental image of translation as a process of verbal transfer or communication, linguistic reciprocity or equivalences, or an issue of commensurability or incommensurability. It is almost as if the promise of meaning or its withdrawal among languages were the only possible thing – blessing or catastrophe – that could happen to the act of translation. I have critiqued these logocentric assumptions in translation studies elsewhere (Liu 1995, 1–42; Liu 1999, 13–41) and will not reiterate my position here. The refrain rings a little hollow, however – as if she had gotten locked into the attitude she adopted in the mid-nineties, and simply not bothered to read anything in TS for the two decades since. Is TS really still so “logocentric”?2 Is “the promise of meaning or its withdrawal among languages” still for TS scholars “the only possible thing – blessing or catastrophe – that could happen to the act of translation”? Was it, for that matter, in 1999, or even in 1995? Was the skopos or functionalist or action-oriented school, beginning in the mid-eighties, really obsessed with the “process of verbal transfer or communication, linguistic reciprocity or equivalences, or an issue of commensurability or incommensurability”? As translator-based research into Think-Aloud Protocols has evolved into eyetracking and other exciting new developments in cognitive science, it has moved further and further away from the narrow “logocentric” realm that Liu attributes to all TS; but there is apparently nothing there that might interest Liu in 2014. Postcolonial translation studies, beginning in the late eighties, is the subdiscipline

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Preface xi of TS that most strongly anticipates what I’m calling CTS here, and Liu (1995) mentions the work of Asad, Rafael, Cheyfitz, and Niranjana in passing; but they are strikingly absent from her work since that early book. Sociological studies of translation from Pym (1992) to Angelelli (2004a, 2004b) are obviously quite distant from the “logocentrism” Liu dismisses, as are the activist or “intervenient” political approaches to translation championed by Baker (2006, 2009) and the authors of Munday (2007). But Liu is content to ignore all this, without reading it – apparently without even being aware of it – and to pursue her own research into translation. To be fair, though, the logocentric assumptions that she dismissively associates with TS as a whole are not only still very much present in the field, but remain in some sense definitive for the field. The fact that some of us associate those assumptions with the linguistic approaches that dominated TS before the Cultural Turn began to take hold from the late seventies to the early nineties – and shudder to see the field caricatured along those lines – does not mean that TS is not still in (large?) part about that “process of verbal transfer or communication, linguistic reciprocity or equivalences.” And to be even fairer, where are the intelligent, complex, nuanced assessments of CTS by TS scholars? Where is the evidence that TS scholars are even reading Liu and Sakai and the others? This book is my attempt to build bridges between the two approaches – with a primary focus on introducing CTS to the TS scholarly community, but with a secondary orientation toward a tentative assimilation of CTS insights to TS concerns and problems. For CTS to become relevant to TS, TS scholars first need to know about it – and then need to know how to proceed with it, how to make it do the kind of work that they do. To that end I have mainly organized my ruminations in the book into two genres of academic writing: Critical Theses on Translation, in three installments (circa 1997, 2006, and 2014), designed to introduce the dominant ideas of CTS as it develops over nearly two decades; and more traditional chapters that bring a more exploratory attitude to bear on the CTS theses. Specifically, where in the Critical Theses I mainly record (and in passing lightly interrogate) CTS theorizations, in the chapters I seek to make those theorizations do work that TS scholars will regard as useful – and sometimes that latter task means bending the CTS concepts in new ways, new directions. For example, in Sakai’s work the “schema of cofiguration” and the “regime of translation” are phenomena that are mostly valorized negatively, by association with the ideological formation that Sakai dubs the “regime of homolingual address,” which imposes an idealized model of perfect mutual comprehension within a single national language and perfect mutual incomprehension across national language barriers. It is this latter regime that for Sakai cofiguratively creates national languages as unified entities, and in so doing creates the need for translation, and specifically for regimes of translation, which he defines as “an ideology that makes translators imagine their relationship to what they do in translation as the symmetrical exchange between two languages” (1997: 51).

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xii  Preface What is useful about this notion for TS is that it historicizes the rise of the paradox whereby the translator is desperately needed for communication across languages but must also be invisibilized, in order to maintain the illusion that all address is homolingual, and therefore unmediated. Beginning with the primacy of something like Roman Jakobson’s (1959) notion of intralingual translation, heavily grounded in the Heideggerean rethinkings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Sakai insists that all address is actually heterolingual – fraught with ruptures, discontinuities, failures – and that therefore we are all to each other not only foreigners but translators. His desideratum would appear to be the restoration of all human communication to the attitude of heterolingual address – which is to say, reminding us that homolingual address is sheer ideological illusion. Useful as that theoretical model undeniably is to TS scholars, however, it also seems to imply that TS as the study of regimes of translation is a study of ideological illusions. If the regime of translation is “an ideology that makes translators imagine their relationship to what they do in translation as the symmetrical exchange between two languages,” then perhaps the utopian solution to the current situation is to smash that ideology and convince translators to stop imagining those illusory things. And if that utopian solution is the task of CTS, perhaps TS is part of the problem. Perhaps these thousands of TS scholars around the world who busy themselves studying translation as “the symmetrical exchange between two languages,” or as “a process of verbal transfer or communication, linguistic reciprocity or equivalences, or an issue of commensurability or incommensurability,” are just making things worse – just helping global capitalism maintain its illusory stranglehold on our social practices and affective loyalties. Perhaps that is why there’s no need for CTS scholars to keep up with the research in TS. I do not believe, in fact, that this is Sakai’s view of translation. The “real” vs. “illusory” binary that I’ve sketched in is a panicky caricature that does not accurately characterize Sakai’s theoretical model. But his theorization is vulnerable to that caricature, I suggest, because he never quite works out the complex intertwining of heterolinguality and homolinguality – making it seem like an airtight binary stretched across the ontological horns of reality and illusion and the moral horns of good and evil. One of my goals here is to explore that middle ground in some detail. To some extent this also involves a transvaluation of Sakai’s values, so that the schemas of cofiguration and regimes of translation are not negatives – not to be regarded with ideological suspicion. Certainly they are ideological formations, shaped by the last few centuries of the nation state, the capitalist stabilization of markets, and the colonialist imposition of hierarchical identities on peoples, cultures, nations, regions, and civilizations. Certainly there are political evils that have arisen out of those formations. But I’m not activist enough to tilt against those evils. I’m mostly interested in how things work. In the chapters, then – and even, in passing, in the Critical Theses, beginning in CT 1.10 and 1.12—I offer a series of what I take to be friendly amendments to the reigning CTS binaries. The main form these friendly amendments take is the icotic/ecotic theory that I have been developing over the last few years, which

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Preface xiii seeks to explore the “felt hypostatization” of opinions and concepts through group somatic plausibilization processes. I derive the term “icosis” from Aristotle’s eikos “plausible,” ta eikota “the plausibilities,” and his observation that, given a choice between a plausible story that is untrue and a true story that is implausible, we will almost always choose the former, because plausibility is an ideological construct that we feel as real. Icosis, therefore, is the becoming-real of group normative opinion. I derive “ecosis” in a parallel fashion from oikos, which can mean “household” or “community”; oikos and eikos were pronounced almost identically in Attic Greek, to the point that Greek thinkers often punned on the two. Ecosis for me is the becoming-good of the community, or the becomingcommunal of abstract concepts of the good. In both icosis and ecosis group norms come to seem like “objective” realities – the way things are, the true nature of humans and their world. In my revision of CTS, in other words, both the attitude of the heterolingual address and the regime of homolingual address are social ecologies – which is to say, both are sociosomatically constructed “realities” that cannot and should not be derogated as illusions. While agreeing with Sakai that the attitude of the heterolingual address is in almost every way more attractive than the regime of homolingual address, and even that it seems to fit my intuitions about the way human communication really works far better than the regime of homolingual address, I submit that that attractiveness and that intuitive sense of rightness do not make the attitude of the heterolingual address “truer” or “more real” than the regime of homolingual address. To the extent that my intuitions, and presumably Sakai’s intuitions, support the “reality” of the primacy of the heterolingual address, the socioecological conditioning of our intuitions could (and arguably should) be historicized as well – beginning, for example, with the German Romantic valorization of das Gefühl des fremden “the feel of the foreign,” which we find implicitly inspiring Lydia Liu in Chapter 1. Since I bring to these matters a less utopian vision of salvation than the Sakai group – especially beginning in 2006, with Sakai’s close collaboration with Jon Solomon – and certainly do not envision a Romantic/Occidentalist post-­ capitalist paradise as the ultimate goal of our critiques – I am far more interested in the tensions between the icoses of heterolinguality and homolinguality, within specific social and professional practices, and in the relational attitudes and motivations and other affects that structure those practices, than I am in consigning heterolinguality and homolinguality to the opposite banks of a deep ideological ditch. As I say, these are not negatives for me – or, to the extent that some specific homolingualization becomes an irritant, the negative attitude in which I participate with like-minded readers becomes a matter for scrutiny. What occasions that negativity? What conditions it?

The structure of this book As I say, the book is divided between – and also alternates between – Critical Theses on Translation and more traditional chapters, organized into two Parts: Critical Theses 1 (Sakai circa 1997), then two chapters, then Critical Theses 2

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xiv  Preface (Sakai and Solomon circa 2006), then three more chapters, then Critical Theses 3 (Solomon circa 2014). The Critical Theses tend to be focused mainly on the work and influence of Sakai Naoki, but with detours: CT 1 tracks his argument in Sakai (1997), but with side glances at Liu (1995) and the articles in Liu (1999d); CT 2 tracks his argument in Sakai and Solomon (2006a), which partly recuperates CT 1, but also pushes strikingly past it, due no doubt in part to the influence of Jon Solomon; and CT 3 tracks the argument of Solomon (2014) alone, his contribution to the special issue of translation guest-edited by Sakai and Mezzadra (2014). There is, in other words, a kind of fade movement from Sakai to Sakai/Solomon to Solomon – but with a solid grounding throughout in Sakai’s theories of heterolingual and homolingual address, schemas of cofiguration, and regimes of translation. At the end of CT 3 I perform another fade, by way of bringing the book to a close: in CT 3.4 Solomon invokes the work of Franco “Bifo” Berardi, friend and collaborator of Félix Guattari, and after tracking Solomon’s argument in CT 3.1–11, I shift in the Conclusion to a closer look at the work of Berardi (and Guattari). In a rather expansive sense the chapters are devoted to a series of readings of Liu’s (1999b) opening chapter in Tokens of Exchange, with side glances at her Introduction (Liu 1999a) and later chapter (Liu 1999c). Chapter 1, “Liu Reading Marx,” looks closely at Liu’s “The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign,” where she develops Marx’s ruminations about the creation of an allgemeine Äquivalent, which is literally a “general equivalent” or “common equivalent” but was translated in the nineteenth century by Moore and Aveling as “universal equivalent.” Liu’s goal is to historicize the pragmatic use of translation to generate competing universals of equivalence, and to adjudicate among them; but as I note in the second section of Chapter 1, she neglects to foreground the history of translation that led to her ability to comment on Marx in English, and the theoretical problems that history creates for her. In the third section I interrogate the Romantic conditioning of her insistence that the creation of universal equivalents is a “social act,” and ask who, then, the “social actor” is. One of Liu’s historicizations tracks the battle the British fought in the mid-nineteenth century over the word 夷 yi, which originally meant the non-Han tribes, and therefore in some contexts “barbarians”; insisting on translating the word in that latter aggressive sense, once the Opium War was won the British built into the peace treaty a ban on the use of the word in official documents. And Liu (1999b: 35) concludes: “The legal ban was so effective that it has made the word literally disappear from the languages of today’s Chinese-speaking world.” Banning the word from official documents was a political act, obviously; but what was the “social act,” and who or what was the “social actor,” that “made the word literally disappear from the languages of today’s ­ Chinese-speaking world”? The ban itself? Or what? I follow that line of questioning up in section 1.4 by looking closely at Liu’s use of depersonalizing nominalizations for that “social actor,” like “meaning,” “the sign,” and “language.” She doesn’t stop to consider how these actors act, what kind of agency they possess and how they wield it; this becomes my first occasion to broach an icotic explanatory model,

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Preface xv to suggest that Liu is largely right to invoke these apparently “abstract” agents as the forces that bring about the circulation of meaning and significance – but that we need to think more carefully about how that happens. Chapter 3, “Walter Benjamin’s Intentions,” picks up the thread of Liu’s admiring critiques of “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” and offers a tentative reading of Benjamin’s “mystical” argument in the piece along icotic lines: what Benjamin seems to attribute to supernatural/spiritual forces might be retheorized as aggregated products of social ecologies. It doesn’t quite work: Benjamin, mostly so careful to naturalize his kabbalistic mysticism, to make the awakening by translators of the clash of the Intentions in the different languages and the consequent move toward Pure Language sound reasonable, realistic, also refuses to budge on the instantaneity of the possible future messianic transformation. But then my intentions are not in the end to foist my demystifying interpretation on Benjamin. Rather, I seek to build a bridge, even a partial bridge, a failed bridge, between Benjamin’s mysticism and Marx’s political economism, to help Liu flesh out her admiration for Benjamin along lines that will advance CTS theorization. Chapter 4, “What One Reads When One Reads Heidegger,” picks up on a passing phrase in Liu (1999c: 137), namely that “one does not translate between equivalences; rather, one creates tropes of equivalence in the middle zone of translation between the host and guest languages.” My question there is, who is this “one” who “creates tropes of equivalence”? Liu borrows the “tropes of equivalence” from Robinson (1991), and advances my argument in surprising and useful ways: I didn’t stop to ask where those tropes came from, back then, when I was writing the book. I didn’t ask who created them. They were my tropes, obviously, borrowed partly from Kenneth Burke’s four master tropes and Harold Bloom’s six-stage map of misreading from 1975, deployed as analytics to help me sort out the different models of translational equivalence translators and their critics and theorists seemed to be working with – but where did those models come from? As it turns out, Liu doesn’t quite get around to asking who creates/created those models/tropes either – but her use of the impersonal thirdperson pronoun “one” suggests to me that Heidegger’s das Man did. Das Man, of course, was Heidegger’s nominalization of the impersonal “one” pronoun; in Sein und Zeit/Being and Time he tended to theorize das Man negatively, as a crowd mentality that resists and denies and suppresses the authenticity of the fully realized “I.” Following a chain of retheorizations from Benveniste on the depersonalizing effects of the third person, through Hugh Kenner on Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse, to Eve Sedgwick’s notion of periperformativity, I suggest that “one” is the quintessential periperformative pronoun: it is a singular “they” that includes the “I,” and seeks proactively to include the “you” as well, and so channels the group-normative pressures of the crowd of witnesses into the performative encounter between the “I” and the “you.” The answer to the question of who this “one” is that “creates tropes of equivalence,” then, is that that “one” is icosis. “One” or das Man is the aggregate face of an affective-becomingconative social ecology.

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xvi  Preface In Chapter 5, “The Socioecological Thought of Laozi and Mengzi,” I return to Liu’s insistence that the legal ban on 夷 yi “made the word literally disappear from the languages of today’s Chinese-speaking world,” and ask how 老子 Laozi and 孟子 Mengzi would theorize the agency behind that “making,” or that “d(a)oing.” The answer takes us through the socioecological thinking of ancient Chinese philosophers, in close readings of Laozi 51 on the entelechy of propensity (勢 shi) and Laozi 49 on 聖人恆無心，以百姓心為心 shengren heng wuxin, yi baixing xin wei xin – the sage lacking an individualized heart, and so taking the people’s heart as heart – and finally of Mengzi on 仁 ren as something like that 心為心 xin wei xin “heart as heart,” a phenomenology of fellow-feeling that shapes not only identity but social reality. Laozi and Mengzi, in other words, extend the socioecological – icotic/ecotic – thread running all through the book, exploring, in Daoist terms, the collective human vitalism of 道 dao: knowing without controlling knowledge (無知 wuzhi), desiring without controlling what is desired (無欲 wuyu), feeling without trapping feeling in individual skin-bags (無心wuxin = 心為心 xin wei xin). I have said that I divide my argument in this book into two genres, the Critical Theses and the traditional chapters; but in fact in Chapter 2 I also introduce a third genre, one that I have plied numerous times in the past (Robinson 1992: 29–32, 51–3, 161–4; 2001: 170–9; 2008: 187–90): the double-bind of translation. This particular double-bind, called “The Double-Bind of Translation Quality Assessment (TQA),” sets Juliane House’s TQA up as a candidate for what Liu calls a universal equivalent, and seeks to voice the conflicted collective “social actor” that might be imagined to be creating and consolidating that equivalent.

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Acknowledgments

The TQA double-bind in Chapter 2 was originally written in St. Petersburg, Russia (a fact to which I allude in TQA 4a), for the Translation Research Summer Seminar later that summer at HKBU, July 29, 2011; Martha Cheung’s challenging questions in particular stick out in my memory as especially unsettling, and so especially conducive to rethinking. I wrote an earlier version of Chapter 3 on Walter Benjamin for the University of Macao Distinguished Lecture Series, in which Zhang Meifang invited me to speak on November 3, 2011. My thanks to Prof. Zhang, Sharanya Jayawickrama, and a visiting professor of philosophy and religion from Vanderbilt, William Franke, who suggested during the Q&A and later at dinner that the ecological middle ground that I was carving out between “human translation” and “mystical translation” in Benjamin’s essay in fact was Benjamin’s “mystical” understanding of translation. A year and a half later, on July 4, 2013, I gave substantially the same talk at the Stridon Summer School on Translation in Piran, Slovenia, with slightly more emphasis on the mediated view of mysticism Prof. Franke had so eloquently advocated – but Prof. Nike K. Pokorn, the director of the Summer School, argued so vigorously against that mediated view, and in favor of a straight-up mystical reading of Benjamin, that in the end I began to back away from it as well, and to acquiesce in the mystical reading. After all, no matter how ingeniously I interpreted Benjamin’s text, I just could not get around his insistence that humans are incapable of bringing about an “augenblickliche und endgültige” (Benjamin 1923/1972: 14)/“instantaneous and final” (Rendall 1998: 157) transformation of the mutual foreignness of languages into “die reine Sprache” (Benjamin 13)/“pure language” (Rendall 156). Maybe he means that there is no need for humans to instigate that transformation? But no. In the end I yielded – “gave up” (Paul de Man’s suggested translation for die Aufgabe in Benjamin’s title). Let Benjamin have his Kabbalism. Chapter 4 on Heidegger is a radically reduced and refocused version of a chapter I originally wrote for a book manuscript that I was calling “Ecologies of Translation,” and later cut out of the draft when I rewrote it substantially as The Dao of Translation (Robinson 2015a); a longer and significantly reframed version of the same argument about “one” and the periperformative was published as Robinson (2016c). While I was working on the original argument, Johan van der

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xviii  Acknowledgments Auwera of the University of Antwerp helped me work through the complexities of the various impersonal pronouns both during and after a lecture he gave at Hong Kong City University (later published as Gast and van der Auwera 2013). Other people to thank in Hong Kong: Nicole Lan and Heidi Huang, for long conversations about Mengzi and Laozi; Lucas Klein and Red Chan, for conversations about Lydia Liu; Iris Chao, Sharon Yip, and my other colleagues in the HKBU Dean’s Office, for making my life both easier and more enjoyable in so many ways; and of course, as always, my family in Hong Kong, Sveta Ilinskaya and Agnes Robinson, who liven up my intellectual and affective life and refocus my thinking on a daily basis.

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Critical Theses on translation 1 Sakai circa 1997 Critical Thesis 1.1 In Translation Studies (TS) we have grown accustomed to figuring translation as “a somewhat tritely heroic and exceptional act of some arbitrator bridging two separate communities” (Sakai 1997: 3) – and specifically as a secondary exceptional act that normatively follows the act of writing monolingually for a source audience that we take to be fully and unproblematically competent in the source language. Sakai’s project is apparently quixotic, interrogating assumptions that seem to be inescapably, even comfortably, cozily, lodged in the way things are; what makes that project powerful is not only the impetus he takes from Jean-Luc Nancy’s rethinkings of Heidegger, but his own experience of writing the book in the interstices between language communities, Japanese-speaking and ­English-speaking, shuttling between them, taking insights from one to transform his address to the other, translating-before-writing, translating-as-writing. The TS assumptions he challenges are assumptions that have taken hold in our thinking over several centuries of normative nationalism – by which I mean the image of the world, born in Europe in the early modern period and most influentially theorized by the German Romantics, according to which there is a “natural” or “organic” relation between a nation and the single language spoken in it by the single ethnic group that comprises its population. Ein Land, Ein Volk, Eine Sprache: One Land, One People, One Language. If inside the One Land there are “foreigners” – people of a non-majority ethnicity, speaking a language that is not the One Language of the One Land and the One People – they must be banished, sent “back to where they came from,” even if “they” have been living in the One Land for hundreds of years, or else so perfectly assimilated to the One Language that they become honorary (if never perfect) members of the One People. This nationalist conception of the integration of nation, people, and language, articulated by a handful of German-speaking patriots two centuries ago – distressed at the occupation of the German-speaking principalities by Napoleon, convinced that the only thing that could protect “the German Nation” from future such incursions would be a German Empire, the unification of Germanspeaking peoples into a true pan-Germanic Nation (which did not happen until 1871) – has since been gradually disseminated to the entire world, so that we see

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2  Critical Theses on translation 1 nationalist governments everywhere applying the One-Land-One-People-OneLanguage principle to domestic policy. Sometimes these applications are violent, even genocidal, aimed at purification of the One People through mass murder of the “foreigners”; sometimes they are aggressively legislative, aimed at preventing the use of any but the One Language in government, education, publishing, and so on; sometimes they are “merely” (but this is still extraordinarily high-impact policy-making) definitional, conditioning their subjects to think of all the related languages inside their borders as dialects of the same One Language. Lydia Liu (2004: 34) inadvertently gives us an example of this One-LandOne-People-One-Language ideology when she refers to the Manchus who ruled China for nearly three centuries (1644–1912, the Qing Dynasty) as “foreigners.” 滿族 manzu “Manchu” was a name adopted in the seventeenth century by a Tungusic people from 東北 Dongbei “Northeast China” (nowadays mostly referred to by non-Chinese as Manchuria) previously called the Jurchens (女眞 ruzhen), who had earlier ruled China for a little over a century in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (1115–1234, the Jin Dynasty). First scenario: if China is China and Manchuria is Manchuria, and if China is One Land inhabited by One People called the Chinese – say, the majority 漢人 hanren “Han People” – and Manchuria is One Land inhabited by One People called Manchus, then obviously in China the Manchus are foreigners, or, say, 夷 yi “non-Han.” But of course matters are very, very far from being that simple. Second scenario: another way of describing the situation is that the Manchus/ Jurchens are, and for at least a millennium have been, a quite large ethnic minority in the shifting multitude of lands controlled at various times by the Han (but at other times by the 鮮卑 Xianbei, 契丹 Khitan, Jurchens/Manchus, Mongols, and other groups – the Xianbei and Khitan, like the Jurchens/Manchus, also coming from Dongbei). If we simplify the history along these lines, calling the Manchus foreigners is rather like European-Americans calling Chinese-­Americans or African-Americans foreigners. Third scenario: when the Mongols overthrew the Jurchen Jin Dynasty and established the Yuan Dynasty in 1234, they divided their old overlords/new vassals into two groups: those who for generations had lived in 華北 Huabei “North China” (北京 Beijing means the “Northern Capital”) and spoke fluent Chinese, and those who lived in their traditional homeland Dongbei and spoke no Chinese. The former effectively became Han – mingled, intermarried, and within a century became indistinguishable from the Han (low status) – while the latter were politically, culturally, and linguistically Mongolized, within a century becoming almost indistinguishable from the Mongols (high status). It was the latter whose descendents some centuries later renamed themselves Manchus. Still non-Han, still 夷 yi, still the “foreigners” of the second scenario – but what kind of racial purism would it take to distinguish them radically from the group of Huabei-born Jurchens who had become Han? Fourth scenario: the mid-seventeenth-century military force – the 八旗 baqi “Eight Banners” – that overthrew the Ming Dynasty and established the Qing was multiethnic, made up of only 16% Manchus. The vast majority, a good

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Sakai circa 1997 3 three-fourths, were Manchu-acculturated Han. The Manchus constituted the 夷 yi “non-Han” elite in this force; but beginning in 1632 and continuing until late in the dynasty, intermarriage between Han men and Manchu women was not only allowed but strongly encouraged, and widely practiced, to promote interethnic harmony. By the late Qing, in other words, whenever the Han of the day resented the Manchu rulers as “foreigners,” they were resenting being ruled by people who were mostly either Han themselves or the descendents of HanManchu intermarriages, and had lived in the Beijing area for two centuries – but who had retained the “foreign” (Manchu) customs of the ruling elite. Culturally they were foreigners; culturally they were 夷 yi “non-Han.” These were the rulers who had to deal with the British invaders in the Opium Wars – a history to which we will be recurring repeatedly throughout the book. By parroting, in her reporting on that history, the Han xenophobia of the day – by declaring in passing that “the Manchus were also foreigners in the country they ruled” (34) – Liu is either subtly and parodically highlighting or unconsciously perpetuating what we will see Sakai calling the “homolingual” myth of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic purity. As we’ll see, Liu’s brief is that the British had earlier translated 夷 yi as “foreigner,” but in the Opium Wars decided that the Chinese were using it to call them “barbarians,” and so in the Tianjin Treaty document in 1858 banned the use of that character in reference to the British. But also, in light of her claim that the “Chinese” whom the British were branding xenophobic were actually Manchus and thus “foreigners,” Liu might be read as implicitly: [a] denying that the British accusation of Chinese xenophobia had any validity at all (the Manchus could not have been xenophobic because they were nonHan “foreigners” themselves, to whom 夷 yi applied as well as it did to the British); or [b] suggesting that in accusing the Manchus of xenophobia the British were in fact replicating Han xenophobia; or [c] undermining all (“Chinese” or “Han” or British) xenophobia on the grounds that heterolingual or heterocultural “foreignness” is preferable to nationalist membership in a hegemonic group; or [d] fill in your own answer. Unfortunately, since Liu does nothing with this identification of the Manchus as foreigners – it’s a throwaway – it is difficult to determine what she might have been trying to achieve with it. My guess is that her authorial intention is something like (a), backed by a repressed version of (b); my preference would be (c); but I’m just guessing. These days, of course, this German Romantic nationalist ideology is increasingly being undermined by global capitalism, global communication, and global mobility. We like to complain that globalization has meant the universal dominance of Global English, and at a highly abstract level of Occidentalist ideologization that is indeed the case: if everyone speaks English, then all communication becomes

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4  Critical Theses on translation 1 effortless because monolingual, and therefore guaranteed to succeed. But the more closely one examines actual social relations on the ground, the less convincing that complaint becomes; and Sakai’s project challenges every assumption in that if-then proposition. Not only does everyone not speak English; those who do speak English (as a Lingua Franca) refract “English” as One Global Language into regional Englishes that are “dialects” in the sense that Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hunanese, Hokkien, Hakka, Beijingese, and so on are “dialects” of Chinese, or as Catalan, Occitan, Galician, Portuguese, Castilian, Aragonese, French, Provençal, Italian, Corsican, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Sardinian, Venetian, Romanian, Ladin, Friulian, Romansh, and so on are “dialects” of Romanic Latin. In Southern Europe some of those “dialects” have been assimilated to the One-Land-OneLanguage policy – Castilian as “Spanish,” Dantean Florentine as “Italian,” DacoRomanian or Moldovan as “Romanian,” Parisian French as “French” – and in China they have all been assimilated to that policy, with Beijinghua or the Beijing dialect called Putonghua (the “common speech,” formerly called Mandarin) and the other Sinic languages all defined as dialects, because they all use Chinese characters. In fact each major “dialect” itself has hundreds of different “subdialects” that are often mutually incomprehensible. And even as something called (and even perhaps approaching) Standard English is increasingly adopted as the medium of instruction in schools and universities around the world, national and regional languages continue to dominate writing and speaking in most other contexts, necessitating not only translation but what Sakai calls “the heterolingual address.” And global intellectuals like Sakai and Lydia H. Liu, the two central figures in this book – both holding endowed chairs at Ivy League universities in the US, Sakai raised speaking Japanese, Liu raised speaking Chinese – find themselves honored not only in the global center of Global English, the United States, for their intelligence in English, but in their countries of origin as well, for their intelligence respectively in Japanese and Chinese. In Hong Kong people like to say that we’re all global intellectuals these days, publishing and giving conference talks in at least two languages, building careers in a succession of countries and languages. It’s not entirely true, but it’s increasingly true. Critical Thesis 1.2 Writing for two different audiences – especially audiences from two different language-use communities, but ultimately audiences that are different in any way – can help us rethink the traditional TS assumption in CT 1.1, because it “could require an overall reconsideration of the basic terms in which we represent to ourselves how our translational enunciation is a practice of erecting or modifying social relations” (Sakai 3). The tension at the heart of this passage is one that organizes much of Sakai’s thinking about translation, namely, that between “enunciation” (how we actually address each other) and “representation” (how we say we communicate). At the highest level of “spatial” representation – the figure Sakai uses for abstractions that perfectly stabilize complexly emerging social relations by emptying them of

Sakai circa 1997 5

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all change and all social relations – we don’t “erect” or “modify” social relations at all, but idealize them into the realm of the transcendental. He begins to broach that idealization in CT 1.3. Critical Thesis 1.3 What writing for two different audiences can help us notice, and so begin to theorize within Critical Translation Studies (CTS), is the ideological primacy, in our normative TS assumptions about translation, of what Sakai calls “homolingual address, that is, a regime of someone relating herself or himself to others in enunciation whereby the addresser adopts the position representative of a putatively homogeneous language society and relates to the general addressees, who are also representative of an equally homogeneous language community” (3–4). Again, here, Sakai is not interested in arguing that the situation in which the addresser and addressee belong to the same language community never happens; his quarrel is with the ideologically mandated assumption that that homolingual address is the norm. Attendant upon the normativity of the homolingual address, as Sakai theorizes it, is a whole raft of other assumptions, including [a] that addressees for whom the language of address is not their first language are “secondary” addressees, or occupy some fractal status between the normative “primary” addressees (members of the perfectly homogeneous language community to which the addresser belongs) and secondariness; and [b] that there is a class of addressees (who may remain normatively invisible and unknown to the writer) who will require translation to understand the address. These nonprimary addressees are either (CT 1.3a) admitted to the homolingual address through a mandatory mimesis in which they assimilate themselves, to the greatest extent possible, to the status and competencies of the “primary” addresses – make themselves “native-speaker-like” – or (CT 1.3b) ignored and forgotten as completely irrelevant to the “primary” address. Critical Thesis 1.4 Though address to non-primary addressees in CT 1.3a and 1.3b is effectively heterolingual, Sakai notes that as long as (CT 1.3a) the addressees who can read the text in the (for them foreign) language in which it was written are expected to pass as native speakers and (CT 1.3b) “the position of the translator is set aside and viewed to be secondary, this type of address is still homolingual” (5). If translation is represented as “a transfer of a message from one clearly circumscribed language community into another distinctive enclosed language community” (6), the address to a heterolingual audience remains normatively homolingual. For Sakai all address is actually heterolingual, but in the regime of homolingual address one is required/expected/pressured to believe that address to one’s compatriots – even if they are not native speakers of the One Language – is intrinsically homolingual. “It goes without saying,” Sakai adds, “that the [TS] image of translator as a somewhat heroic prestigious agent derives from these

6  Critical Theses on translation 1

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assumptions of the homolingual address” (6): the translator is the mediatory hero who crosses the divide that (so goes the homolingual myth) no ordinary mortals can cross, because to be “ordinary” is normatively to be monolingual. Critical Thesis 1.5 Writing or speaking to different audiences without the TS assumptions listed in CT 1.3 – without the division of the audience into ideally separated groups, “locals” (or “native speakers”) and “foreigners,” and without the attitude that only native speakers of the language of address will “automatically” or “perfectly” understand the text – is what Sakai calls “heterolingual address.” Sakai describes the manner in which he wrote the pieces that make up the book, over many years, in both Japanese and English, either writing each piece first in Japanese and translating it into English or writing it first in English and translating it into Japanese, translating as he wrote, writing as he translated (those italicized phrases a paraphrase of a passage at Sakai 8): I tried to speak and listen, write and read among the “us” for whom neither reciprocal apprehension or transparent communication was guaranteed. The putative collectivity of the “we” that I wished to invoke by addressing myself to them did not have to coincide with a linguistic community whose commonness is built around the assumed assurance of immediate and reciprocal apprehension in conversation. Among “us,” on the contrary, “we” ought constantly to encounter not only misunderstanding and misapprehension but also lack of comprehension. Thus, “we” comprise an essentially mixed audience among whom the addresser’s relation to the addressee could hardly be imagined to be one of unruffled empathetic transference, and to address myself to such an audience by saying “we” was to reach out to the addressees without either an assurance of immediate apprehension or an expectation of uniform response from them. “We” are rather a nonaggregate community; for the addressees would respond to my delivery with varying degrees of comprehension, including cases of the zero degree at which they would miss its signification completely. (Sakai 4) Sakai is far too subtle a critical theorist to come right out and say that he is describing “the real world” of actual human social speaking and writing – but that is effectively what he means. The subtext of his critique of the regime of homolingual address is that it is an ideological template superimposed on top of heterolingual reality, and superimposed so effectively that we take it for reality. A subtler (more post-Kantian, social-constructivist) way of articulating the tension in that previous paragraph would be to say that the regime of homolingual address and Sakai’s preference for heterolingual address are competing constructions of human communication, and Sakai is seeking to dislodge the former from our ideological assumptions and replace it with the latter. My claim that he is

Sakai circa 1997 7 talking about heterolingual address as the reality of human communication may just mean that his replacement project has succeeded with me.

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Critical Thesis 1.6 “To address” is to aim at communicating; “to communicate” is to succeed in that aim. Communication as the aim of address is situated and therefore contingent – it may fail, and often does – but the homolingual representation of communication assumes it as the normative condition-in-advance of homolinguality. That is, in the regime of homolingual address, communication with members of “our” (“native” or “local”) language community succeeds by definition, and communication with members of “their” (“foreign” or “alien”) language community fails by definition, until a secondary act of translation trans-ferries the homolingual address over into the (by definition radically different) foreign homolingual community, and so makes it available to speakers of that language. “In the heterolingual address, the disparity between addressing and communicating is most conspicuously perceived, while the regime of homolingual address serves to repress the awareness of this disparity between the invocation of ‘we’ and its representation and thereby reinforces the assumption of immediate and reciprocal apprehension” (Sakai 5). What is kept out of this regime of homolingual address is the mingling and cohabitation of plural language heritage in the audience, and subsequent to this address, speech addressed by or to a foreign language speaker is put aside as secondary to the authentic form of delivery or as an exceptional case outside normalcy. The scene where one speaks without assuming that everybody among the addressees will understand what is delivered by the speaker is premeditatively excluded. In other words, the fact that one must first “address” is confused with the assumption that supposedly “we” should be able to “communicate” among ourselves if “we” are a linguistic community. In other words, communication is not associated with writing, inscription, or even “exscription” but with communion in the homolingual address. (6) Again, Sakai is not attempting to deny that homolingual address happens. Yes, obviously, there are texts that are written in language A for readers competent in language A, and that to be comprehensible to monolingual speakers of language B must be translated from A to B. He is attempting rather to draw our attention to: [a] the normativity of that situation: the fact that we assume that that is how things invariably work – that there is no other way they can work; [b] the inevitable partial failure of that situation: no address to an other, no matter how close that other is in every possible way, ever achieves the perfect communication posited by the regime of homolingual address;

8  Critical Theses on translation 1

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[c] the historicity of the situated functioning of (a) those homolingual norms: the fact that every time things seem to work that way, they have been set up to seem to function that way, and that things either could have gone differently or in fact unbeknownst to us (b) are going differently; and [d] the signal shaping role translators play in (c) the temporal emergence (see CT 1.10) and uptake (see CT 1.9) of such seemings. Critical Thesis 1.7 In the regime of homolingual address, an utterance is uttered first, translated second. The fact that the claim “an utterance is uttered first, translated second” sounds like an obvious and irrefutable truism – certainly I have never seen it questioned in the TS literature – is part of Sakai’s point. It is utterly plausible because (as I would put it) it has been ideosomatically plausibilized, icotized (see Chapter 5). “The regime of homolingual address unwittingly postulates even more assumptions: since speech by or to a foreigner is secondary, the normal delivery must accomplish itself within the same medium, and translation, insofar as it requires the postulation of differing media, cannot be either primordial or originary” (Sakai 6). But imagine a situation in which you’re not sure who all is in your audience. You walk into a dining room as an invited guest and look around the dinner table at the faces gathered there, not sure with whom you will be making dinner conversation. As you glance around the table you’re running language trials in your head, trying out your delivery in two or more languages, translating back and forth. In that situation – which Sakai argues is the heterolingual condition in which all address actually takes place – the only way you can lock into a single language (presumably your first or “native” language) unthinkingly is if you “postulate[] a sphere of linguistic homogeneity where ‘communication’ is guaranteed and taken to be anterior to ‘address’ ” (6). But, you may say, the hypothetical situation in that previous paragraph assumes that the social actor is at least bilingual; what about monolinguals? As we’ll see (CT 1.12), Sakai insists that we are all foreigners to each other: “you are always confronted, so to speak, with foreigners in your enunciation when your attitude is that of the heterolingual address” (9). This is the sense in which, in the attitude of heterolingual address, translation is always primary. Critical Thesis 1.8 Despite ideologically conditioned assumptions, communicational failure is possible even under the regime of homolingual address. That regime accommodates such failures “by establishing a certain economy of failure in communication” (Sakai 6). The way Sakai puts it is that “in the homolingual address, the experience of not comprehending an other’s enunciation or of the other miscomprehending your verbal delivery is grasped immediately as an experience of understanding the experience of not comprehending” (6; Sakai’s emphasis). We are, in other words,

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Sakai circa 1997 9 taught to assume “that the experience of noncomprehension comes simultaneously equipped with an explanation as to why you fail to comprehend” (7). For example, a man comes up to you in the street and says something to you in Russian. You don’t speak or understand Russian, so, Sakai says, “you describe this incident in the following manner: ‘A man spoke to me in Russian, so I could not understand him’ ” (6). But Sakai oversimplifies here, by providing only a single example. For one thing, even for the most well-traveled polyglot, who is fluent in say a dozen languages and can easily recognize a dozen or two more, there will still be hundreds of languages in the world in which a stranger might say something without triggering the response “A man spoke to me in Russian,” or Urdu, or Māori, or Basque. Being able to name the “unknown” language is a very special case that tends to occur only to those well-traveled polyglots, and typically only in fairly small geographical regions like “Southern Europe” or “Northern Africa” or “Southeast Asia” – and only when they get lucky. What Sakai means, I think, is actually something a bit broader, along the lines of: “When communication fails we tend to assume that there’s something wrong with the other person: s/he is from the ‘outside,’ a foreigner, perhaps, or someone outside our group. Or, more generously, we assume that there is something wrong with the social relationship that causes discommunication: it fails to live up to the ideological ideal of the homolingual address, in which communication is guaranteed in advance.” There are many different versions of this discommunication. If you live in Russia, or Brighton Beach, New York, or Rimini, Italy, or Pattaya, Thailand, and are struggling – successfully, but still struggling – with Russian, and a stranger comes up to you on the street and says something to you in Russian, you may say, as Sakai predicts, “A man spoke to me in Russian, so I could not understand him.” You recognize the language easily, not only because you’re studying it, but because you’re in an area where Russian is the majority language; and you fail to understand because your Russian is still rudimentary. But you may also fail to understand because, though your Russian in the end proves completely adequate to the situation, your attention is so intensely drawn to the need to process the foreign language – metacomprehension – that you are unable to process the foreign language. Once you have figured out what the stranger is saying, and responded properly, you wonder why you didn’t understand it instantly, because you knew all the words and all the grammatical structures – but some devil blocked your understanding. Or you may not understand a word of the stranger’s utterance, and then only gradually come to realize that the utterance was in your first language: you were unable to understand because your address-expectations were so intensely oriented to the majority local language. Communication may be blocked, too, if a Russian speaking your first language pronounces a single word wrong; your attention may be so intensely directed to understanding that one word that you are unable to process the rest of the utterance at all. But the same thing can happen at home, with our loved ones, with whom we have been communicating daily in one or more languages for many years.

10  Critical Theses on translation 1

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Once we direct our attention from the abstractions of la langue as a transcendental sign system to la parole as situated conversational address, the ethnography of speaking becomes wildly more complicated – and worlds more interesting. Critical Thesis 1.9 In the attitude of the heterolingual address there is always incommensurability between any addresser and any addressee: that is the consequence of our otherness to each other, our “foreignness.” In the regime of homolingual address, this incommensurability is shifted from the gap between addresser and addressee to the gap “between one linguistic community and another” (Sakai 10). One consequence of this understanding of the heterolingual address that Sakai does not mention here, but makes explicit in Sakai and Solomon (2006a, CT 2.8), is that we are all translators, always, whenever we address others. Critical Thesis 1.10 In the regime of homolingual address, to accommodate the shift in CT 1.9, the translator must be “erased” from communication. This erasure of the translator is an “enemy” move in TS, something against which the TS community rails – “stop assigning us merely ‘instrumental’ value, as if we weren’t even human! stop treating us as invisible!” – but Sakai trenchantly insists that it follows inexorably from the regime of homolingual address within which TS traditionally works. One could represent this necessity syllogistically: P1. P2. C.

The regime of homolingual address entails the repression of heterolingual address. The translator must operate within the heterolingual address. Therefore, the regime of homolingual address entails the repression of the translator’s work.

In the regime of homolingual address, there is no translation. It has to be that simple. No one translates. Who then is the translator? No one. Οὖτις: Odysseus the border-crossing trickster in the land of the blind. The regime of homolingual address as Sakai describes it is a regime in which each language is ideally isolated from every other, with the speakers of each able to communicate easily and freely, and indeed automatically, with each other, and utterly unable to communicate with the “foreigners” that have been relegated in advance to other isolated languages. There is, obviously, no room in this idealized model for the translator – and yet it depends not just for its proper functioning but for its very theorization on the mediatory work done by the translator: Precisely because of her positionality, the translator has to enunciate for an essentially mixed and linguistically heterogeneous audience. In order to function as a translator, she must listen, read, speak, or write in the multiplicity of languages, so that the representation of translation as a transfer from one language to another is possible only as long as the translator acts as a

Sakai circa 1997 11

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heterolingual agent and addresses herself from a position of linguistic multiplicity: she necessarily occupies a position in which multiple languages are implicated within one another. (Sakai 9) But for that very same reason, in order for communication to be represented within the regime of homolingual address, the translator must be “erased”: “The translator who is present to both the writer and the readers regulates communicative transactions, but her mediation must be erased in the representation of translation according to which the message issued by the writer in one language is translated into an equivalent message in another language, which is then received by the readers” (9–10). The idea remains in the “homolingual” representation of translation that the written or spoken text can be understood by its audience because it is essentially homolingual – because the “foreign” author somehow magically wrote or spoke it in the “local” language of its (monolingual) audience. I suggest, in fact, that this is the theoretical critique of “bringing the author to the reader” toward which Friedrich Schleiermacher was so haplessly groping in his 1813 address to the Academy, and that his followers among the foreignizers have so far been unable to formulate more effectively for him: “The assumption that one can make oneself understood without perceptible hindrance, as long as one belongs in the same linguistic community, survives intact here” (10). (See Robinson 2013c: ch. 2 for analysis of the “haplessness.”) The difference between domestication and foreignization for Schleiermacher and his many followers should have been – as Sakai would see it – not that the former takes the author to the reader and the latter takes the reader to the author, and not that the former is immoral and unpatriotic and the latter is the only “true” form of translation (as Schleiermacher insists), and not that the former makes the target culture complicit with capitalism and the latter makes the target culture dissident (as Venuti insists), but that the former is conditioned by the regime of the homolingual address and the latter is an embrace of the attitude of the heterolingual address. (We will, however, be returning to complicate the close connections between CTS and TS foreignism in sections 1.2, 1.3, and 5.7, and in CT 3.16.) The sticking point in Sakai’s homolingual/heterolingual binary is that to work as a binary it has to be absolutely airtight. There can be no crossovers. It cannot be a polarity, in which each emerges gradually out of the other. There can be no heterolinguality in the midst of the regime of homolingual address. From within the attitude of the heterolingual address, the regime of homolingual address is an illusory belief superimposed on top of ubiquitous real-world heterolinguality: what we take to be homolingual address is actually heterolingual. And, conversely, from within the regime of homolingual address, heterolinguality can only exist between language communities, and even there must in the end be perfectly assimilated to the pure interiority of homolingual address (CT 1.4, 1.8): translation as an ostensibly heterolingual form of address is actually homolingual (and so not translation at all). Each form of address, in other words, banishes the other from view.

12  Critical Theses on translation 1 To this purified binary we might want to oppose a “pragmatic” or “realistic” model, with slippages, leakages, tolerances built in: P1.

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P2. C.

The regime of homolingual address mostly entails the eradication of heterolingual address (but you can never weed it out entirely). The translator must mostly operate within the heterolingual address (but we don’t dwell on that fact overmuch). Therefore, the regime of homolingual address sometimes forgets about the translator’s work (but certainly never “erases” or “represses” it).

The TS scholar who believes that translation is fundamentally the transfer of a message from one (more or less) unified language community to another (more or less) unified language community, but also wants to celebrate the translator as a visible hero, will gravitate toward something like this “pragmatic” vision of anti-binary tolerance, protesting that no one (at least no educated person) denies the existence of translation, and therefore that there is no reason to require the regime of homolingual address to erase the translator. So what if there are monolinguals who need translations and bilinguals who provide translations? Isn’t it wildly unrealistic to claim that there exists an ideological regime that, in order to valorize the former, must deny the existence of the latter? I will have occasion to take issue with Sakai’s love of binaries later – CT 1.15 – but in this case I think his CTS theoretical model is plausible and useful. It may be unrealistic to claim that there is a class of hegemonic thinkers that denies the very existence of translation, denies the very possibility of the translator’s mediation between languages; but there is a logical congruency between the theory that languages are monolingual monads and the theory that it is impossible to translate between them, and that logic, understood as an ideo-logic, offers a powerful explanation of the tendency in society to ignore translation, to invisibilize translation. If the importance of translation to global functionality is as obvious to everyone as it is to us, why do we have to keep trying to rub people’s noses in it? Why is it so easy for so many to “forget” about translation? Critical Thesis 1.11 The “erasure” of the translator’s work means in the practical act of translating that the translator becomes a “subject in transit” (Sakai 13). Noting the familiar conundrum that the translator in translating cannot “speak” in his or her own person, and therefore “must be responsible for her translation, for every word of it, but she cannot be held responsible for what is pledged in what she says” (11), Sakai underscores “the extremely ambiguous and unstable positionality the translator has to occupy with regard to the original addresser and the addressee” (11). The translator is the addresser of the translation, but is required to vacate that subject-position in favor of the source author; and is the addressee of the source text, but is required to vacate that subject-position in favor of the target reader. The translator must act as if the source author both is and is not writing to him or her and as if the target reader both is and is not

Sakai circa 1997 13

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reading her or him. “The addressee for the enunciation of the addresser must not be located at the site where the translator is, so that the addressee is always located elsewhere in translation” (11). To put it in Benvenistean terms (for which see Chapter 4): In the enunciation of translation, the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated are not expected to coincide with one another. The translator’s desire must be at least displaced, if not entirely dissipated, in translational enunciation. Thus, the translator cannot be designated either as “I” or as “you” straightforwardly: she disrupts the attempt to appropriate the relation of the addresser and the addressee into the personal relation of first person vis-à-vis second person. To follow the determination of a “person” as espoused by Émile Benveniste – that is, that only those directly addressing and addressed in what he calls “discourse” as distinct from “story” or “history” can be called persons, and that those who are referred to or talked about in the capacity of “he,” “she,” or “they” in “story” or “history” cannot be “persons” – the addresser, the translator, and the addressee cannot be persons simultaneously; the translator cannot be either the first or second or even third “person” undisruptively. (Sakai 12–13) Sakai pauses for a moment to contrast Benveniste’s depersonalization of the third person with Foucault’s “explicitly antipersonalist” (12) conception of discourse, but returns to note that, to the extent that we want to personalize address, translation destabilizes that project, destabilizes “the putatively personal relations among the agents of speech, writing, listening, and reading” (12). The translator cannot be the full (monolingual) “person” or “individual” that is Romanticized in the regime of homolingual address, empowered by membership in a single unified language community to “confirm” her unique individual personality by expressing it: At best, she can be a subject in transit, first because the translator cannot be an “individual” in the sense of individuum in order to perform translation, and second because she is a singular that marks an elusive point of discontinuity in the social, whereas translation is the practice of creating continuity at that singular point of discontinuity. Translation is an instance of continuity in discontinuity and a poietic social practice that institutes a relation at the site of incommensurability. This is why the aspect of discontinuity inherent in translation would be completely repressed if we were to determine translation to be a form of communication. And this is what I have referred to as the oscillation or indeterminacy of personality in translation. (13) In the regime of homolingual address, there are no discontinuities. It is by definition the realm of perfected (because imagined) continuity. As we saw in CT 1.10,

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14  Critical Theses on translation 1 it is precisely in order to protect that imagined continuity that the translator’s work is repressed or “erased.” Because the translator is precisely the “disimagined” laborer whose job it is to smooth out the real discontinuities, and create continuities in their place, s/he is effectively positioned “in transit” between stable communities and stable subjectivities, simultaneously destabilizing the homolingual ideal and restabilizing the resulting discontinuities for reassimilation into the homolingual ideal. And it is precisely this “poietic social practice that institutes a relation at the site of incommensurability” that makes translation constitutive of national subjectivity and national language, as in CT 1.12. Critical Thesis 1.12 “Through the labor of the translator, the incommensurability as difference that calls for the service of the translator in the first place is negotiated and worked on. In other words, the work of translation is a practice by which the initial discontinuity between the addresser and the addressee is made continuous and recognizable” (Sakai 14) – recognizable, that is, as involving a transfer of meaning from one national language to another. Despite the ubiquity of translation in CT 1.9, and the resulting necessary “erasure” of the translator in CT 1.10, the translator continues to work, as a subject-in-transit, in CT 1.11; and that transitory subjectivity, by working on disconcerting discontinuities in the heterolingual address, plying “the initial discontinuity between the addresser and the addressee” (CT 1.9), makes it “continuous and recognizable,” as a gap not between any two human beings who are irrevocably foreigners to each other but between languages, language unities, unified language communities: “Only retrospectively and after translation, therefore, can we recognize the initial incommensurability as a gap, crevice, or border between fully constituted entities, spheres, or domains. But, when represented as a gap, crevice or border, it is no longer incommensurate” (14). It is a gap or a crevice that can be jumped, a border that can be crossed. That image, conjured up by the translator at work, is for Sakai what serves to stabilize source and target into separate unified languages: “What makes it possible to represent the initial difference as an already determined difference between one language unity and another is the work of translation itself” (14). This is one of the founding propositions of CTS. As Sakai puts it: The regime of translation is an ideology that makes translators imagine their relationship to what they do in translation as the symmetrical exchange between two languages. The operation of translation as it is understood by common sense today is motivated by this ideology. The conventional notion of translation from English into Japanese, for instance, presumes that both English and Japanese are systematic wholes, and that translation is to establish a bridge for the exchange of equal values between the two wholes. A translation is believed to become more accurate as it approximates the rule of equal value exchange. In this regime of translation, it is required

Sakai circa 1997 15

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that one language be clearly and without ambiguity distinguishable from the other and that, in principle, two languages never overlap or mix like Siamese twins. It is through this regime that, in the eighteenth century, the idea of the original Japanese language was introduced into the multilingual social environment of the Japanese archipelago, where heterogeneous and creole languages were accepted. (51–2) To put it in programmatic terms: the primal scene of translation in TS is two languages, a text in one that cannot be understood by speakers of the other, and the translator as the mediator between the two; CTS explores the role translation plays in the creation of that primal scene in TS. CTS, in other words, starts the clock early: its primal scene of translation is heterolingual address, and every addresser and every addressee as a mediator/translator across the gap that separates them; that enunciative crossing generates the need for the imagination, and eventually the consolidation, of separate languages. One might argue that this early clock-start is problematic, at odds with other parts of the model. On the one hand, [1] we start with the notion that [a] the homolingual address is possible only in one stable language unity at a time, requiring that [b] the translator be ignored or repressed, because [c] s/he breaks the unity in (1a), transcends or transgresses it. On the other hand, [2] by [a] bridging the gap between existing languages [b] the translator goads monolinguals to see or even create source and target as stable languages, as if for the first time. Is this circular, with (1c) becoming (2a) and (2b) creating the conditions for (1a)? I suggest that it is and it isn’t circular. It is circular in the sense that the opposition or tension (antithesis) between homolingual and heterolingual address keeps cycling around like a Hegelian dialectic, producing over and over the synthesis (which is also an anesthesis)1 that is the regime of homolingual address. In that sense it is the complications arising from heterolingual social relations that keep disturbing our anesthetized homolingual sleep, keep pushing us to reconfirm, as if in a dream, that translation too, while it probably doesn’t exist, and isn’t even possible, allows us to communicate with people who don’t speak our language, as if they did (and so in fact they probably do, and don’t need translators). The sense in which Sakai’s model is not circular, however, is the historical one that interests him most: the birth of the idea of a single stable national Japanese language, in the eighteenth century (see CT 1.16). Critical Thesis 1.13 The traditional TS kinds of translation problems, which revolve around the relative equivalence between a passage in a source text and its reproduction in a target text, or around the (in)commensurability between two languages or two cultures, should not be taken as “guiding rules for translation”; they are in fact “nothing but derivatives of that retrospective inversion because of which the relationship of equivalence between the original and its translation and the enunciation of translation can be represented anachronistically” (Sakai 54).

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16  Critical Theses on translation 1 In other words, “the enunciation of translation” – any practical attempt to translate a text – precedes and conditions all talk of “equivalence” between words or phrases or whole texts, and thereby of “commensurability” between languages. This is the CTS rehistoricization of practical and theoretical translation. “What is perceived as untranslatable and incommensurable in translational transaction, therefore, is possible only ex post facto and does not precede the enunciation of translation. It is because the enunciation of translation opens up the space of communication and commensurability that that which does not lend itself to translation becomes possible and manifest” (54). If “in the regime of homolingual address, an utterance is uttered first, translated second” (CT 1.7), in the heterolingual address every utterance or address is a translation, the “enunciation” of a translation, and creates the communicative conditions for the kinds of stabilization that lead to the regime of homolingual address, including general accounts of “translatability” or “commensurability.” Sakai adds that the “representation” of translation not only follows its enunciation; it spatializes it, imposes a rigid fixity on it that is alien to the emergingness of heterolingual enunciation. As he puts it, “the enunciation of translation is unrepresentable; the enunciation of translation (a practice that is essentially temporal) and the representation of translation (a representation that is essentially spatial) are in a disjunctive and mutually negative relation with one another” (54). Or, as Lydia H. Liu (1999c: 137) puts something like the same idea: “Translatability means something entirely different here; it refers to the historical making of hypothetical equivalences between languages. These equivalences tend to be makeshift inventions in the beginning and become more or less fixed through repeated use or come to be supplanted by the preferred hypothetical equivalences of a later generation.” Critical Thesis 1.14 It is only after many such stabilizing/spatializing “representations of translation” that the relationship between two languages comes to be represented in terms of competing “universal equivalents” (Liu 1999b). Liu never quite clarifies what she means by a “universal equivalent” in translation; what she does not mean, however, is an actual universal. She develops the idea through an analogy she borrows from Karl Marx, who uses the development of an allgemeine Äquivalent “general/common/universal equivalent” (like the gold standard) as a stabilization of the market of trading and buying and selling as an analogue for translation – sort of. I read the translation history behind this analogy carefully in Chapter 1, suggesting that the “universal translational equivalent” implied by Marx’s analogy, unstated in Liu (1999b), might be something like the invisibilization-cum-domestication of the source text in the target culture, the icotic dissemination of the belief that the source author somehow magically wrote the text in the target language (CT 1.10). But in fact Liu is far more interested in the actual histories behind such attempted universalizations: The articulation of difference as value within a structure of unequal exchange thus simultaneously victimizes that difference by translating it as lesser value

Sakai circa 1997 17

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or nonuniversal value. To overcome this conceptual barrier, I propose that we substitute the notion of competing universalisms for cultural particularity to help understand the modes of cultural exchange and their genealogies beyond the existing accounts of colonial encounter. The ahistorical dialectic of the universal and the particular may, then, be understood as a recent historical manifestation of the will to the universal. (19) The will to universalize pits social actors against other would-be universalizers, and so creates a competitive situation that is often “resolved” through geopolitical domination: In thinking about translatability between historical languages, one cannot but consider the actual power relations that dictate the degree and magnitude of sacrifice that one language must make in order to achieve some level of commensurability with the other. In colonial conditions of exchange, commensurability of meaning can sometimes be instituted and kept in place by law and brute military force. (34–5) For Liu the task of CTS is to historicize the universalization of “hypothetical equivalence.” Critical Thesis 1.15 Tracing the histories of how translation has come to be represented in the regime of homolingual address makes it very clear that “the notion of bilateral and bilingual international translation” (Sakai 54) is imaginary. I submit that Sakai’s point here is valid, and important, but that his syllogistic argumentation for it is extremely problematic: [1] Only those who know the source and target languages are able to verify that “a representation of translation as a transfer of a message from one language into another” (Sakai 54) is accurate. [2] Those who need the translation cannot verify the representation in (1). [3] Those who need the translation cannot even verify that the source language even exists: “Such a language is given to me, in the first place, as a phantasmatic figure; for, by definition, I cannot have any means to validate the existence of a language unknown to me, and every testimony to its being is inscribed in the very language I cannot decipher” (56). [4] “My ignorance of a language must necessarily be my ignorance of the fact that I do not know it” (56). [5] The source language is an “imaginary being” – but “this imaginary being, nevertheless, means the absolute and contingent command for the learner in the sense that, in Kafka’s Castle, an order from the Castle is such an absolute but utterly contingent command for Surveyor K” (57). “When I do

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18  Critical Theses on translation 1 not know Chinese, I have no other way but to accept what I am told is the Chinese language. So, in order for me to start learning Chinese, I have to believe in the idea of the Chinese language submissively and blindly, just as Surveyor K had to believe in the command from the Castle” (56). I don’t know whether there is only one Chinese language or many; whether “the Chinese language” consists of mutually incomprehensible “dialects” or a single system, etc. [6] “This is not limited to the case of beginners in foreign language learning: in essence, this should apply to all the empirical studies of languages, for, since academic linguistics is invariably based upon the assumption that the language is an institution that is systematically organized, linguistic study cannot begin to study a language until it posits that object as a systematic unity. Linguists do not come to discover the systematicity of a langue through and as a result of empirical research. On the contrary, the positing of such a systematic unity as a langue is the condition of possibility for linguistic research” (56). [7] “For instance, a regulative idea of Japanese language must first be posited for there to be the figure of Japanese around which linguistic knowledge about Japanese can precipitate” (56). [8] “Consequently, the unity called ‘Japanese’ is an idea that ‘enables us to represent to ourselves other objects in an indirect manner, namely in their systematic unity, by means of their relation to this [regulative] idea of “the Japanese language” ’ ” (57–8). [9] “It follows that the unity of Japanese language itself cannot be an object of experience in the Kantian sense; that is, we can neither experience ‘Japanese’ nor validate its existence empirically” (58). The difficulty with this syllogism is that it is predicated on a binary that is unrealistic for foreign language learning: [a] “to know a language” vs. [b] “not to know a language.” It is quite possible to “know a language” well enough to verify that (1a) a given translation does indeed seek to transfer a message from a specific source language to a specific target language, well enough not only to recognize that (3a) the source language exists but (as Sakai himself insists: see CT 1.8) to be able to identify and name the language from four or five salient characteristics – and yet simultaneously “not to know the source language” well enough to read the source text in it, which is to say, (2b) to not-know it sufficiently to need a translation. It is simply not true that (4) “My ignorance of a language must necessarily be my ignorance of the fact that I do not know it”: it is not only quite easy to know enough of a language to be painfully aware that one doesn’t know enough of it to hold a conversation in it, or read a newspaper in it; it is probably the most common state of foreign-language (semi)proficiency in the world. “My relative ignorance of a language” is never exactly equal to “my relative ignorance of the fact that I do not know it,” and it is disingenuous to assign an absolute and stable (because abstract) mathematical equivalence (x = y) to those two ignorances.

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Sakai circa 1997 19 What is so strange about Sakai’s syllogistic reasoning here, in fact, is that he doesn’t really need it. He could easily show that the source language, or any language, is (5) an “imaginary being” that functions as (6–9) a “regulative idea” without (1–4) the false premises. It is quite true that if I know no Chinese at all, not a word, not a character, not even what a Chinese character looks like in general, “I have no other way but to accept what I am told is the Chinese language,” and therefore also that “in order for me to start learning Chinese, I have to believe in the idea of the Chinese language submissively and blindly.” But that latter is only true at the very start of my language learning: on the first day of class, and perhaps on all the days between deciding to learn Chinese and the first day of class. As soon as we begin reflecting on the process of learning a foreign language, it becomes clear that there is a fuzzy logic to “start learning Chinese” (or any foreign language) that belies Sakai’s binary. At some point in my very first hour of Chinese class (in my personal case this happened in the US, far from China) I begin believing in “the idea of the Chinese language only relatively submissively and blindly.” And while it is true that for a long time, for weeks of that first semester, perhaps, my belief in “the idea of the Chinese language” remained mostly submissive and blind, it’s also true that you can’t build a binary out of “mostly.” And that makes me wonder to what Sakai attributes Surveyor K’s feeling that he “had to believe in the command from the Castle.” In the first place, the notion that K has received a command from the Castle was the bad reading propagated by Max Brod and the Muirs and utterly devastated by Erwin Steinberg (1965) and Walter Sokel (1966): it is patently obvious from the text that K is lying about that “command,” and the whole novel is not so much an existentialist channel of hand-wringing about mysterious commands from this or that avatar of a distant God as it is an exploration of complex social and political relations between the educated Jews of Prague and the mostly anti-Semitic AustroHungarian empire. But even setting that aside, and reading the novel as its early editor and translators conditioned generations to do, I can’t figure out what that “existentialist” allegory might have to do with language learning. Sakai calls the supposed command from the Castle to Herr K an “absolute and contingent command,” and cites it as an analogue to the foreign language learner’s “submissive and blind” belief in the “idea of the Chinese language.” That the command is contingent makes perfect sense to me, but how exactly is it “absolute”? To the extent that there is an absolutism at work in that command, or in Surveyor K’s conviction that it must be obeyed, that absolutism is a phenomenology – a phenomenology that may feel absolute to Herr K but in the larger human scene is actually relativistic (and indeed contingent). The feeling of absolutism suggests that the phenomenology is probably overdetermined psychologically, perhaps sociopolitically; but Kafka does not venture into the morass of (overdetermined) psychosocial motivations, so we don’t know anything about it. Surveyor K just believes it. And the telling fact – still sticking with the bad reading overturned by Steinberg and Sokel – is that he continues to believe it, all through the novel. He doesn’t learn, the way a foreign language learner does. The command from

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20  Critical Theses on translation 1 the Castle holds exactly the same sway over him at the end of the novel as it did at the beginning, and all the way through – for no obvious reason, which is to say, no reason that Kafka explains to us, no reason that seems reasonable in our everyday pragmatic sense of reasonable explanations. There is a dream-like sense of inevitability that pervades the Muirs’ translation, and indeed pervades almost every one of their Kafka translations, a nightmarish compulsion to obey a distantly and vaguely allegorized (presumably Judeo-Christian) God that makes the reader long to wake up, to shake off the dream. This makes The Castle in the Muirs’ English translation a powerful enactment of a certain affective orientation to life, to our mortality, to our vulnerability in a world that seems to care nothing for us – but as an analogue for foreign language learning it seems wildly and indeed absurdly tendentious. Half the class dropped out of my first semester of Chinese, and I suppose Sakai might want to argue that they did so because they were feeling like Surveyor K. I would counter that the frustrations attendant upon learning any foreign language at the start – the feeling that it’s not really a language at all, that it’s only a random set of squiggles and vocalizations, that it’s impossible to remember such random sounds and sights, that one will never be able to converse in it – may be like Surveyor K’s experience of blind submission to the summons to the Castle, but that with time and effort they grow progressively less like it. Those who dropped the intensive first-semester Chinese course midway might have been happy to thematize their frustrations along the lines Sakai sketches, and so to justify quitting; but it would be simpleminded to take their willingness at face value. And while there remained for those of us who stuck it out to the end significant frustrations – the characters just would not stick in my memory, for example – the notion that those frustrations were Kafkaesque is ludicrous. A month into the class, despite the trouble I had remembering characters, when the teacher gave us a full-page sheet of questions in Chinese characters and told us to answer them in Chinese characters, my first thought was Kafkaesque, perhaps – “this task is impossible, but required” – but as my eye scanned the page I realized I could read everything, and settled down to work. Presumably Sakai didn’t mean the ChineseKafka analogy so stringently. Presumably he just wrote it badly, and, if pressed, would write it differently now. What I would suggest, however, is that the proof he needs that the unity of any language is imaginary lies precisely in the fuzzy logic that his know/not-know binary elides: •

Does the foreign learner of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese the day before s/he starts learning it? No. • Does the foreign learner of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese on the first day s/he starts learning it? No. • Does the foreign learner of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese on the second day s/he is learning it? No. • Does the foreign learner of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese on the third day s/he is learning it? No.

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Sakai circa 1997 21 • Does the foreign learner of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese on the fourth day s/he is learning it? No. • Does the foreign learner of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese on the hundredth day s/he is learning it? No. • Does the foreign learner of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese on the thousandth day s/he is learning it? No. • Does the foreign learner of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese when s/ he speaks it fluently? No. • Does the native speaker of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese? No. • Does the scholar of Chinese who dedicates her or his career to the study of the unity of Chinese experience the unity of Chinese? No. The idea there is not only that there is no clear transition from (b) “not-knowing Chinese” to (a) “knowing Chinese,” and thus no clear transition from “not experiencing the unity of Chinese” to “experiencing the unity of Chinese”; it is also that no matter how well you (a) come to know Chinese, you will never experience its unity, because the unity of a language is an imaginary totality that no one ever experiences. The better you know a foreign language, the better things fit together into a coherent whole; but a language is not a transcendent thought in the mind of an impossibly perfect god (and you are not that god). It is a human social construct, which is to say, a kluge. Give an infinite number of Chinese scholars an infinite number of years to work out all the connections in “the” Chinese language (as if there were only one) and they would never formulate an accurate account of the “unity of the Chinese language” – because that unity is an “imaginary being.” The argument Sakai was looking for was the fuzzy sorites series – not a rigid binary between knowing and not-knowing a language. Critical Thesis 1.16 The specific representation of translation as occurring between two stable language unities has had the historical effect of giving rise to the idea of consolidating a geographically based collection of dialects and styles and genres into a single stable national language, but “cofiguratively,” in what Sakai calls the “schema of cofiguration.” Implicit in the theory of the “schema of cofiguration” is that “the comparative framework of Japan and the West” is imaginary (CT 1.15), but in the complex sense that it is an image that organizes the imagination, and so is “practical in its ability to evoke one to act toward the future” (52). Sakai theorizes this as a mutually constitutive relationship between a collectivized self and a collectivized other: The relation to the self cannot be determined unless the relation to the other has already been determined. Not to mention Hegel on self-consciousness, it is a rudimentary premise, when dealing with the problem of identity in cultural and social contexts, that the relation to the other logically precedes that to the self. What is at issue here, indeed, is not a dialectic of the self and

22  Critical Theses on translation 1

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the other for individual consciousnesses, but a process in which the comparative framework of Japan (the self) and the West (the other) is installed. This framework is not merely epistemological in that it offers a means of comparative mapping. As I have repeatedly stressed, its function is also practical, since it fashions the shape of desire for the students of Japanese thought. (51) More aphoristically: “desire for ‘Japanese thought’ is invoked through the schema of cofiguration in the regime of translation” (51). This “desire for ‘Japanese thought’ ” – the desire to create it or imagine it as a unique and original contribution to “thought in general” or “world thought,” the desire to identify with a unique and original “Japanese thought” that already exists and, in so doing, to help bring it into being – is “mimetic,” or perhaps better “co-mimetic,” as it emerges out of an intertwined global network of imitations. The desire to identify with a strikingly original Japan is “mediated by the mimetic desire for the West” (52), and “within the discipline of the history of Japanese thought – and, by extension, Japanese studies – the insistence on the West’s uniqueness would, in turn, be a testimony to the students’ disavowed desire to imitate what is expected of the West by the Japanese” (52). Sakai notes that this representation of translation is not an inevitable one: “As the practice of translation remains radically heterogeneous to the representation of translation, translation need not be represented as a communication between two clearly delineated linguistic communities” (15). Since this is how translation is normatively understood, Sakai’s caution seems excessive here – until we recall the difficulties that translators have figuring out how to translate a source text written in two or more languages, and that translation scholars have had figuring out how to talk about such translations. All the interesting work done on “cultural translation” in various borderlands, one complexly mixed code being translated into another, often with slightly different mixtures of the same codes, should remind us that the “standard” form of translation, with a single coherent source language and a single coherent target language, is an ideal that has been imposed upon translation in the modern era, with the rise of the nation-state. As Sakai goes on, “there should be many different ways to apprehend translation in which the subjectivity of a community does not necessarily constitute itself in terms of language unity or the homogeneous sphere of ethnic or national culture. The particular representation of translation in which translation is understood to be communication between two particular languages is, no doubt, a historical construct” (15). But what we now take to be the “standard” representation of translation did emerge and take hold, several hundred years ago, “and it is this particular representation of translation that gave rise to the possibility of figuring out the unity of ethnic or national language together with another language unity” (15). In other words, the representation of translation as “a communication between two clearly delineated linguistic communities” gave rise to the “schema of cofiguration,” which he defines as “a means by which a national community represents itself to itself, thereby constituting itself as a subject,” but specifically as a

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Sakai circa 1997 23 relational self-representation: “it seemed to me that this autoconstitution of the national subject would not proceed unitarily; on the contrary, it would constitute itself only by making visible the figure of an other with which it engages in a translational relationship” (15–16). His prime example of this “autoconstitution of the national subject” is Japan, the country in which he was born and raised: “Indeed, this is one or the reasons for which I have claimed that the Japanese language was born, or stillborn, in the eighteenth century among a very small portion of literary people, when the schema of cofiguration came into being” (15). And indeed this is his model for the study of the creation of “Japan,” and the reason he writes his long and densely brilliant Introduction on translation, which I’ve mostly been following in this first collection of Critical Theses. He also insists that this origin story is not unique to Japan: By now it should be evident that, given my analysis of the regime of translation and the homolingual address, culturalism in which Japanese culture and nation are obstinately reified and essentialized is, as a matter of fact, not particular to Japanese journalism and academia at all. Culturalism that endorses nationalism in terms of national language and ethnic culture is as persistently endemic in Japanese Studies in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere as in Japan today. For, as I will show in some of the following chapters, behind Westerners’ as well as Japanese insistence on Japanese cultural uniqueness looms an equally obstinate essentialization of the West. (17). It is this historical generalizability of Sakai’s concepts of “the representation of translation” and “the schema of cofiguration” that makes them useful tools in the study of translation in terms of Eurocentrism and Orientalism/Occidentalism (see Robinson 2017). This is the telos of Sakai’s argument in the Introduction; but along the way he also raises several other ex post facto ramifications of his model (CT 1.17–22). Critical Thesis 1.17 “The translatable and untranslatable are both posterior to translation as repetition. Untranslatability does not exist before translation: translation is the a priori of the untranslatable” (Sakai 5). This is an idea that stands at something like the shifting center of CTS: that the “untranslatability” of a given text or phrase or word, or the more general “incommensurability” between two given languages, cultures, or civilizations (cf. CT 1.9, 1.11–12), is something that is always first established by and through translation. Sakai is very far from the only CTS scholar who returns to this idea over and over: This is why we always have to remind ourselves that the untranslatable, or what can never be appropriated by the economy of translational communication, cannot exist prior to the enunciation of translation. It is translation

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that gives birth to the untranslatable. Thus, the untranslatable is as much a testimony to the sociality of the translator, whose figure exposes the presence of a nonaggregate community between the addresser and the addressee, as to the translatable itself. However, the essential sociality of the untranslatable is ignored in the homolingual address, and with the repression of this insight, the homolingual address ends up equating translation to communication. (Sakai 14) Troubled by the uncertainty of commensurability among languages, translators and their critics have a tendency to approach the issue as if the problem resided in the inherent properties (value) of individual languages. [But] Can the achieved or contested reciprocity of languages be plotted as the outcome of a given economy of historical exchange? (Liu 1999b: 13; emphasis in original) The fact that we do not normally perceive things in this light goes to show that the mutual intelligibility of languages has been naturalized more than anything else by common dictionaries, repeated acts of translation, and received theories of language that are conceptually and structurally incapable of comprehending the monumental significance of this recent happening. The first step toward reconceptualizing translatability as a historical event is, therefore, to integrate the problem of translation into the general interpretation of so-called civilizational encounters and their intellectual and material outcomes. (Liu 15) How are incommensurate worlds, then, created from words? The process of translation would at first seem an unlikely tool, for the putative goal of translation is to establish equivalences between two languages. However, it is this assumption that provides for these claims a crucial resource: the purported impossibility of finding equivalent words then itself serves as a sign of radically different worlds. (Hart 1999: 53) Now [William Dwight] Whitney and [James] Legge are inserting Mencius into different generic and institutional frames, and these frames determine what is noteworthy in a translation. Legge wants the king to speak in the fashion appropriate to a participant in philosophical dialogue – and so he does chez Legge, in a close match to the urbane conversation of Socrates and his Athenian friends as fluently Englished by Benjamin Jowett in the 1860s and 1870s. A common language and style forms a precondition (as well as an ultimate objective) for cosmopolitan philosophizing. To bring Mencius into the world of European thought speaking like a raw savage would only have put more barriers in the way of the mutual cultural recognition that Legge worked so hard to bring about.

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Sakai circa 1997 25 But Whitney’s purpose is not philosophical assimilation. If anything, the linguist [in an 1864 lecture series later published as Language and the Study of Language] needs to show Mencius as unassimilable to the common educated discourse. This is translation for the sake of difference. Why? . . . The more convincingly the translator observes the protocols of [literal] “nearness,” the more exquisite the reader’s sense of strangeness, of distance from the original text. If Legge’s policy tacitly anticipates the global common sense of Basic English, Whitney is opening the way to Benjamin Whorf; and these two styles of translation intend to make one another impossible. (Saussy 1999: 109) This theme in fact runs all through Liu’s (1999d) collection Tokens of Exchange;2 in Part One we will be looking closely at the first chapter in that collection, from which the two Liu quotations above were taken. Let me illustrate the theme here with a single interesting example taken from Hart (49–50, 53–4), namely, Jean-Claude Martzloff’s detailed analysis of the 1607 Chinese translation by Xu Guangqi (徐光啟, 1562–1633) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) of Euclid’s Elements, from the Latin translation of Euclid’s Greek original done by the German Jesuit mathematician Christoph Clavius (1538–1612). Hart describes Martzloff (b. 1943), director of the Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, as “perhaps the most eminent Western historian of Chinese mathematics” (49); in Histoire des mathématiques chinoises (1987, translated by Wilson 1997 as History of Chinese Mathematics), Hart tells us, he argues that “the Chinese had failed to comprehend the deductive structure of the Elements precisely because of linguistic incommensurability” (49). Specifically, according to Martzloff, the problem was that classical Chinese lacked a copula, which he claimed was linked to “questions of existence, asserting that ‘one might think that this type of phenomenon contributed to a masking of the conception, according to which geometric objects possess inherent properties, the existence or non-existence of which is objectifiable’3 [Martzloff 1987: 103, Wilson 1997: 118]” (Hart 50). To support his claim Martzloff invoked the incommensurability argument advanced by Jacques Gernet in Chine; et christianisme: action et réaction (1982; translated by Lloyd 1985 as China and the Christian Impact), Émile Benveniste (1966; Meek 1971) on the copula, and A. C. Graham (1959) on the nonequivalence between être “to be” and Chinese 有 you “to have, there is/exists,” 無 wu “to lack, there isn’t,” and 為 wei “to act as.” Most interesting, though, is his illustration strategy: to display the supposed incommensurability between Western languages and Chinese, Martzloff first cites the Chinese, then provides a radical literal translation, then cites the Latin translation by Clavius that Xu and Ricci used as their source text, in Latin. This, Hart notes, is extremely manipulative: The differences that appear in Martzloff’s examples are not between Clavius’s Latin version and Ricci’s Chinese translation – no unmediated comparison is possible – but instead between the untranslated Latin, the translation that

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26  Critical Theses on translation 1 Martzloff provides of Ricci’s Chinese into English, and ordinary expressions of English. Clavius’s Latin represents an uncorrupted original by remaining untranslated and dehistoricized: effaced are the problems of translation from Greek to Latin to French and English, the complex history of the translation and editions of this text, and in particular Clavius’s redaction that altered and deleted much of the structure of the proofs. Martzloff’s translations convey the radical otherness of classical Chinese by employing techniques of defamiliarization similar to those used elsewhere to demonstrate (again, in English) the purported awkwardness of Chinese monosyllabism: “King speak: Sage! not far thousand mile and come; also will have use gain me realm, hey?” Indeed, Martzloff argues against “more elegant, more grammatical” renderings, stating that “English grammaticality tends to obliterate the structure of the Chinese and the connotation of the specialised terms.” (53–4) Hart is himself, there, guilty of effacing the “complex history of the translation and editions [and critical analyses] of this text”: not only is the person stating that “English grammaticality tends to obliterate the structure of the Chinese and the connotation of the specialised terms” not Martzloff but Martzloff’s English translator Stephen S. Wilson (1997: 118) – this sort of slight localization is not uncommon in “normal” translation – but as far as I can tell Wilson added that line to Martzloff’s text (hence, presumably, the reference to English). The descriptions “untranslated Latin” and “uncorrupted original” are potentially misleading as well, as they might be taken to signify that Euclid originally wrote the Elements in Clavius’s Latin. (Hart means, of course, that Martzloff leaves Clavius’s Latin translation untranslated and so implies that it was not just Ricci’s source text but Euclid’s “uncorrupted original.”) The interesting point Hart makes, though, is that Martzloff uses literal translation to accentuate the linguistic differences between French (or English) and Chinese, thereby apparently confirming his thesis that Western languages and Chinese are conceptually incommensurate – and then does not use literal translation to accentuate the linguistic differences between Clavius’s Latin and modern French or English, let alone the linguistic differences between Euclid’s Greek from 300 bce and any modern language. The CTS takeaway from an example like this, however, is not that Western languages and classical Chinese are commensurate, and therefore that it is only this sort of manipulative display of translation that makes them seem incommensurable. Rather, it is that [a] both the commensurability and the incommensurability between any two languages, both the translatability and the untranslatability of any given phrase or structure (like the copula), are products of practical acts of translation, and that [b] translation can be used to make whatever case a given scholar wants to make; but also that [c] these cases tend to be cumulative, patterned, and [d] the patterns tend to be ideologically organized. It is, for example, far more attractive from within a Eurocentric/Orientalist ideology to portray Western languages and Chinese as incommensurable, and to demonstrate that

Sakai circa 1997 27 incommensurability through examples that show a Chinese failure to understand key Western texts, than it would have been to show (say) that the Chinese understood Euclid in ways that anticipate twentieth-century mathematical notions.

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Critical Thesis 1.18 If “communication” as communication theorists understand it is the transfer (or “repetition”) of information without change, the situated success of communication can be tested empirically only through translation. In the regime of homolingual address, communication-as-perfect-understanding with/in/by the homolingual group is postulated in advance, as a structural automatism that does not need to be tested empirically; in the more complex “real-world” state of heterolingual address, translation is the only empirical test of “the sameness of the information: what remains the same in information cannot be identified unless it is translated. What is translated and transferred can be recognized as such only after translation” (Sakai 5). See also Liu (1999b: 31–2) for a discussion of Baudrillard’s critique of this model of verbal communication as formulated by Roman Jakobson (transmitter-message-receiver or encoder-message-decoder). But this “informational accuracy” approach to translation is immediately superseded in Sakai’s account by a more complex approach based in Benjamin (CT 1.19). Critical Thesis 1.19 “As Benjamin clearly saw it, the end of translation is not the communication of information, since translation is an instance where communication of and as an inscription ineluctably ensues” (Sakai 5). Sakai here is reading Benjamin through Jean-Luc Nancy, specifically Nancy’s notion that what communication actually communicates is not propositional information – statements about reality – but community (see Devisch 2013), and specifically community as “naked existence, naked writing, and the silent, haunting referral of the one to the other, which makes us share meaning’s nakedness: neither gods nor thoughts but the us that is imperceptibly and insuperably exscribed” (Lydon 1993: 320; quoted in Sakai 1997: 194n6). The model of communication that Nancy – and, reading Nancy, Sakai reading Benjamin – attacks is just “conventional chatter that attempts to promote reasonable exchange and serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies, leaving no possibility of measuring oneself against powerful follies” (Lydon 319; quoted in Sakai 194n6). Or again, from The Inoperative Community: Mais ce qui s’expose dans l’œuvre, ou par les œuvres, commence et finit infiniment en deçà et au-delà – en deçà et au-delà de l’œuvre – en deçà et au-delà de la concentration opératoire de l’œuvre : là où ceux qu’on appelle, jusqu’ici, les hommes, les dieux et les animaux sont eux-mêmes exposés les uns aux autres par cette exposition qui est au cœur de l’œuvre, qui nous donne

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l’œuvre et qui, en même temps, dissout sa concentration, et par laquelle l’œuvre est offerte à la communication infinie de la communauté. (Nancy 1986/2004: 180–1) What is exposed in the work, or through the works, begins and ends infinitely within and beyond the work – within and beyond the operative concentration of the work: there where what we have called up to now men, gods, and animals are themselves exposed to one another through an exposition that lies at the heart of the work and that gives us the work at the same time as it dissolves its concentration, and through which the work is offered up to the infinite communication of community. (Connor 1991: 73, quoted in Sakai 195n8) I will return to a discussion of Benjamin in Chapter 3, where I will be suggesting that what Sakai, drawing on Nancy, calls “inscription” and “what is exposed in the work, or through the works,” is something like what I call an icotic affectbecoming-conation, group affect as conative pressure to conform to group norms.4 Icosis – the process of “plausibilization” whereby group opinions are somatically normativized and naturalized as felt truths, realities, and identities – is not normally as extreme or dramatic as “violence, betrayal, and lies” or “powerful follies,” but it can be, and in some communities almost always is. As we’ll see, abstracting communication out of the realm of such normative group pressures is an excellent and effective way to obscure (as Nancy says) and ultimately to repress the embodied and situated operation of such collective forces. In Chapter 5 we shall also see Mengzi calling those normative affective pressures in general 禮 li (usually translated “ritual propriety”), and noting that in some groups 禮 li drags members down to a bestial level, through normative “violence, betrayal, and lies” and “powerful follies”; in its utopian form 禮 li becomes 仁 ren, the social fellow-feeling that creates and maintains the ideal “inoperative” or “unworking” community (which “works-without-working,” in Nancy’s sense of désœuvrée, namely, that what makes it work is not a particular effort or work on the part of its members – a very Daoist 無爲 wuwei notion). Critical Thesis 1.20 “In a nonaggregate community, therefore, we are together and can address ourselves as ‘we’ because we are distant from one another and because our togetherness is not grounded on any common homogeneity” (Sakai 7). There are two corollaries of this thesis. The first is that everyone we want to address is a foreigner to us: In this respect, you are always confronted, so to speak, with foreigners in your enunciation when your attitude is that of the heterolingual address. Precisely because you wish to communicate with her, him, or them, so the

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first, and perhaps most fundamental, determination of your addressee, is that of the one who might not comprehend your language, that is, the foreigner. (Sakai 9) The second corollary is that we are foreigners to ourselves: “what is addressed to the addressee is not automatically delivered precisely because of the disparity between addressing and communicating, of a disparity that also expresses the essential distance not only of the addressee from the addresser but also of the addressee or addresser from himself or herself” (Sakai 8–9). We don’t know ourselves. We don’t know what we want to say, because we don’t know what we want in general – until we begin addressing others, begin translating our emerging wants for the foreigners in our environment and the foreigners in ourselves. Only as we venture across those boundaries do we begin to collect the ingredients that might eventually, emergingly, be baked into something resembling a self – which is thus always collective first, individualized second (if at all) (see Sakai 51). This conception of community is again deeply indebted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s La communauté désœuvrée/The Inoperative Community. Critical Thesis 1.21 “Every translation calls for a countertranslation, and in this sort of address it is clearly evident that within the framework of communication, translation must be endless” (Sakai 8). Sakai’s idea here is that not only is every heterolingual address to an other a translation across the gap of exteriority – from one perspective on the world to another – but every reception of or response to every heterolingual address is a (counter)translation of that address as well. “Thus, in the heterolingual address, the addressee must translate any delivery, whether in speech or writing, in order for that delivery to actually be received” (8). “Reception” is not passive but active, an active responding as a translational speech act. Critical Thesis 1.22 Roman Jakobson’s (1959) tripartite distinction among intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation is a historical construction that can only operate within the regime of homolingual address. Sakai is not exactly interested in collapsing interlingual translation back down into intralingual translation, or rewording in the same language, so that all translation comes to be effectively intralingual; his argument is only that intralingual translation is primary, and indeed ubiquitous, and the basis on which the historical distinctions and assignments are made that make interlingual translation seem like “translation proper.” “In other words, viewed from the [heterolingual] position of the translator, neither the unitary unity of a language nor the plurality of language unities can be taken for granted. Moreover, not only the professionally assigned translator, but the rest of us as well, would have to be responsible for the task of the translator” (10).

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30  Critical Theses on translation 1 This is an important point for Sakai because his interest in the formation of a stable national “Japanese language” in the eighteenth century (CT 1.16) leads him to suggest that it involved a hierarchization of Jakobson’s categories, with interlingual translation taking precedence over intralingual translation, and all of the intralingual variations thus coming to be understood as “species within the genus of the Japanese language” (16). Intralingual translation and interlingual translation are not, in other words, mere parallel types of translation; the former gradually gives rise to the latter, historically, generating evidence for the notion, and so an emerging acceptance of that notion among the intelligentsia, that there is a large systematic difference between (say) Chinese and Japanese, and therefore that there is (or should be) interlingual translation between them: Hence, the figure of the Japanese language was given rise to cofiguratively, only when some Japanese intellectuals began to determine the predominant inscriptive styles of the times as pertaining to the figure of the specifically Chinese, or as being contaminated by the Chinese language. It is important to note that, through the representation of translation, the two unities are represented as two equivalents resembling one another. Precisely because they are represented in equivalence and resemblance, however, it is possible to determine them as conceptually different. The relationship of the two terms in equivalence and resemblance gives rise to a possibility of extracting an infinite number of distinctions between the two. Just as in the cofiguration of “the West and the Rest” in which the West represents itself, thereby constituting itself cofiguratively by representing the exemplary figure of the Rest, conceptual difference allows for the evaluative determination of the one term as superior over the other. This is how the desire for “Japanese language” was involved through the schema of cofiguration in the regime of translation. (Sakai 16) As this “desire” grows, the initial historical sequence is reversed in representations of translation, and eventually in the regime of translation, which assigns interlingual translation pride of place as “the overall guiding rule of translation” (16). Sakai also cites the case of calligraphy to undermine Jakobson’s concept of intersemiotic translation: “Is a calligraphic text verbal or nonverbal? Is it a text to see or a text to read? Is it possible to translate a calligraphic text? If it is, in what sense is it so? What are the conditions under which the verbal is immediately equated to the linguistic?” (10). Again, this is an important line of questioning for Japanese Studies because the visual shape of the characters was a critical issue in the consolidation of a national “Japanese language” – the visual-becomingverbal differentiation between, and side-by-side incorporation of, the Chinese 漢字 hanzi or kanji characters and the Japanese syllabic kana systems (ひらがな hiragana andカタカナ katakana). Take the katakana character カ ka for example: it looks almost identical to the Chinese 漢字 hanzi character 力 li, which is

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used as a surname but (like カ ka) also means power, force, capability. Would a hypothetical translation of カ ka as 力 li be interlingual or intersemiotic? If katakana カ ka (in say アメリカAmerika) is written in kanji as 加 ka (in say the あてじ ateji form 亜米利加 Amerika), is that an intralingual or intersemiotic translation?

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1 Liu reading Marx

As I noted in the Preface, Lydia H. Liu identifies one of her research areas as Critical Translation Theory – and with the focus on social practices shaped by power relations that “Critical” implies, that sounds very much like the purview of the Cultural Turn in TS, which was in full swing when she first started publishing on translation in the mid-1990s. Her approach to translation is especially close to the postcolonial and feminist arms of that Turn, but there are also resonances in her work with the convergence of Israeli polysystem theory with the manipulation school from the Low Countries in what James Holmes named Descriptive Translation Studies; and in asking “How do signs and meanings travel from place to place in global circulations?” she also echoes the Sociological or Social Turn in TS, which arguably begins with Pym (1992). But Liu’s project also differs in interesting and significant ways from those. In ways that strongly parallel the work on translation of Sakai Naoki, Liu interrogates not only the intercivilizational operation of translation but the intercivilizational shaping of civilizations by and through translation. Sakai calls that intercivilizational shaping “cofiguration”; Liu’s term is “coauthorship.” Also like Sakai, who theorizes national languages as born out of “regimes of translation” – “an ideology that makes translators imagine their relationship to what they do in translation as the symmetrical exchange between two languages” (1997: 51) – Liu theorizes the construction, stabilization, and ultimately the universalization of equivalences as a translational project: We [may begin to rethink the idea of national languages and cultures] by trying to recapture a sense of the radical historicity of constructed – and often contingent – linguistic equivalences and nonequivalences that have emerged among the world’s languages and societies in recent times. Such equivalences and nonequivalences in turn constitute the very identity of each national language and national culture. The emphasis on the interactive and conflictual processes rather than identities – again, not to be confused with the notion of hybridity or interculturality – may help fill some major gaps of knowledge in contemporary scholarship. I believe that these gaps are there and have remained somewhat invisible because topics like this tend to fall through the

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cracks of well-established disciplines of national histories and world history and between East and West. (1999a: 5) As I argue in Robinson (2017), this global/intercivilizational/cofigurative approach to translation neatly sidesteps the finger-pointing into which debates over “Eurocentrism” (or for that matter Sinocentrism) often devolve by insisting that translation is a (globally) situated relationship that constitutes both various competing universalisms and the very idea of cultural difference. She proposes in particular to explore both the familiar and not so familiar modes of value exchange in global circulations. What I mean by the unfamiliar mode is the largely submerged and undertheorized forms of exchange such as the invention of “equivalent” meanings between languages, struggles over the commensurability or reciprocity of meanings as values, and the production of global translatability among different languages and societies in recent times. The emphasis on meaning-value, equivalence, (in)commensurability, and (non)reciprocity comes from my own dissatisfaction with genealogical and sociological studies of colonial institutions and symbolic power from which we learn so little about the subtle intellectual mechanisms of colonial circulation. (3–4) I will suggest in section 1.4 that one of the limitations on Liu’s theoretical intervention is her tendency to think of colonial circulation in terms of “intellectual mechanisms,” rather than, say, the socioaffective ecologies of power and persuasion to which her own examples keep trying to point her; what channels “translation” into the “reality” of, say, universality, modernity, and historicity is very far from either “intellectual” or “mechanical.” Despite my sometimes quite trenchant critiques, however, my reading of Liu’s “Critical Translation Theory” in “The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign” (Liu 1999b) in Chapter 1 is admiring, and even a bit envious.

1.1 Reading Marx Marx stands at the theoretical center of Liu (1999b) because he insists, usefully, that we historicize the social construction of an allgemeine Äquivalent, which is literally a “general equivalent” or “common equivalent” but was expansively translated in the nineteenth century by Moore and Aveling (1887) as “universal equivalent.” Liu’s (1999b: 14) position is that “one interesting consequence of recent world history is that we can afford not to marvel at the miracle of universal communicability” – that we take “the mutual intelligibility of languages” and thus the reality of “global translatability” for granted, and that they have been so thoroughly naturalized that we not only do not marvel at those things as miraculous but do not need to marvel at them. Liu notes that “global translatability

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has inhabited the same order of universalistic aspirations as the invention of the metric system, modern postal service, international law, the gold standard, tele­ communication, and so on” – and it is specifically the gold standard that gets her initial attention as the useful model for rethinking global translatability, because it was the universalistic project Marx identified as the primal scene, as it were, for the invention and inculcation of a universal equivalent: To study meaning as value is to place the problem of translation within the political economy of the sign. Contrary to forcing a parallel argument about verbal exchange in terms of its monetary counterpart, the linguistic and the economic – as well as their theoretical articulations – have long evoked each other and inhabited each other. In the Grundrisse, Marx draws an interesting comparison between translation and monetary transaction for the purpose of theorizing the problem of the universal equivalent that concerns both: “Language does not transform ideas, so that the peculiarity of ideas is dissolved and their social character runs alongside them as a separate entity, like prices alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from language. Ideas which have first to be translated out of their mother tongue into a foreign tongue in order to circulate, in order to become exchangeable, offer a somewhat better analogy; but the analogy then lies not in the language, but in the foreign quality [Fremdheit] of language” (emphasis added). (21–2; Liu’s insertion) I propose to devote sections 1.2 and 1.3 to a close reading of the passage Liu quotes here from Marx; first, though, let me quickly summarize what Liu writes about Saussure on linguistics and political economy and her two primary case studies of ChineseEnglish translation. Liu notes that, whereas Marx used translation (and thus implicitly linguistic signification) as an analogue of political economy, Saussure ran that parallel the other way, using political economy as an analogue of linguistics, and translation as a kind of empirical methodology for his claims about language. In her reading of the Cour de linguistique générale Liu is particularly interested in that last: “Saussure’s constant recourse to on-the-spot ‘translation’ and simultaneous failure to theorize his textual operation creates a logical impasse for structural linguistics. This,” she admits, “causes no small degree of confusion when he tries to introduce some levels of distinction between meaning and value” (26), but she argues that it is in fact one of his most remarkable moves, and worthy of far more attention and appreciation than it has typically garnered. For example, in discussing the relationship between mouton and sheep, Saussure says that the French and English words mean the same thing but are valued differently in the two languages, because semantic differentiality is organized differently in them: English draws a distinction between sheep and mutton, but French has only mouton. “But if value is different,” Liu asks, “can meaning remain the same? Why should meaning be a fixed category a priori when the sound pattern and other properties of language are subject to the law of differential relations?” (27). What interests

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36  Chapter 1 her in this example, apart from the class differences it reflects – the Anglo-Saxon servants who slaughtered and cooked the sheep called it sheep, but the Norman lords who ate the sheep slaughtered and cooked by their servants called it mutton – is the fact that the only way to discover the semantic “sameness” and/ or “difference” between mouton and sheep is to essay a series of trial translations of them, in different use-contexts, and see what happens. Not only that: once we have done that preliminary work, and drawn a tentative conclusion about the “reciprocity” or “commensurability” between French and English on this one semantic point of contact, we want for our conclusion to be(come) the stable semantic truth, or “universal equivalent.” As every experienced translator knows, of course, every use-context is just different enough, just surprising enough, to thwart any semantic stabilization we might want to impose on it – and that pushes the universalization of equivalents into the realm of the ideological imagination. Put phenomenologically: the professional FR>EN translator who has often enough translated mouton-as-meat as “mutton” and mouton-as-living-creature as “sheep” will become accustomed to those translations, will habitualize them, to the point of translating them unthinkingly (in Robinson 1997a I called this translating on autopilot). And while this translator may never stumble across a French collocation that thwarts this habit, still, the fact that surprises do occur – a fact that every translator knows from frequent experience – means that there may come a day when mouton appears in a poem, say, or a children’s book, and seems to mean a walking, bleating, fleecy lamb steak. This phenomenological tension, between wanting to stabilize specific wellworn transfer patterns as what Marx calls “universal equivalents” and being forced to surrender to destabilizing contexts, is precisely the binary gate Liu wants to explore, not only between equivalence and nonequivalence but between the universalization and de-universalization of (non)equivalence. Her first illustration of this tension comes from the New Culture Movement in China in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, when Chinese modernist intellectuals argued strongly – and in the end successfully – for the need to “update” Chinese third-person personal pronouns. The traditional character 他 ta meant both “he” and “she,” and, on the model of (most) European languages, it was felt that third-person personal pronouns should be gendered, to mark off a public space for women and girls. In speech, ta remained the same, and – like Finns, in fact, who also have only a single personal third-person singular pronoun, hän “s/he” – Chinese people speaking in a European language still often use “he” and “she” and “his” and “her” interchangeably, apparently randomly; but in writing the feminine 她 ta was introduced, with the “female” radical 女 nu (on the left side of the character) to replace 亻 (the radical form of 人 ren). Liu’s point is that 人 never meant a male human before: the two legs pictographically represented any human. “Through the circumstantial contact with the Indo-European languages,” she notes, “the generic radical that denotes ‘human’ now proclaims a masculine essence. In other words, the presence of a gendered neologism in the linguistic system has forced the originally unmarked pronoun to assume a masculine identity retroactively that is, nevertheless, contradicted by the etymology of its otherwise ungendered radical ren” (29).1 This

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Liu reading Marx 37 shows “translation play[ing] a pivotal role in the dual process of both introducing the structural differentiation of gender into the deictic category and making up equivalents where there had been none with reference to the gendered pronoun in Indo-European languages. Grammatical gender acquires translatability precisely in this limited, historical sense” (29). In other words, as Chinese intellectuals translated from Western languages, they found/created an incommensurability with their native Chinese, and in deciding to remedy that “lack,” used Saussure’s translational method to transform the meaning and value of the third-person personal pronoun, in a move toward the creation/stabilization of what Marx calls an allgemeine Äquivalent “universal equivalent.” “Translation,” Liu notes, “need not guarantee the reciprocity of meaning between languages. Rather, it presents a reciprocal wager, a desire for meaning as value and a desire to speak across, even under least favorable conditions. The act of translation thus hypothesizes an exchange of equivalent signs and makes up that equivalence where there is none perceived as such” (34). Her second illustration of this process is one of her favorites (see also Liu 1999c: 131–42 and 2004: 31–70), first broached here in CT 1.1: the Opium Wars case of 夷 yi, which as we saw in that first Critical Thesis originally meant people not belonging to the majority Han people, but was translated tendentiously and tenaciously by the British in the 1830s and 1840s as “barbarian.” This determination on the part of the British to translate 夷 yi aggressively, not only as a token of an imagined/projected Chinese attack on and rejection of them but as evidence of a “xenophobic Chinese ‘mentality’ ” (1999b: 35) – “even though we know very well that the word yi had been previously rendered in English as ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’ in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century” (35) – is an even stronger example of the use of translation to “chart” cultural difference constitutively, to create and consolidate cultural difference along hierarchical (colonial) lines under the guise of simply describing an empirical case. “The linguistic crusade against the word yi became a counteroffensive led by the British to fight the Chinese government’s prohibition of the opium trade,” Liu adds, and once the Opium War was won the British built into the peace treaty a ban on the use of the word 夷yi in official documents. “The legal ban was so effective that it has made the word literally disappear from the languages of today’s Chinese-speaking world” (35) – an interesting claim that I shall return to interrogate in sections 1.3 and 1.4. “In thinking about translatability between historical languages,” Liu concludes this example, “one cannot but consider the actual power relations that dictate the degree and magnitude of sacrifice that one language must make in order to achieve some level of commensurability with the other” (34–5). But again, she reminds us that this one example should not be taken as evidence of a unilateral imposition of a new linguistic/translational/ epistemic regime on a dominated culture by a dominant one; her first example, of the Chinese intellectuals in the New Culture period deciding to invent a feminine third-person pronoun points us back to her insistence that these epistemic shifts are “coauthored,” or, in Sakai’s term, cofigured. Liu has interesting things to say about Baudrillard and Bourdieu on Marx and Saussure, but I propose to jump over them and devote some pages to a look at

38  Chapter 1 the history of translation that makes it possible for her to read Marx, though apparently she has no German.

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1.2 The translation history behind Liu reading Marx And now let us return to Liu on Marx. What strikes one at first is that Liu reads Marx in English. One might tendentiously argue, in fact, that Liu “forgets” that the “Marx” she is reading is a translation: not only does she never mention the translator, but she endnotes the English passage she discusses from the Grund­ risse “as quoted in Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 106” (39n21), as if Shell were simply quoting Marx. Liu (or perhaps the Duke UP copyeditor) used a rather odd hybrid citation style in the book, with chapter endnotes that provide the minimal information that MLA and APA would put in parentheses, and then a Bibliography with full publication information; and the latter does name the translator of that passage: Martin Nicolaus (but resequenced in Liu’s entry for Marx’s text in her references, Asian-style, as “Nicolaus Martin”). She doesn’t actually forget, in other words. She just neglects to discuss the translation as a translation. She also signals the translatedness of the “Marx” she discusses by giving us the German for what Nicolaus translates as “foreign quality” (Fremdheit). She is able to do this because Shell (1982: 106) provides it in square brackets in the quotation he modifies from Nicolaus’s translation. She interpolates the German for “act” or “deed” as well: “Gold became the universal equivalent by a social act (Tat) when this commodity began to assume the power to measure or purchase all the others” (Liu 1999b: 22). That interpolation seems undermotivated (why gloss that one word?) until we get Shell’s book and discover that the chapter in which he discusses Marx is actually about translation and Goethe’s Faust: Marx only becomes interesting to him by alluding in passing (in Das Kapital) to the ruminations Goethe gives Faust on how to translate St. John’s “In the beginning was the Word” into German, ending with the famous Im Anfang war die Tat “In the beginning was the Deed.” As Shell explains it, Marx’s interest in Faust arises by way of explaining the transformation of gold into coin: “Marx associates Faust’s translation of John’s Logos as Tat (‘act’) with the assumption of one commodity of the power to measure or to purchase – in effect to translate – all others. For barterers in a premoney economy, writes Marx, no commodity acted as a universal equivalent. In order to facilitate trade, barterers began to think like Faust; they conjured forth an agent of transfer” (106–7).

1.2.1 Problems in Shell on Marx on Faust on translation Reading that, a TS scholar wonders in what sense precisely “the power to measure or to purchase . . . all others” is “in effect [the power] to translate [all others].” Presumably that “effective” equivalence between the power to measure/ purchase and the power to translate is an analogical equivalence: translation understood broadly, perhaps metaphorically, is like “the power to measure or to purchase . . . all others.” And fine: let the equivalence between these equivalences

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Liu reading Marx 39 be a rough analogy. No reason why it should be any more specific than that. But according to Shell, Marx’s analogue for the “barterers . . . conjur[ing] forth an agent of transfer” is not “translation” in general but Faust translating Logos as die Tat – and that is strange. Goethe’s imagination of a German translation of the mystical Neoplatonist-become-Christian Logos as die Tat is the best-known and most-cited German instantiation of the High Romantic notion of poetry as the heroic Primordial Performative, the eschatological speech act that will restore us to paradise. The idea would appear to be that as Faust is a conjurer, his translation too becomes a spell, the magical translated word a world-transforming deed as an analogy for the “barterers . . . conjur[ing] forth an agent of transfer.” I will argue in section 1.3 that a displaced and secularized version of that High Romantic vision that infects Faust and Shell guides Marx as well, and Liu, and skews their theorization. But for now: is there something about that translation of the Primordial Performative that makes it a potential model for this active transformation (“conjuration”) of a single commodity into a universal equivalent like gold, or minted coins, or paper money? No. It turns out, Shell to the contrary, that what “Marx associates . . . with the assumption of one commodity of the power to measure or to purchase . . . all others” is not “Faust’s translation of John’s Logos as Tat (‘act’)” at all but rather that single word (die) Tat “(the) act,” or what Marx takes to be the idea behind the word, which is to say an implicature that Marx (1867) rather ingeniously divines: Im Anfang war die Tat. Sie haben daher schon gehandelt, bevor sie gedacht haben. Die Gesetze der Warennatur betätigten sich im Naturinstinkt der Warenbesitzer. Sie können ihre Waren nur als Werte und darum nur als Waren aufeinander beziehn, indem sie dieselben gegensätzlich auf irgendeine andre Ware als allgemeines Äquivalent beziehn. “In the beginning was the act.” They therefore transacted before they thought. Instinctively they conformed to the laws imposed by the nature of commodities. They could not bring their commodities into relation as values and therefore as commodities, except by comparing them with some one other commodity . . . as the universal equivalent . . . (Moore and Aveling 1887; translation quoted, modified, in Shell 107)2 It is Marx’s memory of Faust’s famous line that gives him the germ of his key idea here: the idea that “die Gesetze der Warennatur betätigten sich im Naturinstinkt der Warenbesitzer,” lit. “the laws of the commodity-nature became active in the nature-instinct of the commodity-owners,” leading the latter to “(trans-) act before they thought” (“Sie haben daher schon gehandelt, bevor sie gedacht haben”). And he adds, just after the above passage: “Aber nur die gesellschaftliche Tat kann eine bestimmte Ware zum allgemeinen Äquivalent machen”/ “But only the social act can make a specific commodity into a universal equivalent” (my translation). In Peircean terms, of course, this formulation would seem to suggest that the instinctive act (a First) didn’t in fact come first: it was preceded and conditioned by the Thirdness of “the laws of the commodity-nature,” which,

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40  Chapter 1 since a commodity is a social construct, not anything existing in or possessing a stable intrinsic “nature,” must be the result of the habitualization of social experience, namely in this case trade, the exchange of goods and their equivalents. For Peirce (1931–1958, 2.170 [1902]) what we think of as a “nature-instinct” or “natural instinct” is actually an “an inherited habit.” As people trade, they develop habits that condition what they (mostly unconsciously) take to be die Gesetze der Warennatur “the laws of the commodity-nature,” and those laws betätigten sich, which is to say they acted, in a grammatically reflexive, which is to say quasi-passive, automated way, to make the commodity-owners behandel[n], bevor sie gedacht haben “(trans)act before they thought.”3 The implication of Marx’s insight, which he doesn’t work out himself, is that an ideological construct like a universal equivalent can become so thoroughly naturalized that it comes to seem like “instinctively . . . conform[ing] to the laws imposed by the nature of commodities.” But in fact Marx says nothing in Das Kapital/Capital about the linkage Shell stresses between translation and the universal equivalent. He mentions Faust, but not the fact that Faust is reflecting on ways of translating a famous line from the Bible: “In ihrer Verlegenheit denken unsre Warenbesitzer wie Faust. Im Anfang war die Tat. Sie haben daher schon gehandelt, bevor sie gedacht haben.” Our commodity-owners think like Faust, Marx says – and Shell echoes, “barterers began to think like Faust” – but of course, pace Marx, Faust is not thinking that in the beginning was the act; he’s thinking that that might be a good way of translating the opening line of John’s Gospel into German. He’s not thinking, in other words, about beginnings and acts; he’s thinking about translations. Marx highlights the former; Shell highlights the latter. Shell also modifies Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling’s (1887) English translation, which was edited by Friedrich Engels, by imposing a coherent (past) tense on Marx’s tendency to jump around between past and present, but more notably by editing “They therefore acted and transacted before they thought” (for “Sie haben daher schon gehandelt, bevor sie gedacht haben” in Marx) into “They therefore transacted before they thought.” Moore and Aveling, knowing that handeln can mean “to act” and “to deal (with)” as well as “to trade,” “to do business,” “to negotiate,” “to bargain” (and “to transact”), and wanting to build a semantic bridge from die Tat “the act” to gehandelt “acted,” but also wanting to allude to the mercantile connotations of the verb, give us a doubled translation; Shell apparently decides that “. . . ‘was the act.’ They therefore transacted . . .” is clear enough. (And of course for a translation scholar the echo in gehandelt of the Handlungstheorie of Reiß and Vermeer (1984) and Holz-Mänttäri (1984) would be instantly relevant: translation as (trans)action, or, as Nord (1997) titles her volume on Handlungs­ theorie in the “translation theories explained” series, Translation as a Purposeful Activity.) Now, none of this undermines the force of Liu’s theorization. Her main proposition – that the “universal equivalent” traditionally brought to bear on translation quality assessment is a translation-based cultural achievement that should be historicized – remains valid and pressing. But I do think it telling that she doesn’t

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bring the light of her theorizing about translation to bear on the very translation from which she derives her primary model for translation – especially since that means she dehistoricizes, desocializes, and detextualizes the intertextual social history by which she came to be able to read and discuss what Marx wrote in both of her two key Marxian texts, Das Kapital/Capital and the Grundrisse.

1.2.2 Problems in Liu’s reading of Nicolaus’s translation of Marx on translation Having set the stage with a close look at the passage in Capital, then, let us take a closer look at what Marx wrote in the Grundrisse on the parallels between translating and commodity exchange, in both his own German and my literal English translation, with bracketed numbers and letters inserted to facilitate discussion below: (Das Geld mit der Sprache zu vergleichen ist nicht minder falsch. [1a] Die Ideen werden nicht in die Sprache verwandelt, [b] so daß ihre Eigentümlichkeit aufgelöst und [c] ihr gesellschaftlicher Charakter neben ihnen in der Sprache existierte, [d] wie die Preise neben den Waren. [2] Die Ideen existieren nicht getrennt von der Sprache. [3a] Ideen, die aus ihrer Muttersprache erst in eine fremde Sprache übersetzt werden müssen, um zu kursieren, um austauschbar zu werden, bieten schon mehr Analogie; [b] die Analogie liegt dann aber nicht in der Sprache, sondern in ihrer Fremdheit.) (The money with the language to compare is no less wrong [than comparing money with blood, just because both circulate]. [1a] The ideas will not be into the language metamorphosed, [b] so that their uniqueness [is] dissolved and [c] their social character next to them in the language exists, [d] like the prices next to the commodities. [2] The ideas exist not separated from the language. [3a] Ideas that out of their mother tongue first into a foreign language translated must be, in order to circulate, in order exchangeable to become, offer already more analogy; [b] the analogy lies then however not in the language, but in its foreignness.)

1.2.2.1 Problems in Sentence 1 Pace Nicolaus, and with an eye to Liu’s trenchant argument that debates over equivalence and nonequivalence are the channel by which equivalence is gradually stabilized and then putatively universalized, let me begin by noting that “Die Ideen werden nicht in die Sprache verwandelt“ is not “Language does not transform ideas.” The sentence is not at all about what language does or does not do. It’s about what happens to ideas when they are expressed in language. The German sentence says that “The ideas will not be metamorphosed/transformed/ converted/turned into language,” with the implication that, as Marx’s German in (1b) implies, paraphrased, “ihre Eigentümlichkeit wird in die Sprache nicht aufgelöst,” which is to say, ideas’ uniqueness/peculiarity/particularity will not

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42  Chapter 1 be dissolved into language. The reigning thought in (1ab) is that there is something in ideas that resists (intralingual) “translation” into verbal expression. In Liu’s terms, Marx identifies some kind of possibly intrinsic but not entirely insurmountable incommensurability between ideas and language. (1c) In Marx’s notes the clause “ihr gesellschaftlicher Charakter neben ihnen in der Sprache existierte” – which Nicolaus tarts up only slightly, neben ihnen in der Sprache existierte “next to them in the language existed” becoming “runs alongside them as a separate entity” – is a bit awkward and ill-thought-out. Marx is still negating this possibility, saying that ideas’ social character does not exist next to the ideas themselves in language; but it’s very far from clear what this negated scenario actually implies, and how it follows from (1ab) his hint that something in ideas resists total subsumption into verbal expression. Why would the perfect “metamorphosing” or “dissolving” of ideas into language lead to a side-by-side existence (or some even more abstract relationship) within language of “ideas” and “their social character”? Would ideas metamorphosed into language not then be language? Would ideas and language not then be indistinguishable? And while it is easy to guess at what ideas’ “social character” would be, Marx’s reificatory phrasing remains problematic. The colligation would seem to suggest that “social character” is something that (some?) ideas possess, as a “separate entity” (as Nicolaus puts it, additively), and thus something that might potentially be separated (getrennt, gelöst) from them. Marx’s negation of this possibility might provisionally be taken to imply either that [i] ideas have no social character (they are perfectly private), or else that [ii] ideas are so thoroughly social, so saturated in sociality, that they can never be separated from their social character (the social character cannot “run[] alongside them as a separate entity”). Though Marx doesn’t stop to sort this out, we can venture that (i), while syntactically/logically possible, is not ideologically likely in Marx’s thought, leaving (ii) the default reading in a yes/no binary; but that binary does not yet exhaust our interpretive options. Given that the paragraph’s imagistic orientation is the tension in the ideas/language pair between (1ab) fusion and (2) separation, surely that has implications for the specific nature of the relationship between ideas and their social character? We might want to suggest, for example, a fuzzy logic in which [iii] ideas can never be completely dissolved/ metamorphosed into their social character, or [iv] the social character of human communication can never be completely dissolved/metamorphosed into ideas. And, further: if we assume that there is some integral connection between the social character of human communication and the social character of language as the most prominent channel of human communication, we might want to manage the various relationships in (1c) by saying, for example, that [v] ideas can never be completely dissolved/metamorphosed into language, which can never be completely dissolved/metamorphosed into its social character. (And so on: the possibilities are not endless here, but they are considerably more complex than (1ci-v) has yet articulated.) Marx’s failure to theorize (1c) adequately also leaves the analogy he negates between (1c) ideas next to their social character and (1d) “die Preise neben den

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Waren” equally problematic. The implication is that comparing “prices next to commodities” with “ideas next to their social character” does not make a good analogy, presumably because prices do actually stand alongside commodities and ideas do not stand alongside their social character; but again Marx doesn’t stop to work out the reasons for the failure of that analogy. I suggest that the obvious reason it fails is that prices and commodities, like ideas, have a social character, making the operative analogy not ideas:social character::prices:commodities (ideas are to social character as prices are to commodities – Marx’s specific formulation, which is logically problematic) but ideas:social character::prices:social character or ideas:social character::commodities:social character It’s impossible to know why Marx thought that the juxtaposition “prices next to commodities” was even potentially comparable with “ideas next to their social character”; if one had to guess, one might suggest that the adverb neben “next to” summoned up in Marx’s mind’s eye an image of commodities on the shop shelf with prices next to them, and he just jotted it down, without working out the analogy. One final consideration, before we move on to Sentence 2: what should we make of the fact that Marx has buried in one sentence some conventional and perhaps dead mercantile metaphors that tend to drop out of English translations? He writes: “Die Ideen werden nicht in die Sprache verwandelt, so daß ihre Eigentümlichkeit aufgelöst und ihr gesellschaftlicher Charakter neben ihnen in der Sprache existierte, wie die Preise neben den Waren.” If we imagine Marx deliberately burying those metaphors, invoking them implicatively rather than explicatively, we will take them to be important (though perhaps “poetic”) clues to his meaning; if we imagine that he simply didn’t notice the mercantile etymologies buried (and perhaps dead) in the passage, then we may want to frown on their unpacking as overingenious. But let us bracket such interpretive/epistemological questions for now and look at the three metaphors. First: the Eigentümlichkeit “peculiarity, uniqueness” of ideas that Marx says is not dissolved into the language in which they are expressed is an abstract noun derived from Eigentum “property,” which in turn is derived from eigen, which can be either the adjective “(one’s) own” or the verb “to own.” In English too we might speak of “the unique properties” of ideas, troping the ideas’ uniqueness as their stock portfolio or real estate holdings. Second: auflösen can mean not only “to dissolve, to resolve, to disperse, to dispel,” but “to liquidate”: eine Firma auflösen is “to liquidate a company.” And third: in that strange negated image of ideas’ “social character” (not) existing next to them in the language, “social” is derived from Gesellschaft, which

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44  Chapter 1 was originally “guild” (die Gesellen were the guild’s journeymen, associates, or fellows) and in contemporary German means not only “society” but “business” or “corporation.” Metaphorically, therefore, the social character that isn’t sitting there next to the ideas is also a corporate character. (Following Ferdinand Tönnies [1887; Hollis 2001], Germans draw a distinction between Gesellschaft “civil society” and Gemeinschaft “community,” and increasingly bemoan the loss of the latter, along nostalgic lines congruent with the idealization of what Sakai calls “the regime of homolingual address” [CT 1.3], or the mythic community that Nancy [1986/2004; Connor 1991] condemns as “communion.” Since the forces driving the supposed destruction of Gemeinschaft “community” are economic – capitalism, neoliberal globalization – it is appropriate that the two main types of Gesellschaft “corporation” in German are the Aktiegesellschaft [AG] or “company limited by share ownership” and the Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung [GmbH] or “company with limited liability.” (But note also Solomon [2014: 178] on “the progression of geopolitical events that brought a formal end to colonialism and destabilized the sovereignty of the nation-state, gradually replacing it with the transnational corporate-state.”) So: ideas are not metamorphosed into language; their properties are not liquidated into it; their corporate character does not exist next to them in language, like prices next to commodities. But of course perhaps Marx didn’t do this deliberately, consciously. Perhaps the associations I’m teasing out of the sentence are just dead metaphors. But three dead metaphors in the same sentence, indeed in the same subordinate clause of that sentence, all taken from the same mercantile semantic domain with which Marx is here directly concerned? That seems like too much of a coincidence to be accidental – especially given what we know of Marx’s German style, his love of language, which often takes the form of word-play. What we have here, obviously, is a translator’s decision. The translator – Martin Nicolaus, say, or Doug Robinson – has to make a judgment call. Is this metaphorical subtext part of Marx’s message, or not? Should it be translated? Whatever decision the translator makes will have a small but significant impact on how scholars like Lydia H. Liu read Marx – how they read not only what Paul Grice (1975/1988) calls his conversational implicatures (what he is implicitly constating about commerce) but what Charles Altieri (1981: 86–92) calls his expressive implicatures (his metalocutionary implicatures about his own expressive style).4 The subtext I’m finding in this sentence invites us to read it in terms of a playful, recursive, possibly even self-referential metalocutionary implicature. If I’m reading that implicature into Marx’s speech act, willfully inserting that playful postmodern poet into the text, I’m “distorting” the philosopher, encouraging target readers to experience something that isn’t there; if it is there and Nicolaus missed it, or considered it too trivial to highlight in his translation, then he is depriving us of that key personality trait (or “property”). Note that I am deliberately bracketing here all the literary-theoretical compunctions that we have developed since Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1954) about authorial intention, intended meaning, and so on – because those compunctions tend to assume what is here in question, namely whether

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Liu reading Marx 45 [1: the psycho-ontological question] there is or is not an authorial intention, and [2: the epistemological question] we can or cannot know it. My approach here is instead [3] pragmatic and perspectivist, based on the interlinked assumptions that [a] claiming (2) to know (1) Marx’s authorial intention well enough to attribute specific mercantile metaphors to it has certain interpretive consequences; [b] interpreting Marx in (3a) specific ways has certain theoretical consequences; and [c] more than (3ab) we cannot say for certain. Note further that this is precisely Liu’s point about translation: that its trialand-error processes tend to have the effect of creating epistemic regimes, regimes that we end up mistaking for realities. I am, in other words, marshaling this submerged translation history to support her main thesis in the piece. But just as Liu (1999b: 26) herself chides Saussure for his “constant recourse to on-the-spot ‘translation’ and simultaneous failure to theorize his textual operation,” so too am I gently chiding Liu for relying so heavily on translation without highlighting and exploring that reliance as support for her own theoretical model.

1.2.2.2 Problems in Sentence 2 There’s nothing wrong, really, with translating (2) “Die Ideen existieren nicht getrennt von der Sprache” as “Ideas do not exist separately from language”; the two formulations mean basically the same thing. The only quibble might arise out of what Henri Meschonnic (2007; Boulanger 2011) calls the phenomenology of “sémantique sérielle”/“serial semantics”: how we experience language in time; how the rhythms of a sentence organize meaning for us serially. In German we first read that “Die Ideen existieren”: the ideas exist. Only then do we collide with the negative – and while the nicht might be read (as Nicolaus does) as retroactively negating the verb (“do not exist”), serially in German it builds a bridge or segue from “Die Ideen existieren” to “getrennt von der Sprache”: ideas exist not separated from the language. They exist. And while some might want to separate them from the language in which they are expressed, that’s not how they exist. Ideas and the language in which they are expressed are neither (1ab) fused as one nor (2) separate.

1.2.2.3 Problems in Sentence 3 “Ideen, die aus ihrer Muttersprache erst in eine fremde Sprache übersetzt werden müssen, um zu kursieren, um austauschbar zu werden” (3a) is, along with “Aber nur die gesellschaftliche Tat kann eine bestimmte Ware zum allgemeinen Äquivalent machen” from Das Kapital, one of two key insights for Liu’s reading of Marx. There is nothing particularly interesting to note in Nicolaus’s English translation of (3a) as “Ideas which have first to be translated out of their mother tongue into a foreign tongue in order to circulate, in order to become exchangeable”; I will hold off discussing it until section 1.3. But the rest of Sentence 3, “die Analogie liegt dann aber nicht in der Sprache, sondern in ihrer Fremdheit” (3b), is riddled with interesting problems, some of which stem from the desultory nature of Marx’s notes, others of which are exacerbated by Nicolaus’s translation.

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46  Chapter 1 As we’ve seen, Nicolaus translates (3b) as “but the analogy then lies not in the language, but in the foreign quality of language.” The problem with that arises from the fact that English makes a syntactic distinction between “the language” (one specific language) and “language” (in general), and German does not: die Sprache “the language” is used for both. (This is precisely the kind of nonequivalence, hypothesized and gradually stabilized through trial translations, that Liu places centerstage in her theorizing about the translation histories that generate commensurabilities and incommensurabilities between languages, and eventually stabilize interlingual and intercultural communication around those (in)commensurabilities.) Thus in Marx’s German phrase, thought through English, the analogy could be taken to lie either [i] “not in language [in general] but in its foreignness” or [ii] “not in the [one specific] language [into which the ideas have been translated] but in its foreignness,” with the implication that either: (i) there is a foreign quality to all language, even the mother tongue, and it is that general language-foreignness that Marx highlights in analogizing commodity exchange as translation; or (ii) the interesting encounter is with an idea that has been translated into a foreign language, and there in order to circulate has to be assimilated to that foreign culture, which of course is foreign only to the original idea, not to that (target) culture. And notice what I am about to do next, as it again instantiates the semantic stabilization process that Liu foregrounds: the reading that better coheres with Marx’s thinking in the note is (ii). This passage is again rather unclearly written, but the interpretation of it that would seem to promote the greater consistency and clarity in the passage would be that he meant to write (3bii) “die Analogie liegt dann aber nicht in der fremden Sprache, sondern in ihrer Fremdheit”: the analogy lies then not in the foreign language, but in its foreignness. After all, the stumbling block in Marx’s syntactic logic is that he refers first to two languages (“aus ihrer Muttersprache erst in eine fremde Sprache”) and then only to one (“liegt dann aber nicht in der Sprache”) without specifying which. The Grundrisse are, again, only notes, not originally written to be published. Marx presumably knew which language he meant – and indeed marked it as the foreign one in the very next clause, with “sondern in ihrer Fremdheit.” But what does Nicolaus do? Seeing the syntactic problem, he gravitates toward what would appear at first blush to be the obvious solution, that Marx is referring to (i) language in general; but then, perhaps sensing that it’s not the best solution, also simultaneously lingers wistfully in the notion that Marx is referring to (ii) a single language; and then, inexplicably, tries to have it both ways: “but the analogy then lies not in [3b1ii] the language, but in the foreign quality of [3b2i] language.” “Lies not in the language” follows Marx’s German syntax, with its nonspecific use of the definite article, which in English seems to point to (ii) a specific language, either the mother tongue or a foreign language (but without specifying which); (i) “in the foreign quality of language” makes a quantum leap to all language, language in general. This seems syntactically incoherent to me,

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Liu reading Marx 47 which is especially problematic given that the passage is philosophical discourse: it would be easier to manage that kind of syntactic shift in a poem, say. What then does Liu do? Perhaps intuiting the logical conflict between (3b2i) and (3b1ii), she ignores (3b2ii) and throws her full theoretical weight behind (3b2i), basically assimilating Nicolaus’s mixed translation back to the purity of (3a-i): [4] “Marx’s insistence on the foreignness (Fremdheit) of language is central to his working out of a meaningful connection between linguistic estrangement (Entfremdung) and monetary alienation (Entäußerung) in Capital” (1999b: 22) and [5] “The foreign quality (Fremdheit) of language describes a shared process of circulation in translation and in economic transaction, which produces meaning as it produces value when a verbal sign of a commodity is exchanged with something foreign to itself” (22). One might want to suggest that Liu is especially susceptible to this kind of reading because she is Chinese, and Chinese has no articles; “the foreign quality of language” thought through Chinese could very well mean exactly the same thing as “the foreign quality of a language” or “the foreign quality of the language.” But that suggestion would not only be condescending; it would diminish the force of her argument. Liu does want to argue, it seems to me, that for Marx language itself is foreign. She gets that idea partly from Marc Shell (106), whose sentence “In Capital, Marx redefines the connection between linguistic estrangement (Entfremdung) and monetary alienation (Entäußerung)” she very closely, almost plagiaristically, paraphrases. My guess, in fact, is that to her the notion that Marx insists on “the foreignness of language” is attractive in its own right. I would also guess that those attractions have a lot to do with the mystique of the foreign for the German Romantics and post-Romantics: Befremdung in Novalis, Entfremdung in Hegel and Marx, Verfremdung in Brecht. The familiar, the ordinary, the local, the common: those were the petty concerns of the mothers in their houses and the men in the markets that Luther5 invokes, the merchants, the ­factory-owners, the inventors, all those good upright burghers that the Romantics and their Occidentalist followers despised. The strange, the outlandish, the surprising, the mysterious, the foreign: those were the sublime sources of Romantic power, the crypto-esoteric edge that the Romantics and post-Romantics invoked, all the way up through the modernists (Shklovsky’s ostranenie “estrangement, defamiliarization” transmogrified into Brecht’s Verfremdung “estrangement, alienation” – see Robinson [2008] for discussion) and the postmodernists and poststructuralists. She doesn’t cite Sakai here, but arguably the notion that all language is foreign recapitulates Sakai’s attitude of heterolingual address: (CT 1.20) we are all foreigners to each other, and to ourselves; all communication is translation. Fine – I like the theories of estrangement and heterolinguality a lot too. The problem with assimilating all language to the foreign, the strange, and the heterolingual in the specific context of Marx’s argument in Sentence 3, however, is that that argument depends on naturalization – the movement from the feeling of the foreign to the feeling of the familiar, and the habitualization of that latter feeling, until it is no longer even noticed. In Shklovsky’s terms, the feeling of the strange tends to become automated, “algebraized,” necessitating the estranging action of art to defamiliarize it – and then the estrangement effect begins to wear

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48  Chapter 1 off again, we are numbed again to experience, requiring a reestrangement. In Sakai’s terms, we tend to become numb to the heterolinguality of our address to everyone around us, and even to ourselves, so that we seem to be living in the regime of homolingual address, necessitating a reheterolingualization. This is effectively Marx’s argument as well: the domestic being foreignized; the foreign being domesticated; the call for a reforeignization of what has been domesticated. He needs first a disturbance, a disruption in the smooth flows of familiarity, which will generate a need for a rethinking, a reframing – then a gradual naturalization of that reframing as “reality,” as “the laws of the market” – then a demystifying historicization of that naturalization. Is that not in fact what Marx means by “die Analogie liegt dann aber nicht in der Sprache, sondern in ihrer Fremdheit,” that the analogy requires an initial foreignness that is then domesticated in the target language, and must be reforeignized before it can be properly rehistoricized? Indeed is the conception Liu borrows from Marx of the dialectic between naturalization/domestication and rehistoricization/foreignization even tenable if we insist with her on the ineluctable foreignness of all language, and therefore, by extension, of all sign systems? The back-and-forth movement between familiarity and unfamiliarity, between problems and solutions, between naturalization and denaturalization is essential not only to Marx’s conception of circulation/ exchange in the transition from a barter economy to a money economy, but to Liu’s theorization of translation as the engine driving the creation and naturalization of “universal equivalents” – and all of that, everything she needs to get out of Marx, is voided if all language is foreign. But even if we decide that Marx meant to write die Analogie liegt dann aber nicht in der fremden Sprache, sondern in ihrer Fremdheit “the analogy lies therefore not in the foreign language, but in its foreignness,” that still doesn’t answer the trickiest question of all, namely, how exactly the analogy can possibly “lie in the foreignness” of that foreign language. What would that even mean? What does it mean for any analogy to “lie” in any one thing or place? Surely analogies are about comparisons, relationships of similarity, not about single places? And what does it mean for this particular analogy to lie in the foreignness of a foreign language? Presumably Marx means something like “the analogy takes its power or force from the foreignness of that foreign language from which the ideas have been translated”; but how does that work? The difficulty we face in answering that question makes us realize that we don’t really know what the analogy is. He doesn’t quite spell it out. Let us therefore try to unpack his rather crabbed notes on this head. Language is his source domain; political economy is his target domain. He wants to build an argument about the circulation of money (M) or other values in an economy (E); to that end he essays an analogy between that circulation and the circulation of ideas (I) in language (L). So at the broadest level he is arguing that (one might think that) I:L::M:E – but, he says, that would be wrong, because I’s are not transformed/dissolved into L. In order to delve more complexly into the economics of M:E, therefore, he introduces the social act of translation: Ideen, die aus ihrer Muttersprache erst in eine fremde Sprache übersetzt

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Liu reading Marx 49 werden müssen, um zu kursieren, um austauschbar zu werden, bieten schon mehr Analogie; die Analogie liegt dann aber nicht in der [fremden] Sprache, sondern in ihrer Fremdheit. In other words, a better analogue (source domain) for M:E would be ideas (I) that must be translated out of their mother tongue (MT) into a foreign tongue (FT) in order to circulate. The analogy then “lies” not in the FT but in its F (foreignness). What does this mean? The basic logical operation is an expansion of I:L (the circulation of ideas in language): First, we have Ideas (I) in the Mother Tongue (MT): call them IM. Second, the I’s are translated (T) into a foreign tongue (FT): call them IF. Third, the I’s are domesticated (D) in the FT, um zu kursieren, um austauschbar zu werden “in order to circulate, in order to become exchangeable”: call them ID. The act of translation (T) is thus IM>IF; the process of domestication (D) is IF>ID. D is not domesticating translation, as it would be for Venuti; it is the uptake of the translated ideas into the target culture, or what Itamar Even-Zohar (1997) calls the integration of a translation into the target “culture repertoire.” T is also not foreignizing translation, as it would be for Venuti; it is the foreignizing effect of any translation, not on target readers but on “the ideas themselves.” Even if through “domesticating translation” they are assimilated linguistically and stylistically to target-language norms and traditions, they remain at first intellectually alien (IF) to the target culture – but then, as Marx imagines it, are eventually assimilated (ID) to the target culture repertoire, where they begin to circulate. The full sequence is IM>IF>ID. The analogy “lies,” then, for Marx, in the foreignness (F) of the foreign (target) language, the FT, and by extension the F also of the ideas (I) circulated through the FT (IF). I read that to mean that the key to the linguistic source domain for his analogy is that ideas do not simply exist in language, but are translated from one language to another (IM>IF). The Fremdheit “foreignness” that for Marx is the key to the analogy is specifically the fact that translation infects the Ideas with a Foreignness that creates an obstacle to circulation. In order to circulate through the FT the Ideas must overcome the Foreign through Domestication (IF>ID). Presumably they originally circulated in D/non-F form through the MT, but that is an irrelevancy for Marx’s purposes – and thus also arguably a structural flaw in his analogy. He wants to narrow his focus to the F-obstruction to circulation created by translation into a foreign tongue (FT). IF is the speed bump in the trajectory from IM-circulation to ID-circulation. This is not the direction Liu takes with Marx’s analogy, obviously; I venture to say it would not be the direction Venuti would go with it either. But a careful reading of Marx’s text makes it quite difficult to go any other direction with it. The bare or base form of the (linguistic) source domain, then, would be IM:ID. The bare or base form of the (economic) target domain would be the transition

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50  Chapter 1 from a barter economy (BE) before the formulation and institutionalization of “universal” equivalences to a money economy (ME) after those equivalences have not only been created but universalized, internalized, naturalized, made to seem as if they had always been there – or BE:ME. The Aristotelian notation for that analogy would thus be IM:ID::BE:ME. The sense in which for Marx that analogy liegt “lies” in F – in the F-obstruction brought about by the translation of I from the MT to the FT – would be that Marx wants to insert IF into the translational trajectory from IM to ID (IM>IF>ID) as the analogical key to the transition from BE to ME. There is, in other words, some analogical kind of obstruction in the barter economy that precipitates its transformation into a money economy – and that target-domain difficulty is what he wants to analogize by reference to the F-obstruction caused by the translation of I into the FT. What is that analogical difficulty? What is the tertius comparationis that links translation as IF to the transition from BE to ME? Obviously, it is the fact that in a barter economy no one can ever know what will be the equivalent of what. If you knit a sweater and take it to the market, will you be able to barter it for a chicken? There’s no way of knowing. That is the BE Handeln “(trans)acting” that for Marx has to precede the transitional “thinking” (T) about economic equivalences (E) – call it TE – that leads to the formulation and institutionalization of “universal” equivalences (ME). Marx is looking to theorize that TE – and specifically to insert it into the “translational” trajectory from BE to ME (BE>TE>ME). The full analogy might thus be notated IM>IF>ID::E>TE>ME. The bolded transitional elements are his truest focus in Sentence 3: IF::TE. And that formulation suggests that the analogy liegt “lies” not only in the Fremdheit “foreignness” of IF but in the relationship of similarity between IF and TE. This is the full form of the Liegen “lying” at which Marx’s note only barely hinted. Just as IF>ID (the translated/foreignized ideas are eventually domesticated in the FT), so too TE>ME (the thinking about economic equivalences generated by the problems in BE leads to the formulation of “universal” equivalences and so to ME). What is important about all that for Liu’s theorization, of course, is that translation (T>IF) is the catalyst that analogically generates the thinking about equivalences (TE) that coalesces as the creation of a money economy (ME). So the argumentative destination of this more careful reading of Marx is precisely where Liu wants to go. I am not, in other words, suggesting that Liu’s conclusion is wrong; I’m saying that the steps she took to get there are confusing and misleading, mainly because the steps Marx took to get there in his unpublished notes were equally confusing and misleading, and needed to be formulated more clearly to work properly. To some extent that confusion in Liu’s reading of Marx damages her articulation of the conclusion as well, of course: when she claims that “The foreign quality (Fremdheit) of language describes a shared process of circulation in translation and in economic transaction,” there is not only no “foreign quality of language” but no “shared process of circulation in translation and in economic transaction.” For Marx the circulation of ideas in language is not shared with the circulation of values in economic transaction: the one is like the other. They are analogues.

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Liu reading Marx 51 And specifically the “foreignness” obstructions to the circulation of ideas caused by translation are analogous to the “unpredictability” obstructions to the circulation of values in a barter economy; and those obstructions instigate a rethinking and realigning in both the source domain (language) and the target domain (the economy), namely the domestication/circulation of the translated foreign ideas in the former and the development of a money economy in the latter. What still works for Liu in all that, despite her confusion about the analogy, is that Marx’s analogy can now be resequenced, so that his target domain, BE>TE>ME, can become Liu’s source domain, leading to IM>IF>ID as her target domain – with the result that the movement from trial-and-error BE transactions to the TE formulation of “universal equivalents” in an ME can be repurposed as a model for the study of translation.

1.3 Social act or social ecology? Let us now look a bit more closely at Liu’s two articulations of this misreading that would make all language foreign. The first was this: (4) “Marx’s insistence on the foreignness (Fremdheit) of language is central to his working out of a meaningful connection between linguistic estrangement (Entfremdung) and monetary alienation (Entäußerung) in Capital.” Isolating this proposition for scrutiny is perhaps not quite fair, since Liu takes it over virtually unedited from Shell; but her almost-verbatim paraphrase, without citation, does make it effectively her own. That Marx uses Entfremdung and Entäußerung more or less synonymously, to signify the alienation of the form (Gestalt) of the product from its producer, and thereby also of the producer (worker) from her/himself, is well known; verb and noun forms of the former appear six times in volume one of Das Kapital, of the latter ten times, invariably in the same contexts, with the same consequents, suggesting rough synonymy. I have no idea, therefore, what Shell means by “linguistic estrangement” and Marx’s need to “redefine[] the connection” between it and “monetary alienation” – especially in Capital, where to my mind no such project is anywhere in evidence. But Liu takes him at his word, reproduces his summary of Das Kapital with minimal editing, suggesting that this is, as she says specifically in her lead-up to (5), an “important insight” for her. Perhaps a closer look at the other articulation might shed some light on the matter? That other articulation was this: “The foreign quality (Fremdheit) of language [a] describes a shared process of circulation in translation and in economic transaction, which [b] produces meaning as it produces value when [c] a verbal sign of a commodity is exchanged with something foreign to itself.” Here the foreignness or foreign quality of language (5a) “describes” a “process of circulation”: what is circulating, exactly, and where, and how is that circulation “described” by the foreignness of language? What circulates, apparently, are signs: the basic event in the circulation here is that (5c) “a verbal sign of a commodity is exchanged with something foreign to itself.” I’m not sure why the sign needs to be a “a verbal sign of a commodity,” unless this is Liu’s attempt to make the “process of circulation in translation and in economic transaction” not just analogous but “shared.” Presumably, though, there are signs-not-of-commodities that are

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52  Chapter 1 exchanged/translated, and indeed signs-of-any-kind that are exchanged and not (in a strict linguistic sense) translated, which latter eventuality would return us to the analogy without obvious sharing. I’m also not sure what the “something foreign to itself” might be, since that foreignness is a phenomenology that is heightened when the thing is unfamiliar to the onlooker and diminished (or even banished entirely) when the thing becomes so familiar to that onlooker as not to be noticed at all. Surely, therefore, “something foreign to itself” can never become a stable ontological category? I’m guessing, though, that Liu is feeling the need to naturalize “the foreign quality of language” as an integral element in the circulation of signs, and hasn’t quite worked out how all her categories interrelate. And of course (5b) meanings and values also seem to be circulating, and while meanings and values are arguably also signs, it would seem that important distinctions are to be made among them. It should also be clear that a commodity is itself a sign, even if no word (“verbal sign”) is used to describe it, or to ask for it, or to hawk it: a commodity is by definition not an object but an object significationally mobilized for economic exchange and use. A commodity signifies just as a word does. But does a meaning signify? Does a value signify? We are accustomed to thinking that meanings and values are signified, and thus are signifieds; but if we are to take them as signs that circulate, we cannot afford to invoke the dualism of signifiers and signifieds too soon. (In a Peircean [1992– 1998: 2.409 (1907)] semeiotic, they would be emotional, energetic, and logical interpretants, and would never need to be locked into the static passive fullness of “the signified.”) The fact is that Marx’s model, as read by Liu, is stretched across an abysm: on the one hand, universal equivalences are created by a social act; on the other, they emerge out of circulations that constitute social ecologies. In section 1.2 I began to suggest that the interaction between those two poles involves the ­socio-ecological conditioning of social acts – that the instinctive “act” of creating a universal equivalent must be the result of the habitualization of social experience, namely the exchange of goods and their equivalents, and that it is only by being further habitualized that the equivalent so “created” is “universalized” – and working out the functionality of that emergent model is one of my main tasks in the chapters here. But that interaction is nowhere theorized in Liu’s reading of Marx. For example: what exactly is circulation? Money, of course, circulates in a physical sense, hand to hand, cash register to wallet to cash register, bank account to bank account; translations circulate in a similar sense, though not as obviously or inevitably as money (hard drive to publisher to printer to distributor to bookstore shelf to hand to home shelf, cloud to web page to cloud). But that is not the kind of circulation Marx means. If for Marx to circulate is to be exchangeable, then to circulate is to participate in a system of equivalences; and equivalences are cognitive structures that organize social/economic/political behavior, and the ways people talk about them, and the things they believe about them. As Liu (1999a: 3) notes, “The history of colonialism also reminds us how pervasive the work of translation has been in molding and continuing to mold people’s deictic conception of the self, other, and difference, so much so that the self is already inhabited

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Liu reading Marx 53 by the other before people become aware of it.” Equivalences are ideological structures that processually “create” “reality” as we experience it. The question that Marx and Liu don’t think to ask about this process is: how do those structures “create” “reality”? The sense of reality is a human phenomenology; what is it (or “it”) that so effectively stabilizes equivalences in human users’ minds as to flesh forth that phenomenology? How does a population come to feel those equivalences stably and therefore predictably enough for exchangevalue to constitute a reliable economic/epistemic system? As I noted earlier, I suggest that the theoretical impulse that thwarts this line of inquiry in Marx and Liu is something like the (post-)Romantic tradition of the Poet as Hero, speaker of the Primordial Performative, in a series of secularizing displacements (see Figure 1.1).

RPP: The Romantic Primordial Performative [a] the eschatological/poetic speech act that will restore paradise “I speak the password primeval” (Walt Whitman) the Logos in the universal language of poetry RPP-1: The Romantic Translational Performative [a] the eschatological/[b] translational speech act(s) that will restore Pure Language (the task of Walter Benjamin’s translator) the mystical Logos in German as [c] die Tat “the Deed/Act” RPP-2: Post-Romantic translational reflection on the Primordial Performative Goethe imagining [d] Faust (b) translating “In the beginning was the Word” as Im Anfang war (c) die Tat (d) Faust’s (b) translation of Logos as (c) die Tat

RPP-3 (Shell): Marx reading Goethe—RPP-2 as analogue

Commodity-owners transacting before they thought

(d) Faust thinking that in the beginning was (e) the act

RPP-4 (Marx): reading Goethe— RPP-2 as idea

Commodity-owners transacting before they thought

RPP-5 (Liu): reading Shell reading Marx: RPP-3 as event

“Gold became the universal equivalent by a social act (Tat) when this commodity began to assume the power to measure or purchase all the others” (1999b: 22)

(e) Die Tat

Figure 1.1  The “social act” tower

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54  Chapter 1 Read “RPP-1” as Romantic Primordial Performative minus 1, “RPP-2” as minus 2, and so on: the idea is that each level subtracts mystical power, displaces the myth “downwards,” until in RPP-3/4/5 die Tat is a purely secular social act. The bracketed letters mark the key elements, allowing us to track what is dropped out at each level;6 but my point here is not to take Liu or anyone else to task for falling away from the higher levels of the “tower.” Rather, my point is that this whole focus on the act is what leads first Marx, then Liu, astray. In particular, the Romantic act: the act of creation, “dim analogue,” as Coleridge puts it, “of Creation.” Even if we follow Marx, as Liu does, and understand the creation of a universal equivalent as a social act, performed by a group – die Warenbesitzer “the commodity-owners” for Marx, “the barterers” for Shell – the implication remains that the act was performed once, at a specific point in time, or even, as in Liu (2014), at a series of temporal moments, but still performed creatively by individual human agents. As we saw in CT 1.1, in TS (but also in the CTS of Liu) this is translation as “a somewhat tritely heroic and exceptional act of some arbitrator bridging two separate communities” (Sakai 1997: 3). I assume that this Romantic agency is more or less what she means by “the ‘translator’ ” in her claim that “it seems unlikely, either now or in the near future, that we will derive an intuitive understanding of how one language functions visà-vis another language(s) outside what is normally taken as the realm of translation, be it literal, figurative, metonymical, or subversive translation. At each turn, we find ourselves at the mercy of the ‘translator’ among and in us” (1999a: 2). Though “at the mercy of” makes the situation sound a bit dicey, and “translator” is wrapped in scare quotes, I take it Liu’s intentions are good: to idealize “the translator” along the lines at least of RPP-3/4/5, and possibly even of RPP-2, as a powerful creator. For example, she notes that “one does not translate between equivalences; rather, one creates tropes of equivalence in the middle zone of translation between the host and guest languages” (1999c: 137; cf. also Liu 2004: 110). I read that and wonder what it would entail to translate “between equivalences,” or why anyone would even try and argue that one does it, and thus why Liu feels she needs to argues that one doesn’t. Is it possible that she means “one doesn’t translate between equivalents,” and thus something like “one doesn’t translate within/across existing equivalences”? That would imply that the equivalents are not there in the language, waiting to be mobilized by translators, but must be created by translators as they translate, as tropes of equivalence. But is that true? Do these tropes never become stabilized, habitualized, automated? Stabilization, habitualization, automation are anti-Romantic topoi, best soft-shoed in postRomantic/poststructuralist theory. Habit and stability are the enemies of the imagination. The Romantic moment in the transformative event is “one creates tropes”: there creativity is not only individualized but ideally randomized. One creates whatever tropes of equivalence one feels like creating, in the moment, and every time anew. And of course it does often feel while translating as if one were constantly recreating the reciprocal relationship between the source language and the target language by projecting and then seeking to actualize “tropes

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Liu reading Marx 55 of equivalence” – as in fact I (too narrowly) theorized in Robinson (1991: ch. 3), from which Liu (1995: 382n14) initially borrowed the concept. But if this were truly a radical recreation in every translation job, the job would not only not be doable; its products would not be readable. The troping of equivalence is organized. And the organization is not only individual over time – each individual translator building up professional habits in a given language pair, as I (again too narrowly) suggested in Robinson (1997a) – but collectively guided, through the socioregulatory processes that I have been calling icotic, involving the circulation through a group not of signs but of normative simulations of emotionalbecoming-energetic-becoming-logical interpretants that gradually “icotize” or “plausibilize” opinions as identities, truths, realities.7 The pitfalls in Romanticizing the “social act” as Liu does become especially clear when, in discussing the British translation of 夷 yi as “barbarian” in the Opium Wars, she notes that as victors they wrote a ban on its use into the Treaty of Tianjin, and claims that “the legal ban was so effective that it has made the word literally disappear from the languages of today’s Chinese-speaking world” (1999b: 35). Somehow a ban on the use of the word in diplomatic communiqués, written into the Tianjin treaty documents in June, 1858, and ratified by the Chinese emperor on October 18, 1860, after British and French troops occupied the Forbidden City in Beijing – a spatio-temporally restricted event – led to a situation in which the billion and a half Chinese speakers today no longer use it. This is a legislated nonequivalence – the British victors in the second Opium War effectively declared that from now on “夷 yí ≠ ‘Englishman’ ” – that has somehow taken root in Chinese speakerdom, not only as a wrong (unequivalent) translation but as a monolingually wrong (politically incorrect?) word. And indeed such things do happen. Hyperbolic as it may seem, I do not for an instant dispute Liu’s claim that the disappearance of 夷 yí from the speech of Chinese people emerged out of that ban in some mysterious way. I do, however, rather emphatically dispute the Romantic echoes of Im Anfang war die Tat in the claim that “the legal ban was so effective that it has made the word literally disappear” – in the notion that the British, reprehended in Liu’s account but still given heroic Romantic agency, rather like Milton’s Satan as read by William Blake, made it happen in 1858–60, with a social act. Here are the stakes: if they did it, what else but magical powers could have spread that their ban to all Chinese speech? If they didn’t do it, who or what did? What social or political power could have turned that event – the diplomatic ban – into a massive popular trend? Some bans are never even enforced. Some are enforced but achieve only minimal, superficial compliance. Some become standard protocol within a very small coterie of professionals. In this case, if Liu is right, the ban was not only spread to the masses but almost perfectly stabilized in their language-use for a century and a half and counting. What agent could have achieved that? Liu occasionally hints at such stabilization. “Translatability,” she writes, “means something entirely different here; it refers to the historical making of hypothetical equivalences between languages. These equivalences tend to be makeshift

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56  Chapter 1 inventions in the beginning and become more or less fixed through repeated use or come to be supplanted by the preferred hypothetical equivalences of a later generation” (1999c: 137). Yes, those equivalences do tend to “become more or less fixed through repeated use” – which would effectively belie her claim (if I’m interpreting it right) that “one doesn’t translate between[/across/within existing] equivalences.” If equivalences tend to be stabilized through use, by definition they also tend to stabilize use, so that translators do come to translate across established relationships of equivalence – which in fact tend to be institutionalized in bilingual dictionaries, on which translators often heavily rely. The question that interests me, though, is what that “repeated use” is. Is it a more or less random quantitative accumulation of stabilizing habits? Is it an “intellectual mechanism”? More to the point, is it guided in any way, by aggregated sociopolitical or ideological impulses? I’m guessing Liu would want to say yes to that last question – “the preferred hypothetical equivalences of a later generation” would seem to point in that direction – but how is the guidance channeled? This collective organization of the circulation of regulatory behaviors, attitudes, norms, and values through a population would seem to be required by every tiny detail of Liu’s theoretical framework; and yet she not only does not theorize it, she continually seems to be pointing away from it. She adds that “this middle zone of hypothetical equivalence, which is occupied by neologistic imagination, becomes the very ground for change” (137) – but what guides change on that ground? Is the “neologistic imagination” that occupies that ground sheer Romantic creativity, some kind of randomly explosive mystical force, or is it too guided collectively? In The Clash of Empires (Liu 2004) she introduces an expanded conceptual framework into the discussion of this particular translation history by identifying the social actor as “the super-sign yi/barbarian,” which again – as in Liu (1999b, 1999c) – “brings an end to the etymology of the word 夷 yi, making it disappear into the moratorium enacted by Article 51” of the Tianjin treaty document. Her theory of the “hetero-linguistic super-sign” (33) seems almost to transcend the model of “social action” – to be, as it were, a transsocial actor, a supersocial actor, possibly even a supernatural actor with monstrous/magical powers: The super-sign is a monstrosity because it crouches behind the “wordness” of a concept and articulates the latter without itself being articulated in any reified form. The super-sign does not seem to fit into our familiar descriptions of linguistic phenomena and almost always eludes normative etymological analysis because it never announces its positivity in terms of a discrete verbal unit. In short, the super-sign is not a word but a hetero-cultural signifiying chain. As a fantastic hybrid of translated concepts, it can be technically demonstrated with a series of verbal signs connected by slashes, as in yi/­barbarian. This analytical method has the advantage of overcoming the traditional semiotic preoccupation with positive signs and taking us instead into the realm of enchanted meanings, excesses of signification, camouflaged traces of foreign invasions, potent but disavowed forms of translingual speech and writing as well as meaning making across languages, and so on.

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To be sure, a super-sign may invade a language and assume the look of a known word in that language, but it never fails to defer the meaning of that word elsewhere, toward some foreign language or languages. The Chinese character yi has undergone precisely this sort of transformation. (34–5) The transitive verbs there signal the super-sign’s actor-status: it “articulates” verbalized concepts, it “never announces its positivity,” it “invades a language,” it “defers the meaning” of a word. The super-sign clearly possesses agency of some mysterious sort, one associated with “enchanted meanings, excesses of signification, camouflaged traces of foreign invasions, potent but disavowed forms of translingual speech and writing.” Liu is evidently groping toward a conception of transindividual agency that she doesn’t understand and can’t begin to theorize; everything she says about it here is “mystical” in the sense that it seems to wield a transformative force beyond the known world of human social action. The meanings created by this “foreign invader” may not be literally “enchanted,” but they seem to be: enchantment is an imagery that hints at the phenomenology Liu is struggling to characterize. “Fantastic hybrid,” “excesses of signification,” “camouflaged traces,” and “disavowed forms” all deploy the rhetoric of strategic negation that fuels mystical discourse: we don’t know what it is; we have no words for it; whatever it is, it’s not this or that familiar thing; all we can say about it, really, is that it seems to lie just beyond this or that familiar thing. The only positive descriptor she offers for the super-sign is “heterocultural signifying chain” – drawing on the poststructuralist trope of the endless chain of signifiers borrowed from early Peirce,8 and possibly also (I’m guessing) Sakai’s notion of the attitude of the heterolingual address (CT 1.5–10) – but the only thing she says about “hetero-culturality” is that the super-sign “crisscrosses the semantic fields of two or more languages simultaneously and makes an impact on the meaning of recognizable verbal units” (13). But “What is a super-sign?” (13; emphasis added). Liu answers her own question with vague hints at its origins (it “emerges out of the interstices of existing languages across the abyss of phonetic and ideographic differences” [13]), its affordances (“it always requires more than one linguistic system to complete the process of signification for any given verbal phenomenon” [13]), and its semiotic traces (it “can be figured as a manner of metonymical thinking that induces, compels, and orders the migration and dispersion of prior signs across different languages and different semiotic media” [13; emphasis added]). The questions these descriptions beg cover not only what it means to “criss-cross[] the semantic fields of two or more languages simultaneously” and so on but what this force or agency is that “induces, compels, and orders the migration and dispersion of prior signs across different languages.” Is the force or agency just that “manner of metonymical thinking”? Whose metonymical thinking? One person’s? An intercultural group’s? Translators’? Translation readers’? (Or is “metonymical thinking” just a figure, a trope, for the socioeconomic phenomenon toward which Liu is groping?)

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58  Chapter 1 In citing Sakai’s notion (CT 1.2, 1.6, 1.10, 1.14) of the “representation of translation” as the transfer of a stable meaning from one national language to another, Liu also recuperates her notion of an “intellectual mechanism” (1999a: 4) by noting that “this insight leads us to ask by what intellectual mechanism the word yi turned into its own super-sign yi/barbarian. Or, more accurately, how did the Chinese character come to be signified by yi/barbarian?” (2004: 36). She seems to adumbrate that process as cofiguration – but without theorizing it, or even naming it. It all remains a mystery. What mechanism? What is intellectual about it? She also invokes the “materiality of the sign” (see p. 195n9–10) in suggest­ing that “The material signifier of the Chinese character may continue to evoke or hallucinate an uninterruptible etymology in classical Chinese; yet what it evokes or hallucinates is but the ruins of an already dead word” (37) – but just how a Chinese character, material or immaterial, is able to “hallucinate” anything at all remains unexplored. Presumably it’s another trope – this time a personification – but a trope for what? Whatever the collectivizing force is that organizes a population’s responses this reliably – this is what I’ve been theorizing as a social ecology, under the rubric of “icosis” – it is not mobilized by any one Romantic individual, like “the translator” who for Liu is “able to manipulate difference, to dispense or withhold the reciprocity of meaning-value among the languages to make war or make peace” (1999b: 37). That dispensing and that withholding only become possible as the stabilized equivalences circulate through the population, and by so circulating organize the population in hegemonic ways. Let us now return to the line (3a) we put on hold in section 1.2.2.3: “Ideen, die aus ihrer Muttersprache erst in eine fremde Sprache übersetzt werden müssen, um zu kursieren, um austauschbar zu werden.” (In my literal translation: “Ideas that out of their mother tongue first into a foreign language translated must be, in order to circulate, in order exchangeable to become.”) This quotation from Marx seems strikingly to anticipate the translation method promoted for going on three decades now by the world’s foremost Marxist translation scholar, Lawrence Venuti (1986, 2012) – except of course that, following Schleiermacher (1813/2002), Venuti promotes translating foreignizingly into the local language, and Marx writes of translating into a foreign language, where the newly introduced ideas first domesticated must be, in order an exchange-value assigned to be, and so as local ideas to circulate. But in fact these scenarios are not so different: very much like Venuti’s, Marx’s analogy is between domesticating translation and capitalism. The first major difference between the two is that Marx doesn’t have a preferred method of translation – because of course he isn’t interested in translation at all. It’s just a passing analogue of circulation for him, like blood (but a better one than blood). The second major difference, though, is that his interest is in historicizing the creation of a universal equivalent, like gold. If we follow Liu in resequencing Marx’s analogy to focus on translation, therefore, the result is not so much a (TS) Schleiermacherian/Venutian defense of foreignization as the right (or attack on domestication as the wrong) way to translate as it is a (CTS)

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Liu reading Marx 59 demystifying/rehistoricizing ideological analysis of universalizing approaches to translation-as-equivalence. Again, that analysis might theoretically land Marx in the same ballpark as Schleiermacher and Venuti – for Marx, following the German Romantics and Idealists, the translational equivalent of the gold standard might be something like “translate so that the source author seems to have written originally in the target language” – but he would enter that park with a significantly different game plan. At a superficial level, the difference is that Schleiermacher attacks that “domesticating” strategy for nationalistic reasons, because if you don’t simulate the Feeling of the Foreign in German readers of the translated text they will not recognize it as foreign, and Schleiermacher wants to make sure German readers can tell the difference between home-grown literature and scholarship and foreign imports (see Robinson 2013c: 70–2 for discussion). For Marx, by contrast, the homogenization of a domesticated foreign text simply makes it an apt analogue of gold, which can circulate, which has exchange-value, because its equivalences with other commodities have been stabilized, standardized. At a deeper level, in TS Schleiermacher and Venuti are interested in how best to achieve translational equivalence – in translation as a somewhat heroic social act that, if done right, will transform the target culture in salutary ways. In CTS Marx (as read by Liu) is interested in the sociopolitical conditioning of translationas-equivalence – in the creation and competitive universalization of hypothetical translational equivalents as a somewhat mystified social act that everywhere requires an untheorized background understanding of the operation of social ecologies.

1.4 Depersonalization as disaggregation At the beginning of section 1.3 I noted that Liu follows Marx in stretching her model across the abysm between the social act and (not-quite-theorized hints in the direction of) social ecologies. Now let us consider a grammatical form that tension takes, namely between the human agent-subjects that make a billion and a half Chinese speakers stop using a specific word and abstract/depersonalized agent-subjects that somewhat improbably also take transitive verbs. If as I suggested in section 1.3 the former partakes of the Romantic ethos of heroic action, wherein all agents are larger-than-life human social actors, the latter partakes of Romanticism’s dark flip side, the (post)structuralist tendency to depersonalize agents. As the post-Romantic tradition issues into structuralism and then on into poststructuralism, the earlier Romantic focus on the heroic poet as creating god comes to be seen as liberal humanism, and so as grossest error, and a new tendency arises to attribute agency to inanimate objects or other phenomena, such as translation or language. For example: I use the word “token” in the title to capture the range of our collective enterprise. The trope encompasses not only verbal and symbolic exchange but material circulations as well. It suggests that, like verbal signs, [1] objects also constitute representations and that [2] their tangible material existence

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participates in its own signification rather than exists outside it. On the global scale of signification, I take [3] translation as a primary agent of token making as value among languages and markets. In this sense, tokens and their exchange-value represent my way of talking about [4] the circulation of the sign, text, works of art, commodities, philosophy, science, pedagogy, and social practice discussed in this book. (1999a: 4; bracketed numbers added) In what sense exactly is (3) translation an “agent” of token-making? Is that an AgentA as a being with autonomy (able to intend, will, plan, and initiate actions), or an AgentI as an instrumentality of an AgentA (empowered/authorized/enlisted to act in a predetermined way)? Should we take Liu to be implying that translation is an AgentA that not only makes but intends to make tokens as value? If so, does that mean that translation is an AgentA of value-making as well? Given that translation is a circulation of signs, is it also an AgentA that (4) circulates signs? Or are there other agents involved in all this? Do signs, say, circulate meanings, values, other signs? I suspect Liu means that human groups are the actual AgentsA that wield translating as its AgentsI in the making of tokens, valuing, and the circulation of signs; but she nowhere theorizes that, or even indicates that that is what she means. And what does it mean for (1) “objects [to] constitute representations”? Does Liu mean this in a loose colloquial sense, implying both roughly that [a] “objects are representations” and that, come to think of it, [b] “objects are actually only taken to be representations by interpreters,” so that in fact (1a) is actually a naturalized phenomenology of (1b)? Or does she mean it in the technical sense, according to which [c] “objects [are] constitut[iv]e [of] representations”? Do objects actually have (1c) representational agency, the power to constitute themselves as signs, or, in Peircean terms, to generate the interpretants that will constitute them as signs? And what does it mean for (2) “their tangible material existence [to] participate[] in its own signification”? Again, one can imagine a loose colloquial sense in which, say, [a] an arrow-shaped stone found by a park ranger and cleverly put by her to indexical use, built into a sign pointing in a certain direction, might be said to “participate” “materially” in the pointing. The fact that that would be an attributed participation, assigned to the stone by the park ranger who noticed the likeness and decided to put it to significational use, would not bother the passing camper who, unworried about theoretical complexities, only wants to know which way to go. The fact that Liu (1999b: 16) also refers elsewhere to “the materiality of the sign” suggests that she means something more than this loose attributive participation – that for her [b] the signification itself is at least partly material. What this would mean remains mysterious. “The materiality of the sign,” a common trope in discursivist poststructuralism, still retained considerable currency in the academy in the mid- to late 1990s, when Liu wrote this; that materiality was typically not theorized,9 only invoked, as in fact Liu does here, as a kind of mystified truism. The idea seemed to be that if the metaphoricity of a

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Liu reading Marx 61 word’s or other sign’s materiality could be wished away for a while, put in abeyance, one could imagine discourse somehow embodying a quasi-empirical “real world” without dualistically “referring” to it as an external objectivity. Hence for Liu the “tangible material existence” of objects “participates in its own signification rather than exists outside it”: if the materiality of (2a) the arrow-shaped granite object (or say the acoustics of a spoken word) can be imagined as somehow magically (1c/2b) leaching over into the significatory act that constitutes it as a sign, not only generating an interpretant but materializing that interpretant, infecting its mentality with the rock’s or sound’s materiality, then we might (at least in some utopian realm of theory) escape the mind/matter or phenomenalism/materialism dualism. Signs might then become for us the “real” world.10 Clearly, in any case, in this passage Liu strongly intuits that the (post-)Romantic model according to which the creation of universal equivalents is a “social act” performed by world-historical human AgentsA is inadequate: there are large-scale forces that are not quite human, but not quite not-human either, like language, signification, representation, and translation, that bring about significant change in the world. What those forces are, and to what extent they might be imagined or understood as agentive, Liu clearly doesn’t know, and cannot begin to theorize; but she suspects they may be important in some yet-to-be-determined way. Here’s another cast in the same direction: The imperatives of competing universalisms demand that we reconceptualize the ways in which meanings circulate meaningfully from language to language and culture to culture. As a migrant deixis of potential value, meaning acquires value in the process of exchange between actual signs. The circumstantial encounter of one sign with another (in a sentence) or another language (in translation) decides the manner in which the actualization or sabotage of meaning takes place. (19–20) I agree completely that we need to “reconceptualize the ways in which meanings circulate meaningfully from language to language and culture to culture” – especially to the extent that Liu’s phrasings here reflect existing understandings of what a meaning is, what it means for a meaning to circulate meaningfully, what it means for a meaning to be “actualized” or “sabotaged” (nothing in between?), what exactly “the process of [meaning-]exchange between actual signs” would entail in practice, how that process imparts value to meanings, and so on. Who or what attaches “meaningfulness” or value to meaning? Who or what “actualizes” or “sabotages” meaning? It’s not clear from any of this what meaning is, in fact, but it sounds very reified, as if “meanings” were stable objects subject to these various fates: circulated/exchanged like a dollar, or a book; sabotaged like a machine or a plan. A dollar bill or a book is still the same dollar bill or book after it has been exchanged; is the same true of a meaning? Almost certainly not; but the analogy Liu has set up entails (and so imaginatively fleshes forth) some fairly high degree of equivalence between the stability of the dollar bill that circulates

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62  Chapter 1 and the stability of the meaning that circulates. And yet if a meaning changes as it circulates, it would seem to be quite difficult to make the claim legitimately that it is a meaning that is circulating. Liu would most likely protest here that she didn’t mean any of this literally, that I’m performing a literalist reductio ad absurdum on what she intended as a rough analogical portrayal of meaning, as a springboard for a fuller theorization – but what would that theorization look like? To back off from the reductio, the important thing to note is that the impossibility of achieving perfect semantic stability does not mean that “culture” or “society” or “X” (whatever we want to call the group AgentA at work on such things) never strives to stabilize meanings as they circulate, only that such stabilizations are never perfect; and it seems to me likely that Liu is once again using a depersonalized crypto-structuralist rhetoric in order to grope toward an understanding of the functioning of such group AgentsA. Valuing is even more inexorably a cultural activity, something done by individual humans mostly as individualized AgentsI of an AgentiveA culture that has conditioned them to value certain beliefs, attitudes, phrasings, and so on positively (but with a whole complex range of positive valences) and others negatively, and channel those values into highly nuanced (inter)actions. The problem is that the phrase “As a migrant deixis of potential value, meaning acquires value in the process of exchange between actual signs” mystifies (desocializes) the cultural process of valuing, along with the process of meaning and the process of signifying – not to mention the processes of migrating, pointing (“deixis”), acquiring, and exchanging – by airbrushing the group human AgentsA of those processes out of the picture. As Liu presents the case, too, signs have AgencyA. Signs interact, and their interactions decide “the manner in which the actualization or sabotage of meaning takes place.” It’s not clear whether the signs are also at work actualizing or sabotaging meaning, or whether some other unnamed AgentA performs that action, and sign-interaction simply decides how it is performed. As it happens, there is a debate in Peirce studies over whether semiosis is action initiated by signs as AgentsA or by sentient interpreters as creators of signs; Joseph Ransdell (1976, 1981, 1986) is the primary proponent of the signs-as-AgentsA position, but it has been picked up by others, including Dinda L. Gorlée (1994, 2004, 2012) and Ritva Hartama-Heinonen (2008) in their applications of Peirce to what Gorlée calls “semiotranslation” and Hartama-Heinonen calls “abductive translation” (see Robinson 2015a and 2016b for discussion). This Platonizing view has been persuasively refuted by T. L. Short (1981, 1996, 2007),11 Mats Bergman (2009), and others, on the ground that as Peirce theorizes semiosis it is not hermetic, but depends for its functioning on “collateral experience” external to it (MS 640: 9v [1909]; cited in Bergman 106); and that semiosis is a logical abstraction derived from a communicative situation in which an utterer intends something and an interpreter interprets that something (SS 196–7 [1906]; cited in Bergman 124). But again, the generous reading of Liu is that she is not seriously arguing that signs have AgencyA; she is simply plying her depersonalized rhetoric against the standard individualistic Western view, that signs are wielded by individual utterers

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Liu reading Marx 63 and interpreters, as shorthand for something else – a something else that remains to-be-named-later. Obviously for every individual sentient being semiosis has been prestructured – Peirce would say by the commens,12 the aggregate mind of the community – so that phenomenologically it may seem to each individual as if the signs themselves were AgentiveA entities controlling their own interpretation. This would be a phenomenologically projected “shadow-play” or “subdrama,” how things may seem to us when we experience sources or channels of control that are beyond our ken, that should not be taken literally as how such things actually transpire. One more passage: Hence, I would like to sketch out a number of intersecting areas for a preliminary rethinking of [1] the production of meaning as value in circulatory relationship with other meanings (as no value can exist by itself). This tentative reworking of meaning-value may lead us to see that the much contested notion of translatability is often [2] a displaced global struggle (displaced onto metaphysics) over the reciprocity of meaning-value among historical languages. I have suggested in the introduction that there are at least two basic questions we need to think about in order to resist such metaphysical displacements and pursue a fruitful study of translatability as a theoretical and historical problem. First, how does [3] the circumstantial encounter of cultures produce and contest the reciprocity of meaning-value between their languages? Second, how does reciprocity become thinkable as an intellectual problem when predominantly unequal forms of global exchange characterize the material conditions of that exchange? Inasmuch as the historical (re)distribution of meaning-value constitutes a major aspect of global circulation, it is of paramount importance, I argue, to pay attention to [4] the granting and withholding of reciprocity of meaning-value by one language vis-à-vis another. (This struggle is proverbial in bilingual situations where a bilingual speaker always learns to deploy the languages he or she knows strategically under varying circumstance. He or she then becomes one of the physical sites of the processes I am trying to describe in this essay.) (1999b: 14; bracketed numbers added) Most of the spots I’ve numbered there are the typical abstract nominalizations of academic discourse: (1) “the production of meaning as value in circulatory relationship with other meanings (as no value can exist by itself)” means something like people in circulatory relationships with other people produce meaning as value (as no meaning or value can exist without a human group to produce and understand it). (2) The “displaced global struggle (displaced onto metaphysics) over the reciprocity of meaning-value among historical languages” signifies human speakers of different languages struggling globally “over the reciprocity of meaning-value among historical languages” and displacing that struggle onto metaphysics. (3) “How does the circumstantial encounter of cultures produce and contest the reciprocity of meaning-value between their languages?” means

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64  Chapter 1 that people in actual embodied and situated interlingual circumstances “produce and contest the reciprocity of meaning-value between their languages.” And so on. The depersonalizations/abstract nominalizations in these sentences are effectively a conventionalized way of referring to large-scale actions performed unconsciously by groups without explicit guidance from individual leaders. In (4), however, Liu goes further, and argues specifically that the languages “grant” or “withhold” the “reciprocity of meaning-value,” and that individual bilingual speakers are the “physical sites” of that process. In Kenneth Burke’s (1945/1969) terms she is outlining an Agent-Act-Scene ratio: the granting/ withholding of the reciprocity of meaning-value is the Act that is performed by languages as Agents(A) in or among bilingual speakers as their site or Scene. And indeed it does often seem to polyglot speakers that “the languages” we speak have “minds of their own,” that they want us to say things a certain way and no other, or that they deliberately (perversely) block us from expressing certain ideas – that we are the “physical site” on which the languages we speak work their often incomprehensible magic. If we wanted to squeeze translation into that ratio somehow, translation specifically as a byproduct of “learning to deploy languages” strategically, situationally, it would be the AgencyI by which the AgentA performs the Act. This is effectively Liu’s quasi-Benjaminian theory: that any two languages get the bilinguals who speak both to translate back and forth between them, in order to explore, establish, stabilize, and ultimately to universalize equivalences. Just getting those bilinguals to speak both languages is not enough, if each language is used in isolation from the other, in separate monolingual contexts. Translation is the Agency by which languages create universal equivalents. And Burke’s dramatistic pentad is useful in the exploration of such intuitions, even when we find ourselves unable to explain them. (How can a language possibly have a mind of its own? Of course, as I’ve just suggested, and will have occasion to suggest again, Walter Benjamin did believe precisely that. In Chapter 2 I will offer an icotic reading of Benjamin’s famous essay on the translator’s task that attempts – and I think fails, but in revealing ways – to reframe his kabbalistic mysticism along socioecological lines.) One excellent example of “the granting and withholding of reciprocity of meaning-value by one language vis-à-vis another” might in fact be the process by which, as we saw Liu (1999b: 35) arguing earlier, “the legal ban was so effective that it has made the word [夷 yi] literally disappear from the languages of today’s Chinese-speaking world.” According to the depersonalized model we find her developing here, in other words, the AgentA that “made the word literally disappear” would not be “the British,” or even “the legal ban” promulgated by the British; it would be “one language vis-à-vis another.” That wouldn’t yet give an adequate account of the process, of course – how it would even be conceivable for a language like English to be an AgentA capable of “withholding” the “reciprocity of meaning-value . . . vis-à-vis another” like Chinese – or should we say rather for Chinese to be an AgentA capable of withholding that reciprocity vis-àvis English? Liu doesn’t hint in either direction, but it may in fact be the latter: if

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Liu reading Marx 65 for example the AgencyI that worked to withhold that reciprocity was the spreading of shame, or strategic caution, or some other group affect in response to 夷 yi throughout the “Chinese-speaking world,” the withholding AgentA would have been a socioaffective ecology within the aggregate of Chinese speakers over the ensuing century and a half. This latter would constitute a Burkean reperspectivization of the AgentA-ActScene drama: it would make bilingual Chinese speakers-becoming-translators (say modernist intellectuals who had traveled and lived in Europe or North America) a collective AgentA that worked through the AgencyI of the social ecology of their aggregate strategic situated “learning to deploy languages” to organize (Act) the languages in a given bilingual intellectual Scene – to bring them into reciprocal interaction, stabilize the equivalences, grant meaning-value to some and withhold it from others. (This would constitute a tentative assimilation of Liu’s 夷 yi example to her 她 ta example; the sociocultural ethnographic study that would track the actual “disappearance” of 夷 yi from modern Chinese would almost certainly take us in other, more complex, and probably more interesting directions.) Of course the shift from Liu’s AgentA-Act-AgencyI-Scene ratio to mine would also necessarily have to be more complicated than a simple moving of the bilingual speakers from Scene to AgentA, since, as I began to suggest in connection with the previous example, mine would also have to be able to generate the phenomenology according to which “the granting and withholding of reciprocity of meaning-value [seemed to be performed not by human agents but] by one language vis-à-vis another” – the shadow-play in which things seem to happen because the languages make them happen. That phenomenology would be a subdrama created by and through and within the socioecological superdrama (perhaps as an enabling AgencyI or instrumentality?). And if we wanted (AgentA) social ecology of the speakers of Chinese >< English

(AgencyI) the circulation of regulatory/evaluative affect

(AgencyI) (Shadow AgentA) the Chinese language vis-à-vis English the super-sign yi/barbarian

(Act) withholding the “reciprocity of meaning-value” between 夷 yí and “barbarian”

(Shadow Act) withholding the “reciprocity of meaningvalue” between 夷 yí and “barbarian”

(Scene) Chinese–English interactions? Chinese communal language use with an imagined English interlocutor?

(Shadow Scene) bilingual speakers of Chinese (and English)

Figure 1.2  The shadow coauthoring of the tabooing of 夷 yi

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66  Chapter 1 to incorporate Liu (2004: 13–15, 31–70) on the super-sign yi/barbarian here, things would become even more complicated: Liu herself tends to represent the super-sign as an AgentA, but in my reperspectivization it would become a shadow super-AgencyI wielded by some sort of Anglo-Chinese cofigurative super-AgentA. And, tracking that cofigurativity upwards, the terms “reciprocity” and “visà-vis” in Liu’s formulation also suggest that the (sub-)AgentA that withheld the “reciprocity of meaning-value” between 夷 yi and “barbarian” was in fact neither “language,” neither “Chinese” nor “English,” not a socioaffective ecology of the speakers of just one language. The withholding was, as Liu puts it, “coauthored” by the two civilizations in tandem, in relationship (see Figure 1.2). The remaining chapters in this book constitute a series of exploratory forays into possible explanatory models for the putative AgentA that apparently performs these large-scale historical actions – beginning, in Chapter 2, with an attempt to voice that AgentA through the double-bind.

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2 The double-bind of Translation Quality Assessment

So if the socioecological AgentA that I’m calling icosis/ecosis wields its AgencyI through the circulation of regulatory/evaluative affect, how is that AgencyI channeled into the attitudes, impulses, opinions, orientations, and ultimately phenomenological “realities” of individual speakers of any one language or two languages, or of individual translators and readers and critics of translations? The genre that I have developed over the last couple of decades (Robinson 1992: 29–32, 51–3, 161–4; 1995, 2001: 170–9, 2006b, 2008: 187–90) to explore that channeling is the double-bind.1 The new double-bind that I offer here in Chapter 2 is keyed to Liu’s insistence that we historicize the creation of competing universal equivalents of translation: if what Liu theorizes as universal equivalents are to be found anywhere, it seems to me, they must be found at the heart of Translation Quality Assurance (TQA). I take as my authoritative guide to the double-binds of TQA the work of Juliane House (1996), through the link she herself draws between translation and the double-bind: “The fundamental characteristic of a translation is that it is a text that is doubly bound: on the one hand to its source text and on the other to the recipient’s communicative conditions” (24); “translation is constituted by a ‘double-binding’ relationship both to its source and to the communicative conditions of the receiving linguaculture” (29); the overt/covert distinction “goes some way towards getting out of the double-bind” (30), and so on. House seems to mean by the double-bind simply that the translation is tied or pulled in the usual two directions, without the kind of numbing or paralyzing dialectics that Gregory Bateson theorizes as the nightmarish ecosis of schizophrenia, and so may find my unpacking of her translational double-bind in Batesonian terms supererogatory; my ventriloquism suggests that she is only able to maintain her (1) Popperian idealization of TQA by (4) repressing the Batesonian conflicts. For Bateson (1956/1985: 206–8) the double-bind was a kind of nightmarish Hegelian dialectic: thesis: do X antithesis: do not-X synthesis: find yourself unable to escape the dialectic

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68  Chapter 2 He gives an example of a young schizophrenic man who is visited in the hospital by his mother (217). When he is happy to see her and tries to hug her, she flinches, causing him to pull back; when she notices him pulling back, she chides him for being afraid to express his emotions; when he becomes confused at this, she accuses him of not loving his mother. Visiting hours are over shortly after this, and as soon as she is gone he assaults an orderly. Here, clearly, both approaching her lovingly and pulling back in alarm at her flinch are wrong (“damned if I do and damned if I don’t” – also known as the “go away closer” syndrome), and the accusation of not loving his mother effectively traps him in the destructive dialectic, where his only recourse seems to be self-destructive mental and physical violence. As in previous explorations of this dialectic that I have published, however, I here expand Bateson’s model slightly by fractalizing his “synthetic” third command, which traps the addressee in the dialectic, into a sequence of three commands (3–5): (1) Do X. (2) Do not-X. (3) Internalize the command to do both, and expect censure for failure. (4) Repress all this, and despise anyone who reminds you of it. (5) Idealize the command-giver.

2.1 TQA 1: Define Translation Quality (TQ) in objective terms [a] Think of TQ as equivalence between an objectified source text (ST) and an objectified target text (TT). [b] Rethink equivalence so that (1a) the intertextual relation between the ST and the TT, which might be construed (but not by you) as only capable of being verified or falsified by actual people potentially variably, on a trial-and-error basis, comparing the TT with the ST, or (better yet) doing their own trial translations, becomes a textual property of the TT alone. [c] Think of TQ as naturally an objective property of the TT – so naturally, in fact, that it does not require a reader or interpreter or scholarly analyst to establish it. [d] Don’t think about the (1b) rethinking of (1a) equivalence as (1c) TQ. Don’t even notice (1d). [e] Follow Juliane House (1977, 1996) in thinking of objective equivalence in terms of three different kinds of meaning (semantic, pragmatic, and textual or text-linguistic) and two different kinds of text function (ideational and interpersonal), but don’t let her definition of the pragmatic aspect of equivalence as “the particular use of an expression on a specific occasion” (1996: 31), and as including the transformative effect of actual readers of the translation, distract you from understanding (1a) equivalence as (1c) a textual property of the TT. (And don’t forget to forget about 1d.)

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The double-bind of TQA 69 [f] Above all, don’t let House’s observation that “the illocutionary force of an utterance may often be predicted from grammatical features, e.g. word order, mood of the verb, stress, intonation or the presence of performative verbs” (31), followed by her warning that “in actual speech situations, it is, however, the context which clarifies the illocutionary force of an utterance” make you suspect that every time a different reader picks up a translation, or the translation is used for a different purpose, this constitutes a new “actual speech situation” necessitating a new clarification of the TT’s (or a given TT passage’s) illocutionary force. [g] In order to sustain the possibility fact that (1e) a text’s pragmatic meaning exists in objective form, understand the TT “itself” to be (1f) an “actual speech situation,” one that does not change in actual speech situations. [h] If it helps you to make (1g) this conceptual transition, imagine two different phases of the “Actual Speech Situation”: ASS1, in which someone actually says something to someone else in a specific real-world context, for example “I would argue that this TT is not quite equivalent to its ST,” and ASS2, the idealization of ASS1 as (1bc) a single stable objective text. [i] Intensify and ontologize the two-phase model in (1h) by imposing a replatonized faux-Aristotelian entelechy on it (one in which the telos or end dualistically dominates the entire movement): treat ASS1 as the mere potentiality of (1e) objective meaning-and-function that is actualized as the ideal ASS2. [j] Following Plato (and the “Saussure” of the Cours), reverse-engineer ASS1 as merely a bad imitation of ASS2. [k] Think of the TT not as ASS1 (which would change it radically every time some new reader read it, or it was used in some new context for some new purpose, and would thus leave it open to the variability of 2a) but as ASS2. [l] Let (1j-k) put TT=ASS1 under erasure. [m] Become only vaguely aware of, then gradually lose sight of, and ultimately forget entirely, the real readers or interpreters or translation scholars that might in some possible real world postmodern theory be required to read and construct the TT=ASS1 as equivalent to the ST. [n] If it is too difficult to (1m) forget TL readers entirely, think of them as all basically alike. They’re all humans, aren’t they? How different can they be? And if there’s no real difference in how they read or construct the TT=ASS2, there’s no need to reanalyze TQ in “every” “separate” TT=ASS1. [o] Idealize the TT=ASS2 in terms of a “pragmatic” “context of situation” that replaces (1m-n) real readers or interpreters with reader-types or interpretertypes that can be read as more or less stable “grammatical” features of the TT. [p] Think of the (1o) pragmatically idealized TT=ASS2 as containing its own “context of situation” around it, stably attached to it as a paratextual property, like a yard or a parking lot. [q] Note with warm approval how, in (1f), House’s description of ASS1 classified two of the embodied performative features of the interactive utterance, stress and intonation – cf. rhythm, pitch, timbre, volume, tone of voice, etc. – as

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70  Chapter 2 textualized “grammatical features,” and thus as honorary adumbrations of the transmogrification of ASS1 into ASS2. [r] Take this movement within ASS1 to be emblematic and predictive of (1)’s objectivist ASS1>ASS2 faux-Aristotelian entelechy. [s] Never consider the possibility ridiculous notion that (1h-i) objectivized meaning-and-function (ASS2ification) might not be the only possible stabilization of a text. [t] Don’t glance ahead to (2k), let alone (2l). You don’t need to know those things. [u] Be forewarned that without the protective stabilizations provided by objectification, a text (even this one!) would collapse into the chaotic, anarchic ironies and playful aporias of postmodern thought. [v] Remember that “anyone who is interested in a greater variety of texts, such as academic, literary, and other preservable texts, will not easily want to give up the hope that there is indeed what Popper (1976[: 180ff; see also Popper 1972/1979]) has called ‘World Three’, the world of what he called ‘objective knowledge’ [or, in a famous Popperian paraphrase that I place partly under fastidious erasure, ‘knowledge without a knowing subject’] that is embodied in theories, books, and texts – i.e., visible (and valuable) artifacts ‘with a degree of autonomy from their authors and with special properties for controlling how they will be interpreted’ (Olson 1996: 9) – and how they will be translated, we might pertinently add. It is these properties of non-ephemeral written texts (different from speech) that represent and preserve our intellectual world, which should not be degraded or ‘de-throned’ ” (House 15). [w] Understand “objective knowledge without a knowing subject” in translational terms to mean the transformation of “objective SL meaning without an SL reading subject” into “objective TL meaning without a TL reading subject,” and thus in the end “objective TT TQ without either an SL>TL translating subject or a TL reading subject.” [x] Reassure yourself that the ST’s “special properties for controlling” how it will be read (but not by subjects, let alone real readers) in the SL are not only objective properties in the ST, but control how they will be carried over as objective properties into the TT as well, controlling how the target reader will read it they will be read by the Ideal Passivity of the Reader-Type. [y] Worry that if these controlling properties are not carried over from the ST to the TT, not only will our intellectual world be “degraded or ‘de-throned’ ”; empirical research into TQA will become impossible. [z] Feel confident that the “intellectual world” that is thus preserved will be one without intellectual subjects a posthuman utopia.

2.2 TQA 2: Define TQ in subjective terms [a] Think of TQ as purely a reader-construct, a phenomenology. [b] Scoff at the idea that there could exist such a thing as (1v-z) “knowledge without a knowing subject.”

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The double-bind of TQA 71 [c] Know that knowing is a purposive situated activity performed by subjects, full stop. Know that “knowledge” stored in books only exists when it is read, constructed as meaningful, and internalized as knowledge by subjects, and that if no one reads those books, the words written there are not only not knowledge; they aren’t even words. ([1h-s] ASS1 is all; ASS2 is a platonizing fantasy.) [d] Deny the possibility of a (1z) posthuman utopia. Popper’s World Three is on life support from World Two (human subjectivity). The instant the last human died, World Three would devolve into World One (physical objects). [e] Consider it a truism that subjects are needed not only to read STs and TTs, and so to bring them to life; they are needed to translate STs into TTs, and so to create the (World Two) subjective conditions for the post hoc (World Three) objectification of meaning, translation, and translation quality. [f] Always remember that you know what you want to know – that you guide what you learn from experience through rational reflection. Never let yourself begin thinking that your knowing is guided by “hegemony,” “the political unconscious,” “ruling ideology,” or other double-binding voices in your head. Dismiss such notions as laughable conspiracy theories. [g] Think of the subjectivity of TQ as a freedom issue, and the (TQA 1) myth of objectivity as a thin disguise for authoritarianism. No one can dictate the quality of a given translation to you. You have a right to your opinion, and your opinion is theoretically just as valid as anyone else’s. [h] Do not reflect on the fact that objectivizations of TQ are regularly used in vetting the publishability, usability, or legality of translations. [i] If you do reflect on (2h), think of it as a form of arbitrary tyranny that someone is given the power to transform what is essentially a subjective TQA into a TQA that is widely and erroneously believed to be objective. [j] Do not reflect on the subject–object dualism that pervades (2a-i). Whatever you do, do not historicize it as a Western philosophical fixation. Don’t let anyone undermine it for you along those “cultural-relativist” lines. Give it as little thought as possible. [k] If the translation whose quality is being assessed is your own, chafe at what you should consider the faceless bureaucratic coerciveness of institutional determinations of its acceptability, of the revisions that are required for it to be acceptable, or of the consequences for you (no pay?) and the translation (no publication? extensive editing without a chance for you to weigh in on the edits?) if the revisions are not performed to the satisfaction of whatever random bureaucrat has been put in charge of such determinations. [l] Don’t notice that, surprisingly for a subjective construct, TQA often seems to have the calm persistent thereness of objectivity (as in 2h). There is often a high degree of agreement on the quality of a given translation. There is often a high degree of agreement on the qualities that a good translation must have. [m] If (2l) somehow manages to force itself upon your consciousness, explain it as the mere mythic illusion of objectivity, maintained by social practices.

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72  Chapter 2 The post-Kantian social-constructivism that explains this illusion is (2d) the World Two life support that maintains Popper’s desperate attempt to believe in the existence of a World Three. [n] Don’t attribute (2l-m) to the whispering of a double-binding voice in your head. [o] Don’t read (1f-s). [p] If you do happen to glance over (2o) those instructions, scoff at them as blatant absurdities. [q] Ignore criticisms like “The aversion of propagators of this approach against any kind of objectivization, systematization and rule-hypothesizing in translation procedures leads to a distorted view of translation and a reduction of translation evaluation research to examining each individual translation act as an individual creative endeavour” (House 1996: 3). [r] Know that without the deceptive idealizations of (1f-s), House would have to admit that her own insistence on pragmatic equivalence would also require translation evaluation research to examine each individual interaction between a translator and a target reader as what ethnomethodologists call “a new first time” (Heritage 1984: 124; see Robinson 2006a: 142).

2.3 TQA 3: Internalize the command to do both TQA 1  and TQA 2, and expect censure for failure at either [a] Understand that TQA 1 and TQA 2 are both valuable and indeed indispensable approaches to the study of translation, and that it would be counterintuitive and ultimately destructive to reject either. [b] Shy away from dogmatic hobby-horses. Too exclusive and territorial an adherence to a single narrow methodological or philosophical paradigm in TS is likely to sacrifice experiential realism and complexity to explanatory elegance. [c] Feel instinctively that the high-flying philosophical antics of TQA 2 without TQA 1’s solid grounding in common sense and actual translation practice would be mere empty verbiage and idle mind-games, and that the stable categories and hypostatizations and repressive erasures of TQA 1 without TQA 2’s philosophical interrogations would be stale uncritical prejudice. [d] Feel instinctively that TQA 1 and TQA 2 are both rather excessive philosophical positions that are abstract and therefore alien to common sense and actual translation practice, and that the best place to spread out your practical and theoretical tools would be somewhere in the middle, avoiding both extremes. [e] Let your determination to stick to that middle ground make you timid and risk-averse. [f] Understand without being told that what is at stake here is not just your professional integrity as a translation scholar, but your worth as a human being. If you can successfully think of TQ both as semantic/pragmatic/ text-linguistic equivalence and as a social construct within which equivalence

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The double-bind of TQA 73 is just one constructed translational ideal among many, you are not only a good TS scholar, but a good person. [g] Understand without being told that you can’t do both, and thus will never be either a good TS scholar or a good person. [h] Expect to have your nose rubbed fiercely in your failures: you will be derided as a slave to a philosophically discredited premodern common sense if you obey TQA 1, and as a slave to the latest intellectual fashions if you obey TQA 2. [i] Internalize the negative conception these conflicting commands mandate not only of you but of translation studies (TS) in general. Think of the translation scholar as inherently or “naturally” trapped between the conflicting demands to be both empirical and imaginative, commonsensical and deconstructive. [j] Fight the negative conception of TS that the impossibility of obeying both TQA 1 and TQA 2 mandates by working harder, and calling on other translation scholars to work harder as well, to obey both TQA 1 and TQA 2. If only scholars were both more commonsensically oriented toward stabilized and even universalized equivalence as the only true goal of TQ and more philosophically oriented toward the shifting perspectives that undermine the possibility of equivalence, people would respect you and your profession more. Let this transform TQA 1–2–3 into a vicious circle from which there is no escape. [k] To the extent that you lean more toward obeying TQA 2, base your translation research on those realms in the translation field where too obsessive a focus on text-linguistics and objectivized language use is generally frowned upon, like the translation of Great Literature (Venuti 1995, 1998), or ideologically charged journalistic texts (Baker 2006). [l] To the extent that you lean more toward obeying TQA 1, base your translation research on those realms in the translation field where “naïve” or “oldfashioned” conceptions of textual equivalence are still highly valued, such as technical translation. [m] To the extent that you begin to experience your leaning in (3k) as selfserving, protectionist, and therefore narrow and dogmatic (see 3b), develop philosophically sophisticated ways of studying technical translation (see Robinson 1998a). [n] To the extent that you begin to experience your leaning in (3l) as self-­ serving, protectionist, and therefore narrow and dogmatic (see 3b), develop objectivist/structuralist ways of studying literary or philosophical translation (see 1v-z). [o] Realize that your workarounds in (3k-n) are still too narrow and dogmatic, that you are still trapped in a paradigm, and will never be broad and inclusive enough to be a student of translation. [p] Conclude that the problem is too narrow a conception of “translation.” Tell yourself and others that the world is more complicated than that now, that we are all hybrid interculturalists these days, that nobody “translates” any

74  Chapter 2 more, really, and therefore that translation studies is no longer needed. Call yourself a “post-translation scholar.”

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2.4 TQA 4: Repress TQA 1–2–3 and despise anyone who reminds you of it [a] Reassure yourself that there really is no conflict between TQA 1 and TQA 2 at all. It’s only when people start blowing a few peripheral examples way out of proportion and pretending that they have some significant bearing on the issue that it comes to seem as if the study of translation is a hermeneutic steeped in irresolvable contradictions. If you ignore all those unnecessary nitpicky complications, the study of translation boils down to a very simple process, really: your commonsensical understanding of translation as the creation of an equivalent text in another language is exactly what translation is. Anyone who trumps up a double-bind out of all this is probably on summer vacation in Russia. [b] Scoff at the notion that any one translation scholar should have to cover the entire field (TQA 1 + 2 = 3). We all do our bit. Each scholar makes his or her own small contribution to the field; just what the “whole truth” is about translation is up to the subjectivity of future generations (and maybe not even them) to decide. [c] Remark indignantly that it is not a condemnable offense to be somewhat narrowly focused; it is human. [d] Observe how easy it is for detractors to call a passionate commitment to a way of seeing things “dogmatic.” Caring deeply about translation and translation research is not a crime. [e] Resist any suggestion that we might need philosophers to tell us what objectivity and subjectivity mean, and whether there are any valid epistemological grounds for either, and whether our interest in making such distinction is Western or Eastern or Northern or Southern or otherwise mired in some specific civilizationally situated intellectual history or “civilizational spell” (Robinson 2017: ch. 3). Remind yourself that we all not only know well enough how to work with those concepts, but find them useful in distinguishing the important from the peripheral, and so in prioritizing our practical tasks. [f] Don’t waste your time refuting oddball challenges to what you know to be true. Don’t waste your time even reading those challenges. Tell yourself that life’s too short for such frivolities.

2.5 TQA 5: Idealize the command-giver [a] Believe that there is no command-giver; there is simply a factual state of affairs. Don’t even deny the existence of a command-giver; just never let the possibility arise. [b] Tell yourself that there just is such a thing as objective knowledge – that printed and spoken texts just do have an objective structure and meaning,

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The double-bind of TQA 75 in serene isolation from “knowing subjects.” It’s not that you want it to be true, or that you need for it to be true in order for whole masses of other important values and beliefs that you hold dear to be valid, or that belief in objective knowledge without a knowing subject or TQ without a translating or reading subject justifies your entire professional career as a researcher – let alone that I keep whispering in your ear that it’s true. It just is true. [c] Tell yourself that you don’t have to justify your evaluation of a translation in any kind of public way, because there’s no particular reason anyone else needs to agree with you on it. If you think it’s good, it is, for you. If you think it’s no good, it’s no good, for you. Period. This is not a state of affairs anyone created, or told you about; it’s just the way things are. [d] To the extent that you reject all command-givers and believe in your own personal freedom to translate or study translation or evaluate other people’s translations any way you please, don’t recognize the origins of that belief in resistance to external or internalized guidance. Pay no attention to the element of defiance in your maverick sense of personal freedom. You do as you wish and that’s final. [e] To the extent that you sense some minor guidance in this area – a sneaking suspicion that you didn’t invent everything you believe about translation or equivalence or objectivity or subjectivity or reality in general all on your own, based entirely on your own practical experience of professional translation – take the guiding force to be the collective reason of the best minds, based on empirical research. It’s not that you were somehow mysteriously “swayed” (Robinson 2011) to believe these things you believe; you were convinced, rationally. [f] To the extent that you identify the command-giver as “society,” or “socialization,” or “ideology,” or “hegemony,” do not think of these commands as tyranny or authoritarian control; think of them as the ordinary professional discipline that makes orderly social life possible, even enjoyable. If there weren’t rules, there would be chaos. If there were no social norms, no principles, no organization, no one would know how to act. Nothing would ever get done. And, pleased as Laozi and other Daoist 無爲 wuwei freaks might like that, come on, there would be no such thing as efficiency. Laozi is wrong: nothing would run smoothly. [g] Rest assured that, whatever might conceivably be going on under the surface, whatever wet-n-wild philosophical spin might be put on the study of translation as you understand and practice it, it’s all good, and you’re all right. You’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about.

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Critical Theses on translation 2 Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 Critical Thesis 2.1 There is an important difference between “address” and “communication.” This rehearses CT 1.6: Whereas “address” indicates a social relation (that between addresser and addressee) that is primarily practical and performative in nature, hence undetermined and still-to-come, “communication” names the imaginary representation of that relation in terms of pronominal identities, informational content, and receptive destinations: who we are supposed to be and what we were supposed to mean. Theories of communication regularly obscure the fact of address in communication, whereupon they are derived from the assumption that supposedly “we” should be able to “communicate” among ourselves if “we” are a linguistic community. To confuse address with communication is thus a classic hallmark of what we call “the regime of homolingual address.” (Sakai and Solomon 2006a: 7) Or, to draw on Sakai and Solomon’s recurring synonyms for homolingual address: “what we call ‘the regime of communicational spatialization/totalization/ representation.’ ” Sakai and Solomon (2006a) take over from Sakai (1997) the association of “address” with the attitude of heterolingual address, and of “communication” with the regime of homolingual address. Critical Thesis 2.2 Any social encounter (“address”) is heterogeneous and heterolingual from the outset, because other people are always exterior to any speaker, a fact that guarantees the possibility of misunderstanding. We are all foreigners to each other. This rehearsal of CT 1.5 does not mean that we are incapable of communicating with each other; it only means that we are incapable of guaranteeing understanding. As in CT 2.1, we address each other without that guarantee, risking

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78  Critical Theses on translation 2 misunderstanding (CT 2.5). Even an apparently homolingual address, in other words, is fundamentally heterolingual: even when we think we are addressing someone who is like us in (almost) every way, who speaks our language “natively,” who shares our homeland and our norms and our values – even when we think we are addressing that person “homolingually,” in other words – the very fact that s/he is other, in a different body, occupying a different physical location in the world and perspective on the world, means that s/he is “alien” or “foreign” to us, and our address to that person is actually heterolingual. The “truly” or “perfectly” homolingual address, ideally purged of all heterolinguality, is achieved only in the ideological imaginaries of the regime of homolingual address. At one point Sakai and Solomon track the dialogue between François Jullien and Thierry Marchaisse on, among other subjects, a conversation Michel Foucault had in Japan with some Zen monks; Jullien (b. 1951), a Sinologist who teaches at Paris Diderot University, complains to the editor and translator Marchaisse (b. 1955) that “when I try to present [my work on Chinese philosophy to Westerners], I do not at the outset ‘meet’ anyone, I have no designated partner” (translated by and quoted in Sakai and Solomon 10). Implicit in that complaint is an ideal of interiority/insider status: a French speaker speaking to French people about French things should automatically and by definition “meet” them, encounter them at a level of automatic understanding, and thus in a sense should have a whole country full of designated partners, so that, as Sakai (1997) would put it, communication is guaranteed in advance (CT 1.6). We should not allow ourselves to be pulled into that kind of thinking, Sakai and Solomon warn, but we can learn from it: In fact, Jullien’s difficulty is itself an incredibly fecund clue: identity does not precede communication, but is rather abstracted from it after the instance of enunciation. The fact that there is no “designated partner” is in fact the essential situation of address, in each and every instance, since address does not require the presupposition of relation (codified through designation) to be effective. (10) The “indecision” of address is “constitutive”; but this constitutive indecision is obscured [in traditional communication theories, such as are instanced by Jullien] through representations based on the mutual recognition of designated positions. From such a perspective, the situation of ‘no “designated partner” ’ becomes an obstacle. What is being obstructed? Certainly not the form of address itself. Obstruction, were there any, would occur only when the work of address becomes reified into a thing. Hence, the relation of address becomes identified with the interiority of a “given position” designated as Chinese. (10)

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Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 79 The last three words there, “designated as Chinese,” refer to a “joke” Jullien makes about the mysteries of otherness: “That’s the place where it all becomes Chinese” (translated by and quoted in Sakai and Solomon 10). Whatever is not immediately available to “us” here on the “inside,” in French among native speakers of French, “becomes Chinese” (see CT 2.3), as in the English phrase “it’s all Greek to me.” Pace Jullien, for Sakai and Solomon (7) “all readers, including the author, operate within the same scope of (de)legitimation, and the meaning of the text can only be the product of endless re-readings of readings among these variable positions”: the relativity of “legitimate” readings, and thus the impossibility of a “true” or “objective” reading, is the result of the heterolingual address, the heterogeneity of all social relations. Critical Thesis 2.3 Heterolingual address is considered a problem, to be solved by the regime of homolingual address. According to this rehearsal of CT 1.3ab, because people live in the same region, speak the same language, and (ideally) come from the same ethnic stock, “we” (in the regime of homolingual address) assume that they share the same values and cultural assumptions and therefore understand things said and written by each other “in a primary, authentic manner” (Sakai and Solomon 9). The French understand the French in that manner. All Westerners understand other Westerners, and Western texts, in that manner. All Chinese understand other Chinese, and Chinese texts, in that manner. “Jullien and Marchaisse thus confuse the pronominal invocation ‘we’ with a group of those who are inherently capable of communicating the same information with each other. Such communication is conceived of solely in terms of accurate repetition” (Sakai and Solomon 11–12). Of course people who live in the same region and speak the same language do tend empirically to develop a unified culture organized around unified values; people who come from outside that culture do tend to need translation to communicate with those on the “inside.” Sakai and Solomon are not attempting to refute this tendency; they’re attempting to historicize it, burrow down into its etiology, and specifically to show how the homolingual address conceals within it an ineradicable core of heterolingual address (CT 2.2), and thus is always conditioned by translation (CT 2.8). What they do not explore are the channels by which homolingual address becomes a regime, an ideological formation that suppresses the ongoing factuality of heterolingual address. As they present it, it just sort of happens. It’s ideology at work. My icotic theory is an attempt to build that bridge from address to regime – and specifically to a regime that is situated historically, that emerges temporally and, despite its attempts to “spatialize” time into a stable system, must be continually maintained temporally as well, because it can and does fail in a myriad tiny ways, and may even be ravaged and destroyed, by “natural” and “unnatural”

80  Critical Theses on translation 2

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disasters (earthquakes/tsunamis/etc., war, genocide, forced relocation – see Robinson 2013a: First Essay for discussion). Critical Thesis 2.4 In the regime of homolingual address, designated subject positions (like “Me” and “the Foreigner”), communicational totalities (like the perfect understanding guaranteed by shared belonging to a single languageuse community), disciplinary divisions in the construction of knowledge (like area studies), and geopolitical regions (like France and Japan, Europe and Asia, the West and the Rest) are all “sutured” into an unwieldy but ideologically stabilized package that “eras[es] the moment of address” (Sakai and Solomon 15). This isomorphic construct is what Sakai and Solomon (16) call an “amphibological region,” a “regime of co-figuration that inevitably erases the moments of social relation and construes the dialogue exclusively in communication between fixed subject positions ordered by the homolingual address and localized by spatial representation.” Examples would include “German Romanticism, Chinese Confucianism, and American Pragmatism, . . . as would the personalities populating it, such as French specialists of Oriental works (or, quite simply, French specialists of French works in a world system organized around geopolitical divisions of work)” (17). This is also the sense in which “Europe” or “the West” comes to be associated with “modernity” (CT 2.20). Sakai and Solomon note that Foucault identifies “Europe both as a definite geographical region and as a universal category of thought through which categories themselves appear” (17), and conclude that “the amphibological region is, thus, precisely, the quintessential bio-political habitat corresponding to Foucault’s modern Man” (17). It’s not, in other words, just that we associate “Europe” or “the West” with modernity, in the sense that “to be modern” is “to imitate the West”; on a broader scale, this Eurocentric amphiboly is one of many such sutured cofigurative packages containing “fixed subject positions ordered by the homolingual address and localized by spatial representation,” and cofigured through tensile oppositions between a collectivized self and a unified other. As I have shown elsewhere (Robinson 2015a: section 3.7; 2017), German Romanticism was shaped by Orientalist discourses, intense assimilative reading in Latin, French, English, and German translations of Chinese and Indian classics, which the Romantics at first despised, then, gradually, came to admire. American Transcendentalism was similarly shaped by Emerson’s and Thoreau’s intense assimilative reading in French and English translations of the Chinese Daoist and Confucian classics (and also of German Romanticism); and American Pragmatism emerged out of American Transcendentalism, blending the Idealism that the Transcendentalists borrowed from Germany with the vitalism that the Transcendentalists borrowed from Daoism, in opposition to more mainstream materialist conceptions of scientific method in Europe and the US.

Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 81

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To track these histories of cofigurative influence is to restore the “moment of address” that is normatively erased by and in and through these amphibolies. This rehistoricization is the chief task of CTS (cf. CT 1.14). Critical Thesis 2.5 The “unity of language” posited by the regime of homolingual address (Sakai and Solomon 13) cannot be experienced phenomenologically, in the situated body. It is an ideological imaginary that we must be taught to construct as a kind of hologram. What we experience phenomenologically is inevitably a mixture: sometimes the “locals” (our compatriots) with whom we speak seem to understand us, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the “foreigners” with whom we speak seem to understand us – sometimes even better than our fellow “native speakers” – and sometimes they don’t. We often feel inclined to attribute a “foreigner’s” misunderstanding to his or her inadequate command of our first language: so-called “foreigner speech” may be our strongest phenomenological experience of the “(dis)unity of language” thesis posited by the regime of homolingual address, which leads us to expect communicative difficulties with “outsiders,” people from beyond the borders of our “unity of language” region. But “insiders” misunderstand us often enough too, and we likewise misunderstand them. We tend to attribute these latter misunderstandings to clashes in group membership – linguistic disunity is common across gender, class, race, and age lines, a fact that seems “counterintuitive” (ideologically incorrect) from within the regime of homolingual address – but we experience serious misunderstandings with our same-sex siblings too, even when we are only a year or two apart in age, even when we are twins or multiples. The phenomenology of discursive interactions both within and across linguistic borders tends to support Sakai’s notion of heterolingual address; but the regime of homolingual address “educates” or icotically organizes that phenomenology so as to make it seem automatically and exclusively easy to interact with people who speak our first language natively. Critical Thesis 2.6 Forms or events of “heterolingual address” do not constitute a “regime”; they are the state of разноречие raznorechie “heteroglossia” (to use Bakhtin’s term) to which the regime of homolingual address is a unifying response. Sakai (1997: 9) refers in CT 1.7 to what happens “when your attitude is that of the heterolingual address” – namely, an attitude of tolerance for complexity, a willingness to muddle through confusions and mobilities without imposing an ideological episteme of purity and clarity on them in advance (a willingness that Laozi calls 無知 wuzhi – see section 5.1). “Forms of address that take such exteriority into account in the very formation of an impossible interiority are what we call ‘heterolingual forms of address.’ The social relationships denoted by such forms do not ‘add up to’ anything – they form what can be called a

82  Critical Theses on translation 2

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non-aggregate community” (Sakai and Solomon 8). It is not, in other words, a stable community, one with stable properties within stable boundaries; it is “non-aggregate” in the sense of consisting of and constituted by a non-organized series-without-seriality of open-ended address-events between and among people who are other to each other. Critical Thesis 2.7 The regime of homolingual address is a hermeneutic that institutes an imaginary “economy that regulates the distribution of the foreign” (Sakai and Solomon 8) into a perfectly alienated linguistic sphere. If translation in Gadamer’s (1960/2010: 311–12; Weinsheimer and Marshall 1975/1989: 307) TS terms is a Horizonverschmelzung “fusion of horizons” – “the” source-cultural horizon of understanding merged with “the” targetcultural horizon of understanding – “each horizon must be first sanitized of the foreign contamination and homogenized, so that the foreign may come only from without” (Sakai and Solomon 8). According to the regime of homolingual address, “we” – in here on the inside, in “our” “native land” – address only “ourselves,” in-groupers, “in” “our” “native language,” and therefore always require translations before “we” can understand “them,” the “foreigners” who live on the “outside.” From within “their” own intracultural perspective, each such linguistic sphere that is “theirs,” not “our own” – that belongs to “foreigners” homolingually defined, relative to “us” – is organized around the same principle of in-grouper unity. Sakai and Solomon discuss Jullien’s ideological thematization of “the Chinese” along these lines, as linguistically and culturally homogeneous; and while as they say “it would be quite easy to show that the constitution of the ‘outside’ is based instead upon the confusion and mobility enabled by the ambiguities in the word ‘Chinese,’ which becomes a site of immanence that nevertheless transcendentally sutures an immense plethora of different enunciative positions, historical periods, and social identities” (9), the regime of homolingual address responds to and solves that confusion and that mobility by imposing an ideological stabilization on them. To “us” (non-Chinese), the Chinese are a perennial mystery; to “us” (Chinese) “we” Chinese are all the same, instantaneously and automatically available for perfect and total understanding. The most powerful historical form to-date of this hermeneutic notion has certainly been found in the construction of an idealized, Western readership that is posited as someone who identifies with the position continuous with “Western thought”; Western readership is supposedly capable of comprehending “from within the horizon of the Western prejudice,” the entirety of Western thought from Heraclitus to Erigena, from Leibniz to James, down to Whitehead and Sartre. It is precisely the figure of Western readership that implicitly underlies the Japanese Zen monk’s query about Foucault’s work in translation. (Sakai and Solomon 9)

Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 83

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Marchaisse notes that Foucault can’t understand Zen as the Zen monks do; conversely, one would have to say that Japanese readers can’t understand Foucault as the French (or other Westerners) do. It is because “they” are by definition on the outside that they don’t speak “our” “native language.” If “they” do speak “our” “native language,” that is an ideological counterfact that must be suppressed or ignored. And as Sakai and Solomon note, Japanese translations may well in fact pose questions of “understanding” back to the “original” French text in such a way that it requires us to ask of French readers exactly the same question. Indeed, we must call into question the assumption of immanence in the monk’s query that implicitly links French readers to the French text. The fact that one can suture French language to French community does not in itself guarantee the success of communication. (Sakai and Solomon 7) The possibility that “foreigners” may understand “our” texts better than we do ourselves must likewise be ideologically foreclosed. This radical spatialization of subject positions is “a key feature of communicational representation” (Sakai and Solomon 11), and its failure (in Jullien, say) prompts frustration and negativity; but “seen from the perspective of communication-ex-posed-in-address rather than communication-abstracted­ from-address, the undesignated partner who might listen to me presents both of us (and others) with the moment at which social relations can occur – precisely because they remain open” (11). Critical Thesis 2.8 Because in the attitude of the heterolingual address we are all foreigners to each other, in addressing each other we are also all translators. “Translation names primarily a social relationship whose form permeates linguistic activity as a whole, rather than simply comprising a secondary or exceptional situation” (Sakai and Solomon 9). All address is heterolingual; hence all address is translation. This radical expansion of the social scope of translation is one of the key differences between CTS and TS. For Jullien and Marchaisse, “it is only the foreign outside ‘our’ tradition that is incomprehensible” (10). Jullien complains that when he tries to explain Chinese philosophy to Westerners, “it is extremely difficult for me to begin to make myself heard” (quoted in Sakai and Solomon 10) – but, Sakai and Solomon ask, isn’t that true of all communication-as-­heterolingual-address? (They say it “ex-poses” “every instance of ­communication” – following Jean-Luc Nancy,1 I take it, in using “ex-posing” to mean something like “posing the exteriority of the other” in all communication, or “exteriorizing the position of the other.”) In the regime of homolingual address, “ ‘we’ thus have a long historical experience of encountering ‘them,’ from whence ‘our’ experience is immediately communicable among ‘us’; ‘their’ experience, by contrast, requires translation” (11).

84  Critical Theses on translation 2 The corrective to that orientation emerging out of the attitude of the heterolingual address is that all address requires translation.

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Critical Thesis 2.9 The “non-philosophy of the future” that Sakai and Solomon project emerges out of the multitude of “foreigners-without-the-foreign” (18) – their/our social relations emerging out of the heterolingual address and translation, their identities derived from those relations. The notion of “foreigners-without-the-foreign” as Sakai and Solomon conceive it is a principled retreat back from the homolingual “distribution of the foreign” to the outside (CT 1.7, 1.12, 2.7) to the heterolingual attitude that we are all foreigners to each other (CT 2.8). “Other alternative names” for the foreigner-without-the-foreign, Sakai and Solomon tell us, “might include the stranger-without-estrangement, the outsider-without-outside, and/or the alien-without-alienation” (33n34). The idea is that, because every address to another is risky from the outset, because there is always the risk of ­misunderstanding – because the other is always other (and thus a foreigner/ stranger/alien) to us and we are always other (and thus a foreigner etc.) to them – we are all in the same leaky boat and should let our social encounters emerge from our interactive risk-taking, our risky relations, without trying to impose rigid ideological categories on them, without trying to “spatialize” those relations into “the homeland” and its homogeneous inhabits who all instantly understand each other, and “foreign lands” full of foreigners who understand each other but cannot even begin to understand us, and who will forever remain a mystery to us. Whereas philosophy in its most general form as a pretense of knowing the real (either in terms of a materialist identification of the real with matter or a phenomenological identification of the real with the phenomenon) produces Bodies of Knowledge that Capitalize upon the amphibological regions of the World (understood, in philosophical fashion of course, as given), a non-­ philosophy of the future begins, without donation or essence, from the identity of the multitude as foreigner. (33n33; emphasis in original) Sakai and Solomon take the theme of “non-philosophy” (as a corrective to the stable representations of “philosophy”) from François Laruelle (Brassier 2006), along with Jean-Luc Nancy a key influence in CTS. Critical Thesis 2.10 There are important links to be drawn between “exteriority” as the social relations between foreigners-without-the-foreign and “externality” as the outsideness of “a third party not directly participating in the exchange of the other two” (Sakai and Solomon 22) – that latter a role that is traditionally assigned to the translator. The problem is, though, that they don’t draw those links: their introductory chapter in Traces 4 is a kind of manifesto for a research project or agenda that is

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Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 85 ongoing, and in many places only barely begins to adumbrate the kind of findings they or we might expect to reach after years of concerted scholarly effort. Their take on “externality” here is largely negative, based on “the outsideness of ‘a third party not directly participating in the exchange of the other two,’ ” and more specifically on the conception of translation as grounded in that outsideness. But surely the concept of the translator that Sakai (1997: 13) developed under the rubric of the “subject in transit” (CT 1.11) suggests a series of quite promising links between “good” exteriority and “bad” externality? Sakai’s ruminations there involved the breakdown of the Benvenistean regime of pronominal personalization in the transitory nature of the translator’s subjectivity; and in Chapter 4 I suggest a model for CTS based on free indirect discourse and Bakhtinian double-voicing in which “a third party not directly participating in the exchange of the other two” is indirectly participating in the exchange of the other two, by blending the first and third persons in a single heterolingual address. I also suggest there that Eve Sedgwick’s notion of periperformativity, in which “witnesses” to the performative encounter between “the other two” influence the outcome, might offer a useful model for the thinking of “the crowd” – and thus, in Sakai and Solomon’s terms, the multitude of foreigners-without-the-foreign (CT 2.8–9). Critical Thesis 2.11 The “border between two physically adjacent countries[, which] does not in itself form a positive space, but is the negative condition for the creation of the national interiorities on both sides of the line” (Sakai and Solomon 22), is the kind of interculture or intercultural externality often associated with translators, who may also be expected to “be found in the silent, stuttering and/or interrupted interstices between the talking subjects and authoritative bodies typically supported by the nation-States” (22). This is a crypto-structuralist argument, according to which borders are lines, not “positive spaces”; as lines between “physically adjacent countries” they simply negate continuity, and so must be seen as “the negative condition for the creation of the national interiorities on both sides of the line” (see Figure 2.1). The

+

National Interiority 1

– b o r d e r l i n e

+

National Interiority 2

Figure 2.1  The structuralist emptying-out of borderlands as abstract borderlines

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86  Critical Theses on translation 2 positivity of National Interiority 1 could conceivably (and in fact typically does) drift or flow to the right and leach over into National Interiority 2; what is specifically negative about the borderline between them is that it blocks that flow. That block has the effect – a salutary effect, for the regime of homolingual address – of dividing the ubiquity of heterolingual address into perfectly separated homolingualities, one on each side of the line. Sakai and Solomon’s argument is first that in the regime of homolingual address this binary negativity is the only space allotted to translators, a mere line, a negated cipher, and then that globalization has meant the wild proliferation of those interstices. As a diagnosis of the geopolitical effects of the regime of homolingual address, this is acute. The difficulty with Sakai and Solomon’s formulation, however, is that they seem to suggest that globalization has made this crypto-structuralist nightmare a reality. But – surely not? Surely the reduction of borderlands to borderlines, and of borderlines to mere binary negativities, is only an imaginary ideological effect projected by the regime of homolingual address? Surely the heterolingual situation on the ground is that those interstices are not so much proliferated by globalization as they are intrinsic to all social relations, all social encounters between any two persons? And even in the regime of homolingual address, surely globalization entails not just the proliferation of interstices but the socioecological management of such interstices? And surely, therefore, in any attitude of heterolingual address mobilized as resistance to that regime, the (CT 2.10, Chapter 4) periperformative intercultures inhabited by translators – indeed by all of us as translators (CT 2.8) – are emphatically not “the [depersonalized structuralist] silent, stuttering and/or interrupted interstices between the talking subjects and authoritative bodies typically supported by the nation-States,” but a fractal human creativity (誠 cheng – see section 5.1), which not only builds temporary and precarious bridges in and through the heterolingual address, but, by doing so, tracks, tests, and (de)stabilizes spaces of “communication and commensurability” (CT 1.12– 14, 1.17, 2.12–13)? And even if that creativity also has the effect of generating and maintaining national languages (CT 2.14), and thus in the end perpetuating homolingual control and domination, surely that too is an ideological positivity, not just the negativity of “silent, stuttering and/or interrupted interstices”? As we found in section 1.4, structuralist depersonalizations are an ever-present temptation in CTS. And to say that is to suggest not only that structuralism is an arm of the regime of homolingual address, but that CTS scholars committed to the attitude of the heterolingual address are not beyond that arm’s reach. Critical Thesis 2.12 Practical acts of translation open up “a space of communication and commensurability” (Sakai and Solomon 13) and then test and refine that space. In the process of that testing they also uncover nodes of resistance that, if they remain difficult enough to work around, lead to talk of “untranslatability” and “incommensurability.” The impulse to thematize those knots and nodes of resistance as a stable state of affairs, however – as the “untranslatability” of a certain text, the

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Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 87 “incommensurability” between two cultures (see CT 1.17) – is an ideological need to impose and naturalize a simplified stable (“spatialized,” “amphibologized”) order on complexity. That need emerges out of the regime of homolingual address, which seeks to “substitute[e] the spatiality of representation for the temporality of praxis” (14) – “the spatiality of representation” in the sense of a framed picture that stabilizes emerging experiential engagements with texts and readers into a single frozen image. This is the sense in which for Sakai and Solomon “the practice of translation itself remains radically heterogeneous to the representation of translation” (13): the shifting trial-and-error practice of translation in time not only precedes the (static/spatialized) representation of translation but conditions it, and yet in the regime of homolingual address is ultimately pushed aside as radically incompatible with that representation (CT 1.10), precisely because (CT 2.5) “the unity of language cannot be an object of experience in the Kantian sense” (Sakai and Solomon 13) – which is to say that large ideological formations like “the unity of language” can only be “experienced” ideologically if the practical/temporal experiences that constitute them are suppressed. Sakai and Solomon give the example of illumination as a mistranslation of satori, and the ways in which the inadequate translation clutters and corrupts the “authentic meaning”; another example of that in the problems of translating “Chinese Confucianism” into English would be “benevolence” as a mistranslation of 仁 ren (see section 5.2). The clutter: casual readers understand “benevolence” in the usual English sense of “niceness” (and where does that come from?); Sinologists seem to mean by it more or less what Mengzi seems to have meant by it, but of course both seemings are collective “product[s] of endless re-readings of readings among these variable positions” (CT 2.2). “Hence, the desire to recuperate the authentic meaning . . . is inseparable from the desire for self-referentiality as a means of regulating the hybridity and heterogeneity that precedes delineations of self and other” (14). Critical Thesis 2.13 The regulated distribution of the foreign into the “outside” (CT 2.7) is managed (discovered, explored, tested, stabilized, idealized) through practical acts of translation, which are then “exceptionalized” and so invisibilized. The translator is an exception (CT 1.10) because by definition s/he transgresses and exceeds the inside/outside border: the translator is at home in the foreign and is a foreigner inside the homeland. The translator is by definition the only one capable of testing the tensions between the artificially separated inside and outside, and so of setting and maintaining the boundary between them, and must therefore be regarded as a freak that does not belong to the regime of homolingual address that s/he helps institute. Just as Giorgio Agamben has shown how the logic of sovereignty is based on the form of exception (embodied by the figure of the sovereign), the position of the translator has been represented in a similarly exceptional fashion.

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Our work has turned this relationship inside out, demonstrating that the regularity of the “national language” as a formation in which the (hybrid) position of the translator has been deemed irrelevant is in fact produced only after the subjective encounter of social difference in translation (or in any social situation in which communication might fail). (Sakai and Solomon 28) In the regime of homolingual address, no one translates. There is no translation. Source authors write in the target language, through some magical process about which the less said, the better (see Robinson [2001] for discussion of one magical explanation: spirit-channeled translation). See also CT 1.10 for a discussion of one trenchant TS critique of this CTS thesis. Critical Thesis 2.14 National languages are channels of “biopolitical” control, created and maintained through the mobilization, exceptionalization, and invisibilization of translation. “By proposing to look at the formation of national language through the exceptional position of the translator” (CT 2.12), Sakai and Solomon add, “we have been able to show that it [national language] is a systemic, or transnational, technique of domination” (28). The term they typically use for that domination is the Deleuzean adjective “majoritarian,” which in a sense is misleading, because it seems to imply the rule of the majority, and in the regime of homolingual address it is not the majority that rules but the entirety, the totality, of the unified homeland. To the extent that their perspective mobilizes a minoritarian resistance to that regime, however, it reframes the ideal of perfect and total unity as the majority’s domination of all minorities, and specifically as the suppression of “minoritarian language” – and so is not misleading at all. In fact Sakai and Solomon rely very heavily on Deleuze and Guattari (1980: 132–3; Massumi 1987: 116) here: Soustraire et mettre en variation, retrancher et mettre en variation, c’est une seule et même opération. Il n’y a pas une pauvreté et une surcharge que caractériseraient les langues mineures par rapport à une langue majeure on standard ; il y a une sobriété et une variation qui sont comme un traitement mineur de la langue standard, un devenir-mineur de la langue majeure. Le problème n’est pas celui d’un devenir. La question n’est pas de se reterritorialiser sur un dialecte ou un patois, mais de déterritorialiser la langue majeure. Les Noirs-américains n’opposent pas le black à l’english, ils font avec l’américain qui est leur propre langue un black-english. Les langues mineures n’existent pas en soi : n’existant que par rapport à une langue majeure, ce sont aussi des investissements de cette langue pour qu’elle devienne elle-même mineure. Chacun doit trouver la langue mineure, dialecte ou plutôt idiolecte, à partir de laquelle il rendra mineure sa propre langue majeure. Telle est la force des auteurs qu’on appelle « mineurs », et qui sont

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Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 89 les plus grands, les | seuls grands : avoir à conquérir leur propre langue, c’est-à-dire arriver à cette sobriété dans l’usage de la langue majeure, pour la mettre en état de variation continue (le contraire d’un régionalisme). C’est la langue majeure pour y tracer des langues mineures encore inconnues. Se servir de la langue mineure pour faire filer la langue majeure. L’auteur mineur est l’étranger dans sa propre langue. S’il est bâtard, s’il se vit comme bâtard, ce n’est pas par mixité ou mélange de langues, mais plutôt par soustraction et variation de la sienne, à force d’y tendre des tenseurs. Subtract and place in variation, remove and place in variation: a single operation. Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty in relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a becoming-minor of the major language. The problem is not the distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. It is a question not of reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of deterritorializing the major language. . . . Minor languages do not exist in themselves: they exist only in relation to a major language and are also investments of that language for the purpose of making it minor. One must find the minor language, the dialect or rather idiolect, on the basis of which one can make one’s own major language minor. That is the strength of authors termed “minor,” who are in fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one’s own language, in other words, to attain that sobriety in the use of a major language, in order to place it in a state of continuous variation (the opposite of regionalism). It is in one’s own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer the major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use the minor language to send the major language racing. Minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language achieved by stretching tensors through it. Sakai (1997) and Sakai and Solomon (2006a) would add (CT 2.8–9): not just minor authors but all of us are foreigners in our own tongue(s). “S’il est bâtard”/“If he’s a bastard” for translation scholars echoes Schleiermacher (1813/2002: 81) on the dangers of straying from what Sakai calls the regime of homolingual address: “Wer möchte nicht lieber Kinder erzeugen, die das väterliche Geschlecht rein darstellen, als Blendlinge?”/“Who would willingly breed mongrels when he could instead sire loving children in the pure image of their father?” (Robinson 1997/2002c: 232). Siring children in the “pure image of their father” for Schleiermacher would mean translating-without-translating, translating so that the translator’s work vanishes into the pure image of the source-author-as-father, who, as we saw in CT 2.13, magically (homolingually) writes the target text in the target language himself, without the aid of the translator’s mediatory intervention. Siring Blendlinge/mongrels, or bâtards/bastards, is ideologically unattractive as a “lapse” from ideals of purity, but for Schleiermacher that “lapse” is

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necessary as a signal that the translation is a translation, that it was not magically written by the source author. Unfortunately, of course, Schleiermacher was also a Romantic German patriot who proved unable in the end to extend his tolerance for Blendlinge/mongrels as far as Sakai and Solomon would like; for him we are not all foreigners: Denn so wahr das auch bleibt in mancher Hinsicht, daß erst durch das Verständniß mehrerer Sprachen der Mensch in gewissem Sinne gebildet wird, und ein Weltbürger: so müssen wir doch gestehen, so wie wir die Weltbürgerschaft nicht für die ächte halten, die in wichtigen Momenten die Vaterlandsliebe unterdrückt, so ist auch in Bezug auf die Sprachen eine solche allgemeine Liebe nicht die rechte und wahrhaft bildende, welche für den lebendigen und höheren Gebrauch irgend eine Sprache, gleichviel ob alte oder neue, der vaterländischen gleich stellen will. Wie Einem Lande, so auch Einer Sprache oder der andern, muß der Mensch sich entschließen anzugehören, oder er schwebt haltungslos in unerfreulicher Mitte. (Schleiermacher 87) For true as it remains in many ways that one cannot be considered educated and cosmopolitan without a knowledge of several languages, we must also admit that cosmopolitanism does not seem authentic to us if at critical moments it suppresses patriotism; and the same thing is true of languages. That highly generalized love of language that cares little what language (the native one or some other, old or new) is used for a variety is not the best kind of love for improving the mind or the culture. One Country, One Language – or else another: a person has to make up his mind to belong somewhere, or else hang disoriented in the unpleasant middle. (Robinson 235) Here, in the name of patriotism, contra cosmopolitanism, Schleiermacher manifestly declares his allegiance to the regime of homolingual address – and underscores the importance of German as the “national” language (the proleptic foundation for the creation of the German Nation, six decades after this address). (See Robinson 2013c: 146–65 for discussion.) Critical Thesis 2.15 The regime of homolingual address imposes disciplinary shapes on knowing that rely heavily on translation but invisibilize it. Or, as Sakai and Solomon put that, “Disciplines of knowledge based on the unities of national language and national community intrinsically accord importance to translation – only to conceal it through naturalizing representations that effectively spatialize anterior systematicity” (13). By “spatialize anterior systematicity” they mean something like “create a stable template for reality in advance of actual experience”; the clause after the en-dash might be paraphrased as “only to

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invisibilize translation by treating as simple empirical reality ideological representations that organize experience by imposing a stable order (‘spatial system’) on it prior (‘anterior’) to emerging and shifting experiential encounters.” Thus, for example, we may believe that people who speak the same language all automatically understand each other, and may indeed continue to believe that, even if a close look at our experience would tend to refute that belief. As for the disciplinary shapes: Just as social divisions created by uneven global development have been encoded in very specific and profound ways into the structure of knowledge, both in terms of disciplinary divisions as well as in terms of the legitimate objects, methods, and theses that compose each discipline, so the meanings of these divisions have been further refracted by the crystallization of nationalized language that has governed the production, dissemination, and perception of knowledge – indeed, the very criteria of truth – in the age of the single world. (16) To unpack that: “uneven global development”: • •

the differentials in power, wealth, popularity, and various other kinds of symbolic capital among different nation-states world-wide; the historical trajectories of those differentials (who’s rising and who’s falling relative to whom)

“social divisions”: these can be virtually anything, such as gender and class, age and beauty, intelligence and skill, specifically as enabled and organized by “uneven global development” • •

greater wealth and power tend to mean more top people in every field lesser wealth and power tend to mean a lower level of everything, and even the best people who stay may be submerged in the mass

“encoded into the structure of knowledge”: this would include not only “what sorts of things count as (valuable) knowledge” but “what sorts of knowledge-construction count as valuable” • does it have to be empirical? • does it have to be practical? • does it have to be pious? • does it have to be inventive/creative? • etc.

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“in terms of disciplinary divisions”: think of the departmental and college/ school/faculty structures of the modern university: • which disciplines are highly enough valued to have departments organized around them? • what differences are there among the departmental structures at elite institutions, small regional state institutions, small liberal-arts colleges, community colleges, and for-profit institutions? • what kinds of institutional structure are assigned to interdisciplinary area studies (based on race, gender, sexual identity, geopolitical region, etc.)? • note especially key shifts in emphasis, away from the old preference for classics and religion, toward media studies and big data • what kinds of country tended to create translation studies programs first, second, and third, and when did universities in the UK jump on the TS bandwagon (the mid-nineties), and when did the US jump on it (not yet)? • which disciplines rely heavily on translation but never think about it? “in terms of the legitimate objects, methods, and theses that compose each discipline”: to take translation studies alone, •

what are its legitimate objects? • • • • • •

•

translated texts compared with their originals? multitext/multiyear translation histories? the paratexts of translation? translation criticism? theoretical constructions of translation? ethnographic events and situations of translating and interpreting?

what are its legitimate methods? • anecdotal? • syntactic/semantic? • pragmatic? • text-linguistic? • corpus-linguistic? • cognitivist? • neurological? • hermeneutical? • activist? • ethnographic?

• consider the delegitimization of anecdotal and syntactic/semantic approaches to the study of translation over the last three decades or so, and the increasing legitimization of activist and ethnographic methods (why?)

Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 93 consider the conference I just attended that kept pushing on the possibility of a methodological convergence between hermeneutical and empirical/cognitivist/neurological approaches • consider also the fact that the theses that I’m calling here “Critical Theses on translation” have been ignored – delegitimized – in translation studies for two decades (why?)

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•

“refracted by the crystallization of nationalized language”: this impact is especially noteworthy while • • • •

a national language is just being crystallized, as in Finland in the midnineteenth century a national language is being rejuvenated, as Irish is in Ireland today nationalized languages find themselves under assault, as Cantonese is in Hong Kong a lingua franca like English is gradually replacing the nationalized language in education, the media, and government

“governed the production, dissemination, and perception of knowledge”: •

who is allowed/encouraged to produce knowledge (professors? journalists? novelists? translators? politicians? teachers? preachers?) and in what social and institutional contexts? • how are the various types of knowledge produced by those producers in those various contexts disseminated, by what media, and to whom? • how is that knowledge received by various social constituencies, in the sense of considering it true, or useful, or exciting, or aesthetically attractive? “the very criteria of truth”: • does a thing have to be proved empirically, or logically, or imaginatively, to be true? • is it enough for respected authorities (at whatever level) to verify a thing for it to be true? • is it enough for us to “know” (intuit, sense, feel) that a thing is true? • what are the different criteria of truth in different contexts, and how do we manage the conflicts among them? • are those criteria “set” by individuals, by committees after long deliberation and negotiation, or by some less conscious processes of which we are typically not aware? • how aware are we ever of the criteria of truth that we accept and value? • how much eye-rolling follows (in say a departmental meeting) if a colleague asks a metaquestion about the criteria of truth that a given

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“in the age of the single world”: this is a bit of a journalistic overstatement, perhaps – the world is not single – but • it is closer to being a single world today than ever before, due to global communication technologies, and • universalizing tendencies are becoming increasingly universalized, making tongue-in-cheek references to “the single world” increasingly current Critical Thesis 2.16 The fact that there are target readers of translations on the “inside” (in the target culture) who can also read the source text, and so technically speaking don’t need the translation, thereby undermining the ideological purity of the regime of homolingual address, must also be exceptionalized, disqualified, suppressed, forgotten – or otherwise rendered ideologically harmless, powerless to undermine the regime of homolingual address. Even if, say, there are Chinese people living in France, reading French translations of Chinese classics, not because they need the translations in order to read the Chinese texts at all but because they are interested in translation, or are tracking the dissemination of Chinese writing in France, this will not be allowed to sully the purity of “translating Chinese classics for French people who can’t read Chinese.” “Foreigners” are source authors and source readers who live in the “foreign land”; they are not target readers living in the “homeland.” “Foreigners” who live in the “homeland” and translate from the local language into the foreign language may be thought of as local agents of the “foreign land,” and therefore not strictly speaking living in the “homeland.” The fact that some “locals,” “native speakers” of the local language, have learned a foreign language well enough to read both the source text and the target text, and indeed to read them stereoscopically, and possibly to review the translation in print, can be ignored. Ditto the locals who have lived abroad, or were born into a bilingual or multilingual family. There’s just no need to think about them at all. This is another case of the kind of “extremist” theorization – along with CT 1.10 and 2.13, and sections 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 of “The double-bind of Translation Quality Assessment” – that “reasonable” and “pragmatic” TS scholars will want to protest. Almost certainly, in fact, this will be the most divisive wedge issue between TS and CTS, and thus the issue that will keep some TS scholars out of the CTS camp. Critical Thesis 2.17 The project of consolidating “culture” and “communication” around “the construction of majoritarian subjects of domination” (Sakai and Solomon 20) – subjectivities like “a unitary ‘voice of the people’

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and an authoritative ‘body of knowledge’ ” (20) – is the most durable social project in the world today. This is a project aimed at organizing knowledge pragmatically around ideological ideals, in the sense of designating who can know what and how, and how that knowledge can be communicated, and as a reliable account of what kind of “experience” it can be communicated. Sakai and Solomon identify “the archive, the language, the culture and the history – in short, the modern fetishization of ‘communicable experience’ ” (20) – as among the socioideological formations produced by and through this project. The question they don’t answer, again, is how this happens. By what channels are “culture” and “communication” consolidated? It seems clear that it is not a rational, conscious, analytical process – it surges through the political unconscious – but what does that mean, exactly? How is guidance channeled through that unconscious? In what form does it reach us, and transform us in its image? Critical Thesis 2.18 The bodies that “ ‘speak’ the unitary language” are “actual, authoritative bodies of knowledge. . . . Such bodies could be either people or institutions; in either case, they are the forms of relation regularized according to the apparently natural boundaries of ‘the individual’ and its corollary, the collective” (Sakai and Solomon 20–1). The idea here is that whether the “speaker of the unitary language” is a person or an institution, s/he/it/one is constructed ideologically as a “speaker of the unitary language,” and thus as an imaginary person. For example: think what happens when one “gentrifies” one’s accent, learns to speak “the” national language with an educated, high-status accent and “correct grammar” and so on, whether because speaking that way brings one personal social benefits or because one’s foreign students have been taught that language and may be assumed (by search committees and department heads) to understand only that language (not slang or dialect, etc.). In that kind of case one not only speaks for the state, or for a specific social elite that is taken to represent the state; one also speaks as the state (or that elite). Think also what happens when a spokesperson for a government, or a large powerful private or public institution, speaks “the national language” “badly,” makes “grammatical errors,” uses a “low” street or youth accent or a despised dialect, hems and haws and stammers and stumbles over words, or uses substandard body language (hands in pockets, slumped or twisting shoulders, leering or bleary eyes, random vocalizations, chewing gum, etc.): feel the plummeting of “your” “personal” respect not only for that person but for the institution s/he represents. Critical Thesis 2.19 The most powerful template-representations “spoken” in/ through “the unitary language” by the majoritarian “actual bodies of knowledge” in CT 2.17–18 are “the tandem notions of the West-as-a-normative-value

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and of Modernity-as-an-unfinished-project,” which form the x and y axes of “a grid of global proportions along which the microgradient of majority/minority relations is continually plotted” (Sakai and Solomon 21). The “majority/minority relations” that are “continually plotted” on that global grid would include, presumably, various channels of Occidentalist resistance to Western modernity (see Robinson 2017), presumably as a powerful but loose collection of minority movements rising up against the (even more powerful) majority. If Sakai (CT 1.16, 2.4) is right to insist that such grids are inevitably cofigurative, that would mean that the “plotting” of majority/minority relations along the microgradient is not simply dictated by the majority: majorities and minorities cofigure that plotting, in (unequal) relationship. It would also mean that when Sakai and Solomon add that “herein lies the key to a minoritarian analytic and a new interdisciplinary syncretism on a global scale” (21), the “minoritarian analytic” cannot simply rethink or reframe or replot the microgradient at will, unilaterally. The enmeshment of minoritarianism in cofigurative majority/ minority relations will always exert a powerful shaping influence on any attempt to redirect this or that trend or this or that line of analysis (let alone any attempt to jump off the grid entirely): We all know the story of anti-Eurocentrism, according to which the minoritarian critique of Western hegemony in the context of the (post)colonial nation sustains the critical shock to the “Western” majority formation. By transposing it into a local register, the critique of Eurocentrism becomes a good rhetoric for the elite, whose subjectivity is partly formed by their systemic competition with “the West” through the structural (class) accumulation of value by the labor of their social inferiors. Similarly, the majoritarian dispensation of respect for minoritarian difference short-circuits the possibility of recoding relations on a completely different terrain. The dialectical form of this relation is well known: apparently free, the position coded Master suffers from its actual bondage to the labor of the Slave; the position coded Slave, however, dreams of nothing if not the chance of assuming, finally for itself, the magisterial height of the Master – without realizing that the Master position is always already deprived from the very outside of the possibility of being simply for itself. Certainly the first step out of this aporia is to admit that the very split between the two distinct forms of modernity – the imperial modernity and the colonial modernity – is itself the very definition of something like Modernity in general in the constitution of the hierarchical, non-democratic world of Capital. Even in their very opposition, both the colonial modernity and the imperial modernity are bound to a common index, the normative value of the West, the supposed naturalness of which obfuscates a state of domination. (21–2; emphasis added) In rhetoric an aporia (morphologically “no way through”) is a trope whereby one pretends to doubt, in the sense of having vague reservations or qualms about,

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Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 97 one’s own or someone else’s claim, and so to reach an impasse that temporarily stalls one’s argument; the discourse built around such aporias is called “aporetic.” It is an extremely useful (and traditionally minoritarian) rhetorical strategy for staging and justifying a foray into the repressed complexities of an established (majoritarian) viewpoint. Aporetic “stalling” – endlessly pretending to doubt and be unsure, while casually (but gleefully) poking around in the dark corners of hegemonic thought-structures – is a playful way of sending the majoritarian discourse racing. Instead of this rhetorical sense, Sakai and Solomon here seem to be invoking the philosophical sense, which stabilizes the trope’s “no passage” etymology ontologically by purging it of the situated performativity of rhetoric – leaving behind something like a “logical impasse.” Given their preference for non-philosophy over philosophy, heterolinguality over homolinguality, minoritarianism over majoritarianism, and situated affect over abstract formalism, this is somewhat surprising; but then the philosophical sense of aporia did get rather uncritically popularized in the heyday of deconstruction (again surprisingly, given Derrida’s love of aporetic argumentation). The other issue is the reliability of the grid: “can we really assume the consistency and indexical veracity of the map onto which such positions are plotted?” (21). No, of course we can’t; but neither is there a reliable Archimedean point at which we might stand to determine the map’s “consistency and indexical veracity.” We have to treat the map as incorrigibly gerrymandered, and just live with that assumption as pragmatically and strategically – and aporetically – as we can. Critical Thesis 2.20 The majoritarian bodies of authoritative knowledge in CT 2.17–19 “should undoubtedly be called the ‘West’ ” (Sakai and Solomon 26), but they are now so effectively distributed around the globe that it’s no longer realistic to distinguish “the West” and “the Rest” on geopolitical grounds. “The West,” in other words, rules the world from everywhere – not just Europe and North America. Not only that: “the West” is no longer ruled by people stereotypically recognizable as “Westerners,” which is to say white male Christians speaking a European language. Yes, such people do exist, such people do rule, but so do a great many people that don’t fit that description; and as a result “the meaning of the ‘West’ in all historical specificity must be measured against an actual constitutive process that reveals it to be, time and again, so highly arbitrary that it is in fact actually void of any specific content” (26; emphasis added). Register two problematic formulations there: “arbitrary” and “void of any specific content.” And further: “Elements associated with ‘Western modernity’ can now be found in places that have conventionally been excluded from ‘the West’ – often in forms that are more authentic than what is found in the West itself” (23; emphasis added). Register another problematic formulation: “authentic.” What is the positivity that “arbitrary” implicitly voids? What kind of “specific content” are they hoping and failing to find? What would an “authentic” form of Western modernity be? Would it be anything like people in the ideologized

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homolingual community understanding things said and written by each other “in a primary, authentic manner” (Sakai and Solomon 9)? I suspect Sakai and Solomon only have the vaguest idea what they mean by these modifiers, based on the most ideologically normative (homolingual) of stereotypes: • Because being a white male Christian and speaking a European language doesn’t automatically guarantee access to rule, and being a ruler does not automatically guarantee that you will be a white male Christian speaking a European language, they want to claim that the relationship between “the West” and “Westerners” has become “arbitrary.” » •

It’s not arbitrary; it’s just organized by a complex social ecology that Sakai and Solomon don’t try to understand.

Because the traditional “content” of “Western modernity” is “Eurocentric,” the apparently “arbitrary” decentralization/dispersal of “Western modernity” to all parts of the globe empties out that particular kind of “content” and seems to leave “the West” “devoid of content.” »

A radical shift in the “nature” or “content” of an ideological formation does not void its content; it just changes it, and nudges us to start thinking and talking about it differently.

• Because there is a set of cultural stereotypes that we have associated integrally with “the West,” and those have been adopted and adapted all over the world, often with uncanny simulations of stereotypical “Western modernity,” “authenticity” has been disseminated globally as well. But what does “more authentic than what is found in the West itself” mean? A hamburger joint that isn’t a McDonald’s? » “Authenticity” is a relational construct of the regime of homolingual address. I assume Sakai and Solomon must be using it ironically, so as to undermine its reification as a stable ontological description of things in the real world; but I don’t see or feel the irony, and would have preferred scare quotes as reassuring signals. Sakai and Solomon add that while there is no geopolitical distinction between the West and the Rest, and “the West is floating and dispersing (with the tides of domination) . . . it is equally important to note that the West is not declining. Hence, our project of the dislocation of the West” (23). What they mean by that dislocation is not clear. If “the West is floating and dispersing (with the tides of domination),” it can’t be dislocated as an elbow or shoulder is dislocated, removed from its proper place; in Sakai and Solomon’s view the West has already been so removed. I suggest they mean “the dislocation of the West” in something like Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense of the word dislocation,2 which might be paraphrased as “the heterolingualization of the West” – the undoing of the domination of the regime of homolingual

Sakai and Solomon circa 2006 99

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address, so that we are once again revealed to ourselves and each other as foreigners-without-the-foreign. Critical Thesis 2.21 The “differentially coded subjects, typically national ones” (Sakai and Solomon 27), that “ ‘speak’ the unitary language” and so become/ form the majoritarian bodies of knowledge (CT 2.17–20) are produced by and through “the modern regime of translation [as] a concrete form of ‘systemic complicity’,” “a globally applicable technique of domination” (27). Sakai and Solomon see “a multiplicity of disciplinary arrangements forming an economy of translation (in place since the colonial era but far outliving colonialism’s demise)” (27) that produces these subjects, these speakers, these majoritarian bodies, and describe the CTS research agenda as an attempt to “trace a series of genealogies within which ‘translation’ is no longer seen as simply an operation of transfer, relay, and equivalency, but rather assumes a vital historical role akin to that played by labor in the constitution of the world” (27–8). This is a rudimentary icotic, an attempt to theorize translation as a primary channel of negatively heightened social relations like “complicity” and “domination” – and to my mind a welcome improvement over the older TS study of translation as “an operation of transfer, relay, and equivalency.” My only hesitation is that Sakai and Solomon seem to lack a convincing theoretical bridge from translation as a textual process to history as collective action. Somehow, translators by translating not only are systemically complicit in domination and (CT 2.14) “biopolitical control,” but give to “reality” form, function, and the feeling of stability, even solidity: “Like labor, language is a potentially totalizing category that concerns not just a specific activity but a form of social praxis that produces, or at least binds, the production of the world and the self” (28). Right, but how does language totalize? How can a category, by totalizing, produce the production of the world and the self? How does translation stabilize and so “nationalize” language? Propositionally, logically, through the writing of grammar books? Presumably not – but then how? These seem to be non-questions to Sakai and Solomon. It happens, somehow. Hegel walked us all through the steps by which labor produces “the production of the world and the self” (see Robinson 2013b for discussion); it is not enough here for Sakai and Solomon simply to invoke labor as an analogue of translation>language to carry Hegel’s painstaking theorization of labor over into CTS.

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3 Walter Benjamin’s Intentions

Given that I call Liu’s theory “quasi-Benjaminian,” and summarize her position as claiming that “any two languages get the bilinguals who speak both to translate back and forth between them, in order to explore, establish, stabilize, and ultimately to universalize equivalences,” it should come as no surprise that she has (qualified) praise for Benjamin’s 1923(/1972) introduction to his translation of Baudelaire, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”: As I have argued elsewhere [Liu 1995: 14–16], Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” and Derrida’s reading of the same in “Des Tours de Babel” are among the few bold attempts in the twentieth century to rethink the problem of meaning outside the purview of semantics and structural linguistics. Their notion of complementarity, which refuses to privilege the original over the translation, enables a powerful critique of the metaphysical ground of traditional semantics that has long dominated the translation theories of the West. Derrida’s attack on Western metaphysics, in particular, has helped clear the philosophical ground for useful critical work, but one of the questions on which the notion of complementarity remains vague is how hypothetical equivalence is established, maintained, or revised among languages so that meaning, which is always historical, can be made available or unavailable to the translator. I wonder whether hypothetical equivalence does not already inhabit the idea of complementarity itself in a subtle but potent form. (1999b: 13–14) Liu cites Benjamin’s essay in Harry Zohn’s (1968/1982) translation, as “The Task of the Translator”; the year before her collection appeared, Steven Rendall (1998) retranslated it as “The Translator’s Task.” Famously, however, Paul de Man (1986: 80) reminds us that aufgeben is also cognate with the English verb “to give up,” and the title might also be translated “The Translator’s Surrender.” A focus on the translator’s task would be individualizing, translator-centered; for TS readers expecting that sort of focus (and I include the author of Robinson 1996: 200–9 among that group), Benjamin’s essay is intensely frustrating, because it is mostly about other matters, die Übersetzbarkeit “the translatability” of a text even when no human can translate it, die Intentionen “the Intentions”

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Walter Benjamin’s Intentions 101 of languages, die reine Sprache “Pure Language,” and so on. The translator’s only “task,” apparently, is to surrender to the inevitable – to renounce or abandon (two other possible translations of Aufgabe, aufgeben) the assigned task, to surrender, professionally speaking, to failure, the inevitable failure of the translator’s quest to reproduce the source text in the target language, but also, in what would appear to be a mystical sense, to an inexplicable success, the apparently magical or divine transformation of the translator’s professional failure into a key or door or pathway to the “messianic” end of “Pure Language.” For CTS readers focused on the translator’s participation in the shaping effects of larger forces, however, Benjamin’s essay is not only not frustrating; it is infinitely productive. If my earlier reading of the essay was a venting of TS frustration, this one is a tentative exploration of CTS productivity.

3.1 Human subjectivity and the objective life of the work of art My idea for this new pass through Benjamin’s essay is to make a quick surgical incision: to look quickly and representatively only at the seemingly “mystical” aspect of what the German Handlungstheoretiker would call das translatorisches Handeln “the translatorial action” in the piece – the focus that, rather strikingly like Karl Popper’s World Three (see Chapter 2’s TQA 1v-z, 2d), apparently excludes the human: So dürfte von einem unvergeßlichen Leben oder Augenblick gesprochen werden, auch wenn alle Menschen sie vergessen hätten. Wenn nämlich deren Wesen es forderte, nicht vergessen zu werden, so würde jenes Prädikat nichts Falsches, sondern nur eine Forderung, der Menschen nicht entsprechen, und zugleich auch wohl den Verweis auf einen Bereich enthalten, in dem ihr entsprochen wäre; auf ein Gedenken Gottes. Entsprechend bliebe die Übersetzbarkeit sprachlicher Gebilde auch dann zu erwägen, wenn sie für die Menschen unübersetzbar wäre. (Benjamin 1923/1972: 10) Thus we could still speak of an unforgettable life or moment, even if all human beings had forgotten it. If the essence of such lives or moments required that they not be forgotten, this predicate would not be false, it would merely be a demand to which human beings had failed to respond, and at the same time, no doubt, a reference to a place where this demand would find a response, that is, a reference to a thought in the mind of God. The translatability of linguistic constructions would accordingly have to be taken into consideration even if they were untranslatable by human beings. (Rendall 1998: 152) Very much along the lines of Popper’s “knowledge without a knowing subject” (Olson 1996: 9), Benjamin here posits unforgettability without a forgetting

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102  Chapter 3 subject and translatability without a translating subject. Does this in fact mean that he attributes translatability to the mind of God? It would seem difficult, perhaps, to argue that Benjamin is interested in human subjects at all – especially since this passage follows hard on the heels of his opening salvos against the relevance to poetry, either original or translated, of the reader. If the translation “für den Leser bestimmt [wäre],” he writes, “so müßte es auch das Original sein” (Benjamin 9)/“were intended for the reader, then the original would also have to be intended for the reader” (Rendall 152), and obviously (for him) “kein Gedicht gilt dem Leser, kein Bild dem Beschauer, keine Symphonie der Hörerschaft” (10)/“no poem is meant for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience” (151). (But see also Sakai’s reading of this passage in CT 1.19.) Whatever action is performed in his essay is – must be – performed by nonhuman agents, at least akin (and perhaps equal) to the mind of God. And indeed a few pages later he warns expressly against seeking the essence of linguistic change “in der Subjektivität der Nachgeborenen statt im eigensten Leben der Sprache und ihre Werke” (13)/“in the subjectivity of later generations rather than in the inner life of language and its works” (155). It is this last phrase, “das eigenste Leben der Sprache und ihre Werke”/“the inner life of language and its works,” that interests me here, because it so strongly seems to echo Liu’s claim that languages are agents capable of granting and withholding “the reciprocity of meaning-value.” If das eigenste Leben der Sprache – literally the “ownmost” life of language – has agency, perhaps that agency is human? But Benjamin attributes language change to “the inner life of language and its works” rather than “the subjectivity of later generations”: presumably this opposition excludes human subjectivity from “the inner life of language and its works”? If we wanted to insist that the vitalistic agency he sees at work in language is – must be – human, it would have to be a form of humanity that lacks human subjectivity; and while subjectivity is a slippery concept, most thinkers would agree that it is an essential component of human agency. Look at the full context of that last quotation about not seeking the essence of linguistic change in human subjectivity: Denn in seinem Fortleben, das so nicht heißen dürfte, wenn es nicht Wandlung und Erneuerung des Lebendigen wäre, ändert sich das Original. Es gibt eine Nachreife auch der festgelegten Worte. Was zur Zeit eines Autors Tendenz seiner dichterischen Sprache gewesen sein mag, kann später erledigt sein, immanente Tendenzen vermögen neu aus dem Geformten sich zu erheben. Was damals jung, kann später abgebraucht, was damals gebräuchlich, später archaisch klingen. Das Wesentliche solcher Wandlungen wie auch der ebenso ständigen des Sinnes in der Subjektivität der Nachgeborenen statt im eigensten Leben der Sprache und ihrer Werke zu suchen, hieße – zugestanden selbst den krudesten Psychologismus – Grund und Wesen einer Sache verwechseln, strenger gesagt aber, einen der gewaltigsten und fruchtbarsten historischen Prozesse aus Unkraft des Denkens leugnen. (Benjamin 12–13)

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Walter Benjamin’s Intentions 103 For in its continuing life, which could not be so called if it were not the transformation and renewal of a living thing, the original is changed. Established words also have their after-ripening. What might have been the tendency of an author’s poetic language in its own time may later be exhausted, and immanent tendencies can arise anew out of the formed work. What once sounded fresh may come to sound stale, and what once sounded idiomatic may later sound archaic. To seek what is essential in such transformations, as well as in the equally constant transformations of sense, in the subjectivity of later generations rather than in the inner life of language and its works, would be – even granting the crudest psychologism – to confuse the ground and the essence of a thing; or, putting it more strongly, it would be to deny, out of an impotence of thought, one of the most powerful and fruitful historical processes. (Rendall 155–6) Just calling these processes historisch “historical” does not, of course, necessarily ground them in human subjectivity. Benjamin surely knew that German theologians speak of Heilsgeschichte, sacred history, as the history of God’s interventions in human events. God as agent, human events as ground. Pure Language, or the intentions behind individual languages, could well be in charge of linguistic history in much the same way. And Benjamin’s oppositions there suggest that he does imagine some such radical dualism (see Figure 3.1). The exhaustion and rejuvenation of linguistic tendencies of which Benjamin writes are obviously part of the social history of language as ground; the vital agent behind such transformations is for him the essence of language, which does seem to be essentially nonhuman. Undeniably the Klingen “sounding” in Was damals jung, kann später abgebraucht, was damals gebräuchlich, später archaisch klingen “What once sounded fresh may come to sound stale, and what once sounded idiomatic may later sound archaic” is a sounding to someone – a phenomenology of human interpretive response to poetic expressions – but that for Benjamin is again only the ground out of which the essential agent that animates language arises to shape and direct the transformative historical action. The interesting thing to note about the right side of Figure 3.1, though, is that Benjamin mostly adumbrates it metaphorically and negatively: translatability is like a thought in the mind of God, but (presumably) isn’t one; the “ownmost life of language and its works” is also limned in chiaroscuro, through negated metaphors. Benjamin insists, for example, that “man nicht der organischen

inside humans (subjectivity) the social history of language as ground the human?

(ownmost life) inside language the essence of language as agent the nonhuman?

Figure 3.1  Opposed explanatory channels for Benjamin

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104  Chapter 3 Leiblichkeit allein Leben zusprechen dürfe” (11)/“life must not be attributed to organic corporeality alone,” but neither should what lies beyond organic corporeality be reduced to die Seele “soul” or Empfindung “feeling” or “sensation” (which Rendall renders “sensitivity” [153]). This mode of expression is of course common in religious discourse, whenever the speaker or writer butts up against the outermost boundary of his or her own language, the railing beyond which that specific language seems not to want to go, and then tries to push it farther. And in an important sense Benjamin’s attempt to relinquish, or rhetorically deny himself access to, that negative metaphoricity is itself an access to it: “In völlig unmetaphorischer Sachlichkeit ist der Gedanke vom Leben und Fortleben der Kunstwerke zu erfassen” (11)/“The notion of the life and continuing life of works of art should be considered with completely unmetaphorical objectivity” (153). The “life” of a work of art, this says, is •

• •

not just metaphorically alive (or dead but still alive) – there is some objective element of biological life and supernatural afterlife in art, and even in the “posthumous” reception of art; not just metaphorically to be aestheticized – even though it is alive, and dies, and survives death, it is still a work of art; to be erfasst “considered” with objectivity that is not just metaphorical – the objectivity that literally inheres in material objects, including living things, must also be taken to inhere in the life of those things.

This is transcendent denial, of the sort that we associate with philosophical idealism: a denial that attempts to turn the tables on our ordinary assumptions, to make the immaterial literal and the material its shadowy metaphorical extension. (It’s no accident that Benjamin was the darling of the poststructuralist discursivists, who as we saw in section 1.4 popularized the phrase “the materiality of the sign,” which seemed to be likewise not just literally material, and so susceptible to empirical scientific study, but also not just metaphorically material.) The only direct positive descriptor Benjamin offers of the apparently nonhuman essence of language is this: Vielmehr beruht alle überhistorische Verwandtschaft der Sprachen darin, daß in ihrer jeder als ganzer jeweils eines und zwar dasselbe gemeint ist, das dennoch keiner einzelnen von ihnen, sondern nur der Allheit ihrer einander ergänzenden Intentionen erreichbar ist: die reine Sprache. (13) All suprahistorical kinship of languages consists rather in the fact that in each of them as a whole, one and the same thing is intended; this cannot be attained by any one of them alone, however, but only by the totality of their mutually complementary intentions: pure language. (Rendall 156)

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Walter Benjamin’s Intentions 105 It’s not that any given translator or succession of translators or “translation” “itself ” overcomes the imperfections to which all human endeavors are prone, but that translation activates the Intentions “in” the various languages, which together somehow generate Pure Language. The translator’s “task” is to “give in” to the activation of these Intentions. Translation, Benjamin (9) famously says, is eine Form “a form,” or, as Zohn (1968/1982: 70) and Rendall (152) both translate that, “a mode” – a form or a mode of expression – and a mode of expression entails an expressive agent. Translation is the mode of expression of some agent – who is not, we are given to understand, the translator. In the same way, the “fact” here that in each language “eines und zwar dasselbe gemeint ist”/“one and the same thing is intended” entails an intending agent, or what he calls an Intention. He continues: Während nämlich alle einzelnen Elemente, die Wörter, Sätze, Zusammenhänge von fremden Sprachen sich ausschließen, ergänzen diese Sprachen sich in ihren Intentionen selbst. Dieses Gesetz, eines der grundlegenden der Sprachphilosophie, genau zu fassen, ist in der Intention vom Gemeinten die Art des Meinens zu unterscheiden. In »Brot« und »pain« ist das Gemeinte zwar dasselbe, die Art, es zu meinen, dagegen nicht. In der Art des Meinens nämlich liegt es, daß beide Worte dem Deutschen und Franzosen je etwas Verschiedenes bedeuten, daß sie für beide nicht vertauschbar sind, ja sich letzten Endes auszuschließen streben; am Gemeinten aber, daß sie, absolut genommen, das Selbe und Identische bedeuten. Während dergestalt die Art des Meinens in diesen beiden Wörtern einander widerstrebt, ergänzt sie sich in den beiden Sprachen, denen sie entstammen. Und zwar ergänzt sich in ihnen die Art des Meinens zum Gemeinten. Bei den einzelnen, den unergänzten Sprachen nämlich ist ihr Gemeintes niemals in relativer Selbständigkeit anzutreffen, wie bei den einzelnen Wörtern oder Sätzen, sondern vielmehr in stetem Wandel begriffen, bis es aus der Harmonie all jener Arten des Meinens als die reine Sprache herauszutreten vermag. So lange bleibt es in den Sprachen verborgen. (13–14) Whereas all the particular elements of different languages – words, sentences, structures – are mutually exclusive, these languages complement each other in their intentions. To gain a precise understanding of this law, one of the most fundamental laws of the philosophy of language, it is necessary to distinguish, within intention, the intended object from the mode of its intention. In “Brot” and “pain,” the intended object is the same, but the mode of intention differs. It is because of their modes of intention that the two words signify something different to a German or a Frenchman, that they are not regarded as interchangeable, and in fact ultimately seek to exclude one another; however, with respect to their intended object, taken absolutely, they signify one and the same thing. Thus whereas these two words’ modes of intention are in conflict, they complement each other in the two languages

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106  Chapter 3 from which they stem. And indeed in them the relation between the mode of intention and the intended object is complemented. In the individual, uncomplemented languages, the intended object is never encountered in relative independence, for instance in individual words or sentences, but is rather caught up in constant transformation, until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all these modes of intention. Until then it remains hidden in the various languages. (Rendall 156–7) The agent that expresses and intends in each language is not God, but seems somehow godlike; is not human, but seems like a superhuman, a transhuman agent with agentive powers akin to our own, able to express and intend things, but on a larger scale, larger both spatially (far greater scope of action) and temporally (longer historical span). But clearly this is still metaphorical description, saturated in negation. The unity behind the different (translational) forms/modes of Intention that mire specific social languages in mutual incomprehensibility and non-­interchangeability is like the physical loaf of bread to which both Brot and pain refer, but not the same as that loaf. In the (human, social, subjective, formal/modal) ground of translation, Brot belongs entirely to German and pain belongs entirely to French, and the two are not interchangeable, not synonymous, not semantically equal, because one hears Brot only in German-speaking contexts and pain only in ­French-speaking contexts. The contextualized or situated social histories of the two languages push the two forms or modes of Intention apart, keep them at bay. The fact that the translator as trained human professional is someone trained to cross the space between them doesn’t change that; in some sense it only accentuates the gap between them. In the (superhuman, mystical, objective, agentive) essence of language as poetry as translatability, the difference between Brot and pain is raised to the sublime differentiation between individual languages taken each “as a whole,” Transcendent Homolinguality, and the bread to which both Brot and pain refer is troped as the sublimity of a single transcendental “thing” that is Intended by all such “whole” homolingualities. Wenn aber diese derart bis ans messianische Ende ihrer Geschichte wachsen, so ist es die Übersetzung, welche am ewigen Fortleben der Werke und am unendlichen Aufleben der Sprachen sich entzündet, immer von neuem die Probe auf jenes heilige Wachstum der Sprachen zu machen: wie weit ihr Verborgenes von der Offenbarung entfernt sei, wie gegenwärtig es im Wissen um diese Entfernung warden mag. (Benjamin 14) If but these [languages] in this way until the messianic end of their history grow, so is it the translation that on the eternal on-living [Fortleben: survival] of the work and the endless up-living [Aufleben: revival] of the languages is sparked, ever anew the test of that sacred growth of the languages to

Walter Benjamin’s Intentions 107

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make: how far their hidden [thing] from revelation distant is; how present it [that hidden thing] in the knowledge of this distance might become. (literal translation DR) The pragmatically oriented Idiot Questioner wonders, there, in what world exactly works live on eternally, and languages are revived endlessly. Don’t works and languages die all the time? If planet Earth becomes inhospitable to humans, and the human race becomes extinct, will that not, as the hermeneutic commandgiver notes in TQA 2d and 2m, be the not-so-messianic end of the history of languages and the works written in them?1 But of course Benjamin is not simply making outlandish claims, not simply exaggerating real-world trends beyond plausibility; he is, rather, dwelling in the world of myth, where reality is ever eager to conform to the idealizing imagination. And while colleagues who admire Benjamin for his kabbalistic mysticism chide me for thinking I’m doing him a favor in not taking it literally, in reading him icotically, I do persist in that perverse reading, and say only by way of defense that I offer it not as the truth about “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” but as a trial perspective, a “way of seeing” Benjamin. Fine, those colleagues might protest – but Benjamin himself explicitly forecloses on the impulse to trace these matters back to die Subjektivität der Nachgeborenen “the subjectivity of later generations,” and explicitly sneers at den krudesten Psychologismus “the crudest psychologism.” One implication of his foreclosure might be that what makes a language and a work written in that language potentially eternal is also not the phenomenological fact that people speak and read that language and therefore subjectively construct the written record as if it had those stable and therefore conceivably universal and eternal attributes. People do those things, certainly, and may even believe that the written record possesses eternal qualities because they tend to universalize their own subjectivity; but that is not what makes a work or a language potentially eternal. Still, let me continue to work around the warning signs Benjamin posts, and offer a hesitant suggestion: that the key to Benjamin’s conundrum in das ewige Fortleben der Werke “the eternal survival of works” lies not in the nature of works, or the work of nature, and not in the nature of human subjectivity, either, but in the question of what induces us to universalize our subjectivity. It’s “natural,” we want to say. It’s “human nature” to believe that the way we are is the way all humans are – that we are exemplars of the entire human race; that anyone is, because how different can humans be? If we are smart, well-read, self-reflexive theorists, we may go even further and say that it’s “human nature” to naturalize our idiosyncracies as human nature. The verb “naturalize” signals our sophisticated self-awareness, our recognition that what we take to be human nature is not human nature at all but a local construct, perhaps an ideology – but what does it mean to naturalize an ideology? What is an ideology, and why do we feel unconsciously inclined to naturalize it as human nature, and how do we accomplish that naturalization?

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108  Chapter 3 By now we have some tentative answers to these questions – answers that constitute icotic theory’s chief contribution to an ecological understanding of human social behavior: individual humans are endowed by the communities that raise them with a need to impose interpretations on anything they don’t understand, and indeed to vet/confirm those interpretations collectively, by persuading others that they are right; and that persuasion takes place largely below the radar of conscious awareness, through a collectively self-regulatory kinesthetic-becomingaffective-becoming-conative exchange involving body language and the mirror neurons. This is the ecological reading I’m trying out on Benjamin: that there are at work on and in languages and texts in those languages agentive and even vitalistic forces that are human, in the sense that no superhuman or subhuman agents (no gods or demons) participate in those forces, but that also seem trans­ human, in the sense that no rational human agent controls them. To the extent that those collective human agents possess subjectivity, it is a collective subjectivity, an ecological subjectivity, which one may want to follow Heidegger in derogating as das Man (see Chapter 4), but that does know things and Intend things and put pressure on its constituent parts – individual humans – to help bring its Intentions about. Benjamin insists that language change is not brought about by die Subjektivität der Nachgeborenen “in the subjectivity of later generations”; that may simply signal his sense that the forces that organize “the inner life of language and its works” are not consciously subjective, or even that subconscious acts are sub-subjective, and so not really subjective at all.

3.2 The social ecology of the Intentions So then for Benjamin the eigenstes Leben der Sprache und ihre Werke “ownmost life of language and its works” is lived by what he calls the “Intentions.” Is there any possible sense in which they could be supernatural agents? It seems unlikely. They must obviously be transhuman agents, or at least transindividual agents – no one human being could possibly be or embody the Intention of an entire language – but on the face of it the likelihood is far greater that Benjamin means some communal agent than that he is thinking about gods, or spirits, or other supernatural forces. Presumably what he means by the Intentions of individual languages is something like what we mean when we say that English “requires” or even “wants” us to use simple declarative SVO sentences with active subjects doing things to passive objects, or that English “mandates” a temporal logic, instantiated through verb tense, that is only vaguely present and indeed mainly optional in (say) Chinese. We do frequently personify languages in this way. And those personifications seem to me to be driven by the feeling we have, in languages that we speak and write well, of being constrained by some kind of highly (if not perfectly) organized force or pressure, which “tells” us affectively, or conatively, or even kinesthetically, when the usages we are tempted to use transgress those constraints. We feel this feeling when we try to translate literally, or when we read sentences in student papers like this one I read today: “It seemed like only yesterday that he came straight home in the middle of the night and locked the door.” My initial response is a generalized

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Walter Benjamin’s Intentions 109 feeling that there is something wrong with the first part of that sentence; “feeling” my way closer in, I roll “It seemed like only yesterday” on my mind’s tongue, which seems to push me – from outside my own will, outside my own personalized agency – to rephrase it as “It seems like only yesterday.” But isn’t “It seemed like only yesterday” possible? I feel around in that for a while, until clarity begins to emerge: if I use the past tense in the first clause, I need the past perfect (and “the day before” for “yesterday”) in the second. It does feel to us, I submit, as if a language we speak and write well has a quasipersonalized directionality at least, and possibly even a set of desires and preferences that resemble those of a person. This would be roughly what Benjamin means by Intentions; but it also sounds like the agentive power Liu attributes to languages, and remarkably like what Mikhail Bakhtin (1934–1935/1975: 84) calls “язык как мировоззрение и даже как конкретное мнение”/“language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion”: Общий единый язык – это система языковых норм. Но эти нормы – не абстрактное долженствование, а творящие силы языковой жизни, преодолевающие разноречие языка, объединяющие и централизующие словесно-идеологическое мышление, создающие внутри разноречивого национального языка твердое и устойчивое языковое ядро официально пр изнанного литературного языка или отстаивающие этот уже оформленный язык от напора растущего разноречия. Мы имеем в виду не абстрактный лингвистический минимум общего языка в смысле системы элементарных форм (лингвистических символов), обеспечивающий минимум понимания в практической коммуникации. Мы берем язык не как систему абстрактных грамматических категорий, а язык идеологически наполненный, язык как мировоззрение и даже как конкретное мнение, обеспечивающий максимум взаимного понимания во всех сферах идеологической жизни. A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia. What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. (Emerson and Holquist 1981: 270–1)

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110  Chapter 3 Mapping Benjamin’s terms onto Bakhtin, here – Benjamin’s 1923 translator’s preface to Baudelaire precedes the writing of Bakhtin’s Слово в романе/Discourse in the Novel by over a decade – we might say that the “system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication” of which Bakhtin writes is Benjamin’s social history of language as “ground” – the regularities that ordinary language-users feel and linguists systematize. We might further say that Bakhtin’s “generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought,” would be Benjamin’s “essence” of language as agent. Both thinkers are attempting to distinguish language as theorized by structuralist linguists – inert language, language as abstract form, at most constituting what Bakhtin calls “an abstract imperative” – from language as collective agent, quasipersonalized language, language as possessing and wielding a will to unification. This would be the Romantic vitalistic conception of language, which Benjamin and Bakhtin share. Languages want things. They are not abstract sign systems; they are willed. For Bakhtin, they want to banish disorder, replace it with order – to “unify” themselves. For Benjamin, they want to rub up against each other, exchange messy body fluids, as it were, specifically through translation, and so to move slowly toward a unification of a higher order than the kind that interests Bakhtin – namely, what Benjamin calls die reine Sprache “Pure Language.” To paraphrase Bakhtin, the forces that interest Benjamin are the generative forces of interlinguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia that prevails between languages, global forces – perhaps just intercultural forces – that unite and centralize the verbal-ideological thought of multiple language communities, creating between and among heteroglot national languages some kind of firm, stable linguistic nucleus that might approximate the mythical language of Eden and so come to be called Pure Language.

3.3 Conclusion: Giving up Benjamin’s theory of language is undeniably mystical; the question I’m gnawing at is whether the mystical agent powering languages’ ripening toward Pure Language is inaccessibly nonhuman (a god) or just transhuman/transindividual (a social ecology). If it is the latter, it is a vitalistic force made up of tens of billions of human beings doing whatever they do to and with language, over centuries, or millennia, or tens of millennia, and participating willy-nilly in this larger ecological process whose end Benjamin names “Pure Language,” but which might be reframed in my terms as the becoming-good of the community, or what I’ve been calling “ecosis.” The community will never become good in any absolute sense; language will never become pure; but the becoming is always at work, the guided becoming that is at the vitalistic core of ecosis/icosis. Again, the belief that languages do tend ecotically toward a merging in purity is Romantic, mythical (Edenic), and undeniably mystical; but if the vitalistic force driving that growth is not a god but an icosis or ecosis, a social ecology, then Benjamin’s is a secular mysticism, one grounded not even in the mystical secularity of

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Walter Benjamin’s Intentions 111 the Romantic apocalypse – “any strong desire to cast out nature and to achieve an unmediated contact with the principle of things” (Hartmann 1964: x), or, as William Blake (1793/1982: 39) put it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite”2 – but in the individual’s surrender to the group, to What One Does (see section 4.3). Benjamin developed his Marxist tendencies seven or eight years after the writing of this piece, partly through his friendship with Bertolt Brecht; but this socioecological reading of the mysticism of “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” as effectively secular in nature would make it not at all incompatible with his later Marxist inclinations. The translator’s surrender: to failure, in the inevitable deformation of the source text as it is transposed into the target language; but also to success, in the ecotic transformation of both languages in the impossible but all-too-human quest of a becoming-pure. And yet, of course: Damit ist allerdings zugestanden, daß alle Übersetzung nur eine irgendwie vorläufige Art ist, sich mit der Fremdheit der Sprachen auseinanderzusetzen. Eine andere als zeitliche und vorläufige Lösung dieser Fremdheit, eine augenblickliche und endgültige, bleibt den Menschen versagt oder ist jedenfalls unmittelbar nicht anzustreben. Mittelbar aber ist es das Wachstum der Religionen, welches in den Sprachen den verhüllten Samen einer höhern reift. (Benjamin 14) To say this is of course to admit that translation is merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other. A dissolution of this foreignness that would not be temporal and preliminary, but rather instantaneous and final, remains out of human reach, or is at least not to be sought directly. Indirectly, however, the growth of religions ripens into a higher language the seed hidden in languages. (Rendall 157) What Benjamin is fudging, there, is the exact agent that might instantaneously dissolve “the foreignness of languages to each other.” It’s not exactly not-human, but it is basically “out of human reach,” suggesting rather vaguely that humans either [a] can’t effect it themselves or [b] can’t experience it themselves. The (a) reading would imply either that [i] individual humans can’t perform that dissolution or that [ii] it can’t be done by humans at all; the (b) reading would imply that it is a supernatural experience that does literally exceed the human ability to partake of such things. An ecological reading of the passage would favor (a-i); but Benjamin’s phrasing is obviously vague enough to cover a lot of other possible interpretive territory as well. He does narrow the interpretive options considerably with two hedges: [c] we can’t seek it directly, and [d] a good example of the indirect alternative to that seeking is the “growth of religions.” Not, mind you, the growth of power (or of our awareness of the power) of

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112  Chapter 3 (b) the supernatural persons as postulated by religions, but the growth of religions themselves, which is to say of (a-i) social ecologies. The implication of this, I suggest, is that what Benjamin means by (c) “direct seeking” is the seeking of a single individual human agent, and what he means by (d) “indirect seeking” is the work of whole communities, on the model of religions; and thus also that the dissolution of the foreignness of languages to each other is “out of human reach” in the specific sense that individual rational agents can’t effect it, but communities can, and individuals can experience it. The only hitch in that reading, of course, is that Benjamin is talking about [e] “eine andere als zeitliche und vorläufige Lösung dieser Fremdheit, eine augenblickliche und endgültige”/“a dissolution of this foreignness that would not be temporal and preliminary, but rather instantaneous and final,” and obviously the instantaneity and finality of (e) lies beyond the power of a language community. So perhaps he is talking about some form of divine intervention after all?

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4 What one reads when one reads Heidegger

Rewind again: recall Liu (1999c: 137) writing that “one does not translate between equivalences; rather, one creates tropes of equivalence in the middle zone of translation between the host and guest languages.” I read that in section 1.4 as a Romantic individualization of creativity; but is “one” really an individual? Who exactly creates those tropes, and where exactly is that middle zone? For Émile Benveniste (1966: 225–36, 251–7; Meek 1971: 195–204, 217– 22) – see also CT 1.11 – only the “I” and the “you” are personal pronouns, in the sense of subjectivizing the participants in a conversation. The third person “kills.” To say “he,” “she,” “one,” or “they” – a fortiori to say “it” – is to de­personalize, desubjectivize. Benveniste assimilates all third-person pronouns to the impersonality of “it rains” or “it’s raining”: what rains? Who or what is the agent that rains? No one. Nothing. Οὖτις. “I” and “you” personalize/subjectivize; “s/he/it,” “one,” and “they” depersonalize/desubjectivize. This is close enough to the binary I began setting up in sections 1.3 – Liu Romanticizes the social act by giving the “I’s” of individual human agents too much power – and 1.4 – Liu depersonalizes the social act by assigning primary agency to abstract “its” like language, signification, representation, translation – to be worth exploring. My brief in this chapter, however, is that there is a powerful and quite common “periperformative” middle zone between the “I” and the “s/he/it/they,” and it is found precisely in the semipersonal pronoun “one” – but also in free indirect discourse and Bakhtin’s double-voicing. Specifically, I suggest that what is at work in that middle ground is a collectivized “I” that includes the individualized “I,” the individualized “you,” “they” as the crowd of witnesses, and the various abstract “its” to which Liu assigns agency.

4.1 das Man The most famous philosophical discussion of the semipersonal pronoun “one” is of course Martin Heidegger’s (1927/2001) concept of das Man; and it is significant for Liu’s Critical Translation Theory that Heidegger both despises the depersonalized third person of das Man and, nearly a quarter century later in Heidegger (1950/1986) – like the poststructuralist Liu that I tracked in section 1.4 – lauds the depersonalized third person of die Sprache spricht “language

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114  Chapter 4 speaks.” Is this an about-face? Did Heidegger change his mind in the interim? Or is something else at work there? Henri Meschonnic (2007: 20; Boulanger 45) complains that Heidegger imposes a literalizing/essentializing “réalisme de la langue”/“realism of langue” on language by announcing that “La langue . . . parle”/“langue . . . speaks.” In Meschonnic (1990) he makes it clear that his rejection of Heidegger’s dictum is predicated on the German philosopher’s renunciation of the subjective “I,” which for Meschonnic as a Benvenistean thinker is the only guarantor of subjectivity. If Meschonnic is right about the depersonalizing effect of the third person in die Sprache spricht “language speaks,” that would generate a significant philosophical inconsistency between Heidegger’s praise for that particular third person and contempt for the depersonalizing third person in das Man – but let us see how that works out. Das Man has proven exceedingly difficult to translate effectively into English. Part of the problem is that man “one” sounds exactly like (and is presumably derived from) Mann “man” (male adult human), so that das Man bears a strong aural resemblance to der Mann, but with the neuter article das rather than the masculine article der. So similar does man sound to Mann, in fact, that German feminists have attempted to replace das Man with das Frau – but it hasn’t caught on. Dutch men and Swedish, bokmål Norwegian, and Danish man work identically to their German cognate, and some speculate that English “man” used to work the same way – but does no longer. Speakers of nynorsk “New Norwegian” – the nationalistic dialect spoken and written in resistance to the Danish colonizers’ bokmål – associate man with German and Danish, and, like the English and some Swedes, have switched to en, which is also the number “one.” Obviously the resemblance between der Mann and das Man and the resulting natural “feel” of Heidegger’s coinage is impossible to reproduce in English; but the main problem is that man in German means only the impersonal third-person pronoun, while “one” in English is polysemous, covering both the number and the pronoun. As a result, the literal translation of das Man, “the One,” already has an established meaning – one that is more or less exactly the opposite from what Heidegger means, big and important rather than diffuse and almost invisible. To the believer, “the One” is God; to the lover, “the One” is the beloved. In rendering das Man into English, therefore, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962) shift from the collective third-person singular “one” to the collective or corporate third-person plural “they,” as in “they say” or “they won’t like that” (see Siewierska and Papastathi 2011). In her 1996 revision of the Macquarrie and Robinson translation, Joan Stambaugh changes very little: where in Macquarrie and Robinson das Man is “the ‘they,’ ” in Stambaugh it is “the they” (no scare quotes). This translation does get at something like the unconscious dissemination of homeostatic self-structuring throughout a whole social field that Heidegger means by das Man; unfortunately, it also lexically redirects the depersonalized/generalized speaker-inclusion in “one” to a depersonalized/generalized speaker-exclusion in “they.” Das Man sets up a reciprocal exchange between the personal first-person “I” and the impersonal third-person “one”; “the ‘they’ ”

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What one reads when one reads Heidegger 115 shifts that all over to shadowy others who control things from behind the scenes, to a generalized social paranoia that is not what Heidegger is theorizing at all. The usual assumption that the plural of “one” is “they” is simply not accurate. The true plural of “one” would have to be either a first-person “they” or a thirdperson “we.” Macquarrie and Robinson are presumably trying to hint at the former; but without the (superficially counterintuitive) theorization I’ve been offering in defense of that approach to one/they, with just the scare-quoted “they” on the page – and as I say Stambaugh removes even the scare quotes – the English reader is unlikely to reframe the pronoun along those lines. Benveniste (1966: 235) too raises the issue of third-person “one” in the context of the pluralization of personal pronouns: D’une manière générale, la personne verbale au pluriel exprime une personne amplifiée et diffuse. Le « nous » annexe au « je » une globalité indistincte d’autres personnes. Dans le passage du « tu » à « vous », qu’il s’agisse du « vous » collectif ou du « vous » de politesse, on reconnaît une généralisation de « tu », soit métaphorique, soit réelle, et par rapport à laquelle, dans des langues de culture surtout occidentales, le « tu » prend souvent valeur d’allocution strictement personnelle, donc familière. Quant à la non-­personne (3e personne), la pluralisation verbale, quand elle n’est pas le prédicat grammaticalement régulier d’un sujet pluriel, accomplit la même fonction que dans les formes « personnelles » : elle exprime la généralité indécise du on (type dicunt, they say). C’est la non-personne même qui, étendue et illimitée par son expression, exprime l’ensemble indéfini des êtres non-personnels. Dans le verbe comme dans le pronom personnel, le pluriel est facteur d’illimitation, non de multiplication. In a general way, the verbal person in the plural expresses a diffused and amplified person. “We” annexes an indistinct mass of other persons to “I.” In the passage from “thou” to “you,” be it the collective “you” or the polite “you,” we recognize a generalization of “thou,” either metaphoric or real, with regard to which, especially in languages of Western culture, “thou” often takes the value of a strictly personal and hence familiar address. As for the non-person (the third person), verbal pluralization, when it is not the grammatically regular predicate of a plural subject, accomplishes the same function as in the “personal” forms: it expresses the indecisive generality of “one” (of the type dicunt ‘they say’). It is this non-person which, extended and unlimited by its expression, expresses an indefinite set of non-personal beings. In the verb, as in the personal pronoun, the plural is a factor of limitlessness, not multiplication. (Meek 1971: 203–4) Again, this is somewhat problematic: like “we,” but unlike “they,” “one” includes the “I.” “One,” like the implicit subject of free indirect discourse (see section 4.2, below), is a blending of the first and third persons, and thus a kind of honorary plural in its own right, “I”/“he”/“she” all wrapped into “one,”

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116  Chapter 4 and so a strange kind of “they” that does not exclude the speaker – but also does not shine a spotlight on the speaker. Benveniste’s insistence that “one” and “they” are grammatical non-persons that express “an indefinite set of nonpersonal beings,” part of his general assault on the personhood of the third person, does work, sort of; but I suggest that his binary cognitive model betrays him. If a category has to be either “personal” or “non-personal,” then yes, “one” and “they” sort of fall into the latter. What he misses by forcing those two pronouns into a single binary pole, however, is that the “one” of “one simply doesn’t do that sort of thing” and the “they” of “they say” are semipersonal pronouns, pronouns that half-depersonalize the persons to which they refer but continue to ground the actions their verbs describe in a very human (but disaggregated) agency. Like the “verbal person in the plural” (namely, “we” and plural “you”), “one” in particular (but also “they”) “expresses a diffused and amplified person” – a diffused human agency that often seems to lack individualized faces, but that nevertheless follows strong inclinations, and even makes decisions, very much like a single person. “One simply doesn’t do that sort of thing” describes a principled ethical choice, or perhaps just ethical orientation or inclination; it means first of all that I don’t do that sort of thing; but second that my inclination not to do it is backed up by all right-thinking people, the group, the community, society, “they,” who strongly frown on this sort of behavior, and by incorporating my “one” convert it into an honorary “we”; and third that you shouldn’t do it either, because you are (at least entelechially) a part of the “one” that simply doesn’t do such things. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, my inclination becomes one’s inclination when it is backed up by “[le] jugement de la loi de la communauté, ou plutôt et plus originairement [le] jugement de la communauté en tant que loi” (1986/2004: 72)/“the judgment of the law of community, or, more originarily, . . . the judgment of community as law” (Connor 28). “One” is in that sense the inclusion or incorporation of the “they” of societal or communal “witnesses,” what Eve Sedgwick (2003: 69–70) calls the “peri­ performative,” into the performative “I-you.” Sedgwick’s trenchant observation is that performatives, not just institutional performatives like “I now pronounce you husband and wife” but more ad hoc performatives like “I dare you,” depend for their effect on witnessing, on a kind of crowd ratification that is channeled through conative pressure to conform: if I dare you, and you accept the dare, they (the witnesses) will either pressure you to do the dangerous deed or punish you with disapproval if you “wuss out” (that being the technical term Sedgwick uses). “One” is in that sense the perfect periperformative pronoun: it is the “I-youthey” idealized/unified into a single collective agency that has subsumed its own witnesses. “One,” to put it boldly, “performs the crowd.” Some languages, of course, including English, use “you” impersonally, or perhaps semipersonally, to do (at least some of) the periperformative work that “one” does. “One” may implicitly include both the speaker’s “I” and the hearer’s “you,” as well as the speaker’s/hearer’s “we” and the absent/collective/­corporate/ witnessing “they,” but is not explicitly marked for any of those; impersonal “you”

What one reads when one reads Heidegger 117

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is at least theoretically limited by its explicit marking as hearer-inclusive, and possibly also, at least in colloquial uptake, hearer-identical: A:  You’d have to be truly warped to like Frank Zappa. B:  I would? A:  I mean, one would. B:  But I do like Frank Zappa. Are you saying that I’m warped? A:  No, I’m . . . well . . . I’m just saying.

There clearly A’s conditional “you” is primarily speaker-exclusive (“I don’t like Frank Zappa”), but also secondarily (becoming-cognitively) hearer-exclusive (“you’re probably enough like me that I can safely exclude you from ‘you’ ”), and therefore projectively speaker-and-hearer-exclusive-becoming-impersonal (“I mean, one would”). B first (perhaps pointedly) mishears A’s impersonal (hearer-exclusive) “you” as singular personal (hearer-identical) “you,” and then, when A tries to back-pedal out of the implied insult by going explicitly impersonal, insists on the hearer-inclusivity even of A’s “one.” As A’s humorously lame “I’m just saying” implies, we are not always fully conscious of the exact extension of our personal or impersonal pronouns, or therefore of the exact boundary between the personalizing and/or depersonalizing effects of those pronouns on the people with whom we converse. In Sedgwick’s terms, too, the performativity of “you” as perlocutionary target blends vertiginously with the periperformativity of “you” (pronounced [jə]) as conatively distanced witness. And indeed one possible English translation of das Man might be “the You” – except, of course, for the unfortunate fact that “you” in English is both hearerinclusive/impersonal and hearer-identical/personal, and so just as polysemous as “one.” Similar problems beset other translations that have been offered, such as “the Everyone” (Funkenstein 2000: 178) and “the Anyone” (Blattner 2007). Both indefinite pronouns (see Haspelmath 1997) come closer to das Man than “the ‘they’ ” in suggesting that Heidegger’s concept is a kind of collectivized self, though neither stands in intimate relation with the self; the focus in both is on collectivization rather than the operation of that process in individuals. The big problem with “the Everyone” and “the Anyone,” however, it seems to me, is that neither is integrally connected with periperformatively guided choice, specifically crowd guidance to the selection from among ethical options of the normative one. Das Man may be nearly anonymous like “everyone” and “anyone,” but it wants things, and puts pressure on individuals to want those things too. “The Everyone” is literally everyone, the whole world, all human beings, and therefore incapable of helping the individual choose a course of action. Indeed the childhood cry “But everyone does it!” would seem to invoke something like the exact opposite of das Man – random, indiscriminate action sanctioned by an unregulated mass – as a channel of resistance to precisely the kind of periperformative (in this case parental) pressure to adhere to group norms that das Man channels. “The Anyone” makes every individual interchangeable, which is not so

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very different from the kind of conformity das Man seeks to create; but not normatively interchangeable, because we’ve all been ethically regulated by society, as das Man would prefer, but randomly interchangeable, simply because we’re all human. Because groups proliferate and overlap, of course, there can be no universal set of norms to which das Man seeks to make us conform; and because the ethical pressure that is das Man works imperfectly on imperfect beings in an imperfect world, conformity is never total even within a single group.

4.2 Free indirect discourse As I began to suggest a moment ago, the periperformative middle zone of “one” or colloquial “you” is surprisingly close to the periperformative middle zone of free indirect discourse, which Bakhtin (1929/2002; Emerson 1984) famously retheorized as double-voicing. In Joyce’s Voices Hugh Kenner (1978: 15) writes: The first sentence of “The Dead” has also a leaden ring, very perceptible to a translingual ear. (Joyce’s household language was Italian, his public language during the Ulysses period successively Triestino, Schweizerdeutsch, and French. He was normally poised between some other language and English.) Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Translate that into any alien tongue you like. “Literally?” To wonder what “literally” may mean is the fear of the Word and the beginning of reading. Whatever Lily was literally (Lily?) she was not literally run off her feet. She was (surely?) figuratively run off her feet, but according to a banal figure. And the figure is hers, the idiom: “literally” reflects not what the narrator would say (who is he?) but what Lily would say: “I am literally run off my feet.” Kenner here seems to be anticipating Liu’s argument, that we – translinguals like Joyce, who by all accounts are becoming the global norm these days, necessitating for some the move past TS to CTS – tend to test for this sort of middle-zone complexity by translating it into other languages. That test would seem to suggest that, Benveniste to the contrary, there is a reciprocal relationship between the first and third persons: according to Kenner’s “translingual ear,” Joyce creates one here. In the free indirect paraphrasing of Lily’s thoughts as narrative voice, he sets up a partial meshing or merging between “She was literally run off her feet” and “I am literally run off my feet,” and thus also between the third-person past-tense narration of the unnamed and uncharacterized narrator, in reporting what some absent person named Lily said or thought, and the first-person present-tense narration of Lily, who is presumably present in the moment that is here being narrated. “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” is neither “purely” Lily nor “purely” the narrator, but both intermingled, intertwined; and that means that personhood is neither purely present (as Lily

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What one reads when one reads Heidegger 119 thinking/saying “I am”) nor purely absent/past (as the narrator thinking/saying “she was”) either, but both at once. But is this relationship really reciprocal? Surely, for example, Lily could not turn the “I am” of the story’s narrator into a “he was” – even assuming this was a characterized first-person narrator, which it is not. But Bakhtin (1929/2002; Emerson 1984) explores just this sort of literary strategy in Dostoevsky, under the rubric of “активний тип”/“the active type,” in which the subjectivity of narrator and character not only blend but interact, and interchange, in vertiginous ways. As Bakhtin presents this mode, as a type of literary narration, it seems relatively rare; but in ordinary conversation this sort of multinarratorial reciprocity is quite common, whenever A tells a story about B to C, paraphrasing or retonalizing B’s words, and B immediately retells the same story to C from his or her own point of view, correcting (and so re-retonalizing) A’s retonalizations. In that sort of situation, A inflects the “s/he” that refers to B with his or her own “I” (own personal attitudes, affective interpretations, etc.), and B in turn reinflects the “s/he” that refers to A with his or her own “I” – each attempting to narrativize the “truth” about the situation for C, but in reciprocally opposing ways. More, as I read Sedgwick (2003: 67–91) on periperformativity, free indirect discourse blurs the boundaries not only between the “I” and the “s/he” – and not only (as Kenner hints) between the local/familiar and the foreign/strange/ alien, and between the present encounter and past/other/absent encounters, and thus between “personalization”/subjectivization and depersonalization – but between the performative event or gesellschaftliger Tat “social act” (section 1.3) and the periperformativity of social ecologies, or what I call icoses/ ecoses. Even at the furthest extreme of s/he-depersonalization, in the utterances like “He’s dead to me” and “She’s nothing to me” that Benveniste takes to be paradigmatic of the third “person,” I argue that the third “person” thus alienated and depersonalized is not so much absent as periperformatively presented to the “you” as a channel of normative socioaffective pressure. Thus if A says to C of B, “I tell you, he’s dead to me,” A should be read not as banishing B from the dialogue but rather as marshaling a depersonalized image of B for the purpose of shaping the personhood of C. And indeed there is something about this blurring and this reciprocity that is always at work at a very deep relational level constructing personhood – not just Lily’s and the narrator’s, in the first sentence of “The Dead,” but, and more importantly, that/those of the participants in the implicit I(she)>you created by the narrative voice, which is at once the narrator’s exchange with the narratee and Joyce’s exchange with the actual reader. As Kenner continues, “Joyce is at his subtle game of specifying what pretensions to elegance are afoot on this occasion, and he does so with great economy by presenting a caretaker’s daughter (Americans say ‘the janitor’s girl’) cast for this evening as hall maid . . .” (15). Specifying to whom? Presenting to whom? To us, obviously: Joyce’s readers. Not quite his addressees, we nevertheless serve as witnesses to his satire, and thus, as Sedgwick notes, the enabling social force behind that satire. Joyce is using his narrator not only to evaluate social pretensions negatively, but also implicitly – periperformatively – to

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120  Chapter 4 put socioaffective pressure on us, his audience (C), to submit to his evaluations, to accept them as true and valid. To join his narrator in looking down on a pretentious and perhaps illiterate “janitor’s girl” who thinks or says “literally” when she rather banally means “figuratively” is to enter into a social ecology of value that enforces its collective judgments affectively, and thus also ideally to allow our sense of our own personhood or subjectivity to be shaped “morally” or “evaluatively” (socioaffectively) in the image of the superior educated person who uses language more creatively and critically and despises those who fail to do so. Why “collective” judgments? Surely Joyce is only a single person (who “contains” his narrator)? But of course contempt for the uneducated among the global/translingual intelligentsia is not a random individualized sentiment; Joyce imbibed his disapproval of uneducated people saying “literally” when they mean “figuratively” (or else mean to intensify the affective force of their remarks) from other educated people of his acquaintance, in several countries, several cultures, even several intercultures and interlanguages. He may even have heard someone else making fun of this “class” idiom – he may, in other words, here be freely/indirectly paraphrasing some educated friend’s verbalized contempt. Even if that is not strictly speaking what happened, his class contempt for the uneducated is something in him that has been shaped (ecotized) by other people, precisely through tonalizations and other attitudinalizations of other people’s discourse. And above all, again, the enabling factor that renders the event ecotic is our evaluative participation in the periperformative “witnessing” of that contempt in his retonalizations of Lily. Without the complex social support for the performative that Sedgwick calls periperformativity and I call ecosis/icosis, the speech act is performed entirely by one individual with an intended design (“illocutionary force”) on another individual (“perlocutionary effect”) – and the relationship between illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect is mystified (remains impossible to explain). Note also that Kenner’s “Translate that into any alien tongue you like” implies a kind of periperformative continuity between Joyce as the author and das Man as the translator: like Joyce, like any author of fiction, the translator is blocked from the performative “I-you.” As soon as either the author or the translator says “I” to readers as her or his “you,” s/he becomes a narrator, addressing not readers but narratees. What some TS scholars are calling the translator’s narratoriality is in fact typically not the overt assumption of the narratorial “I-you” but a covert periperformative participation in the narrator’s double-voicing of the author and the anticipated reader: the translation scholar detects signs of that narratoriality not in first-person address but in stylistic proclivities that “infect” or “contaminate” the source-textual narratorial voice with target-authorial preference, the stylistic propensities of the translator as what Sakai calls a “subject in transit” (CT 1.10). Textual performatives are performed by persons inside the text; pace Derrida, it is precisely because authors, translators, and readers are outside the text that their contribution to the text’s performativity is periperformative in nature, the shaping influence of “witnesses” – the crowd.

What one reads when one reads Heidegger 121 But then one must also hasten to add – you don’t want to forget – that that periperformative influence is built into the text. In Sedgwick’s terms, there is no performative “I-you” without a periperformative “I-you-they.” There is nothing outside the crowd’s performance of the text.

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4.3 das Man again And now back to Heidegger’s nominalization of “one,” das Man, which one might even want, whimsically, to translate as “the Periperformative.” Given Heidegger’s passionate preference for philosophizing with ordinary Germanic words and phrases rather than the kind of Latinate abstractions that ground science and scientifically minded philosophy, however, I think perhaps not. In what follows, therefore, I propose to use a noun phrase instead: “What One Does.” Das Manselbst, which Macquarrie/Robinson (1962) and Stambaugh (1996) both translate as “the they-self,” would thus be “the What One Does-self.” The syntax of What One Does tends to shift semantic focus from the depersonalized pronoun (“one”) to the predicated action, the actional contents of the verb, What One Does; however, given that Heidegger himself puts so much emphasis on verbs and verbal action (sein “to be,” sprechen “to speak,” heißen “to call,” stillen “to still,” and so on), I don’t think that’s a serious problem. If Benveniste read Heidegger on das Man, I’m guessing he found in those remarks striking confirmation for his thesis that the third “person” actually depersonalizes. This is in fact Heidegger’s brief. Under the rule of das Man, he says, Jeder ist der Andere und Keiner er selbst. Das Man, mit dem sich die Frage nach dem Wer des alltäglichen Daseins beantwortet, ist das Niemand, dem alles Dasein im Untereinandersein sich je schon ausgeliefert hat. (Heidegger 1927/2001: 128) Everybody’s the other, nobody’s himself. What One Does, which answers the Who Does What question of everyday Dasein, is the Nobody Doing Anything to which all Dasein in its Being-among-one-another has already surrendered itself. (translation DR) In this realm of everyday functioning, there are no authentic Selves; there is just this commingled Being-as-doing, Being-like-everybody-else, Being-shapedin-the-image-of-the-mass. In den genannten Modi [‘[das] alltägliche[] Untereinandersein[], Abständigkeit, Durchschnittlichkeit, Einebnung, Öffentlichkeit, Seinsentlastung und Entgegenkommen’] seiend hat das Selbst des eigenen Daseins und das Selbst des Andern sich noch nicht gefunden bzw. verloren. Man ist in der Weise der Unselbständigkeit und Uneigentlichkeit. (Heidegger 128)

122  Chapter 4

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In the forementioned modes [“everyday Being-among-one-another, otherdirectedness, mediocrity, flattening, superficiality, offloading of being, and meeting others halfway”], the Self of one’s own Dasein and the Self of the Other haven’t yet found or lost themselves. One is neither self-sufficient nor truly oneself. (translation DR) Heidegger’s specific orientation to What One Does is that we are wrong to think of our existence as initially singular, self-centered, individuated, and so isolated from others, and only gradually socialized through our encounters with other beings; in fact what happens, he argues, is that we begin as part of What One Does, existentially trapped inside the faceless collectivity of What One Does, and only gradually – and only if we value our freedom – begin to break ourselves out of it, split ourselves off from it, to become “I.” “ ‘Die Anderen,’ ” Heidegger says, “besagt nicht soviel wie: der ganze Rest der Übrigen außer mir, aus dem sich das Ich heraushebt, die Anderen sind vielmehr die, von denen man selbst sich zumeist nicht unterscheidet, unter denen man auch ist” (118). The spatial imagery there requires that we try that literally: “ ‘The others’ says not so much as: the whole rest of the left-overs outside me, out of which the I out-heaves itself, the others are far more those from whom one (one)self mostly does not under-part, under/among whom one also is.” The phrase “der ganze Rest der Übrigen außer mir” is a bit clunky and wordy: it could be translated “the whole rest of the remainder but me,” or “the whole remainder of the remainder except me”; Macquarrie and Robinson (1962: 11) and Stambaugh (1996: 111) reduce it to “everybody/everyone else but me.” I’ve literalized die Übrige as “the leftovers” because übrig “remaining” has über “over” as its root – which is interesting because in the rest or the remainder of the sentence Heidegger plays on unter “under,” which is also used to mean “among.” To be among is to be under; to be left out or left over is to be over or above. Over and under as exclusion and inclusion. I’ve literalized unterscheiden as “to under-part” to highlight that, even though it could also be literalized as “to among-part” or “to among-separate,” and is usually translated as “to differentiate” or (as both Macquarrie/Robinson and Stambaugh both have it) “to distinguish.” The pun is “man selbst sich zumeist nicht unterscheidet, unter denen man auch ist”: What One Does is not normally to among-part oneself from others, What One Does is among them – but that among-ness in German is also an under-ness, and the remaindering of their apartness is an overing, an overage. With that vertical imagery Heidegger then mixes an inside-outside imagery: “außer mir, aus dem sich das Ich heraus­ hebt” gives us three outs, first “outside me” (myself as the inside, the others as outside), then the I heaving itself out of the others (the others as the inside, the authentic I as propelling itself to the outside). The overlapping spatial metaphors project visualizations of the relationships Heidegger is trying to flesh out: not just with others or alone, but over-under others, inside-outside others. To be trapped inside others is to be under them, and so subordinate to them; to cast oneself off

What one reads when one reads Heidegger 123

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from them is to rise over them, to wield power over them. This is the heroizing impulse of the Romantic Occidentalist. Or again: Das Selbst des alltäglichen Daseins ist das Man-selbst, das wir von dem eigentlichen, das heißt eigens ergriffenen Selbst unterscheiden. Als Man-selbst ist das jeweilige Dasein in das Man zerstreut und muß sich erst finden – (129) The self of everyday Dasein is the What One Does-self, which we differentiate [under-separate] from the authentic, which is to say, authentically grasped self. As the What One Does-self, Dasein is dissipated into What One Does, and must first find itself – (translation DR) – in order to emerge into authentic “I”-hood. If the “one” that “does not translate between equivalences” and does “create[] tropes of equivalence in the middle zone” (Liu 1999c: 137) is “the What One Does-self, [the] Da-sein [that] is dispersed into What One Does,” then Heidegger has nothing but contempt for it. He expects the authentic Self to surge up out of that dispersion into the Romantic heroism of section 1.3 – and as I suggested there, Liu too feels strongly drawn to that Romantic ethos of the poetic hero, only slightly displaced downward into the British translators and colonial officials who somehow magically made the word 夷 yi disappear from the discourse of a billion and a half Chinese. But it seems to me that the power to make that word disappear from the discourse of a billion and a half Chinese is precisely the power wielded by das Man, the What One Does-self – especially as I’ve expansively articulated it here, as the “I’s” address to the “you” swelled into a crowdnormativity by incorporating witnesses, the third-person periperformative witnesses that regulate social action by bringing to bear on it conformative pressure. And even at a much lower order of civilizational magnitude, those tropes of equivalence that Liu borrowed from The Translator’s Turn – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, irony, metalepsis – are surely not created by individual translators; they’re created as general orientations by das Man (and identified and named as tropes by individual translation theorists), for use by individual translators. This seems to me, in fact, exactly what Liu was attempting to articulate. I am again, in other words, marshalling icotic theory not to refute but to refine her arguments.

4.4 Language speaks But then if that one third-person pronoun depersonalizes, is Meschonnic completely wrong to insist that the third-person description of “language speaking” depersonalizes language and speaking as well? “Die Sprache spricht,” Heidegger

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124  Chapter 4 (1950/1986: 16) writes. “Wie ist es mit ihrem Sprechen?” “Language speaks,” Hofstadter (1971: 193) translates that. “What about its speaking?” Because die Sprache is a feminine noun in German, Heidegger does write literally “how is it with her speaking?” – but by the conventions of German grammar, the feminine ihrem is simply an impersonal possessive pronoun marked as feminine, not an actual personal possessive. And in any case Benveniste insists that all third-person pronouns depersonalize. So what should we think about this Benjaminian speaking of language? Die Sprache spricht. Wie ist es mit ihrem Sprechen? Wo finden wir solches? Am ehesten doch im Gesprochenen. Darin nämlich hat das Sprechen sich vollendet. Im Gesprochenen hört das Sprechen nicht auf. Im Gesprochenen bleibt das Sprechen geborgen. Im Gesprochenen versammelt das Sprechen die Weise, wie es währt, und das, was aus ihm währt – sein Währen, sein Wesen. Aber zumeist und zu oft begegnet uns das Gesprochene nur als das Vergangene eines Sprechens. (Heidegger 16) Language speaks. What about its speaking? Where do we encounter such speaking? Most likely, to be sure, in what is spoken. For here speech has come to completion in what is spoken. The speaking does not cease in what is spoken. Speaking is kept safe in what is spoken. In what is spoken, speaking gathers the ways in which it persists as well as that which persists by it – its persistence, its presencing. But most often, and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past. (Hofstadter 193–4) If the third-person indicative verb “speaks” depersonalizes, surely the passive form “is spoken” does as well, as does the noun derived from the participial passive (das Gesprochene “what is spoken”). Later in the essay Heidegger gives the third-person indicative a human subject – “Der Mensch spricht, insofern er der Sprache entspricht” (Heidegger 33), “Man speaks in that he responds to language” (Hofstadter 210) – but from Benveniste’s point of view, and from Meschonnic’s Benvenistean point of view, this helps his case not at all, because he is still in the depersonalizing third person. But if we cautiously begin to apply to Heidegger the notion of a periperformative middle zone between the first and third persons, we may find that things look a little different. If Heidegger collectivizes himself as der Mensch “the person,” which Albert Hofstadter translates as “man,” is he too thereby abandoning his own personhood? As he writes this article in the late 1940s, after the war, still in disgrace, Heidegger is himself a Mensch, at least in the German (as opposed to the Yiddish) sense: he’s human, a person. When he refers to what people do, surely he includes himself. I speak; Heidegger speaks; one speaks; people speak. As Bakhtin might put it, for that matter – invoking his notion of адрессивность adressivnost’ addressivity – I speak insofar as I respond to you/them/one/others

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What one reads when one reads Heidegger 125 speaking. One speaks insofar as one responds to one speaking, which is to say, one speak-hears insofar as one responds to one hear-speaking. And if we hear-speak “one” there as the singular version of a first-person “they” or a third-person “we,” we might paraphrase that to say that we speak insofar as we respond to each other speaking. It’s hard to see much of a distinction between der Mensch and das Man, in fact: if speaking is What One Does, das Man spricht insofern es der Sprache entspricht, which is to say, “What One Does [is that one] speaks insofar as one responds to language.” What One Does with words one does in witness to the doing of things with words. One periperforms the performative “I-you” as crowd. There’s also the question of how we are to understand das Sprechen “speaking,” or das Sprechen der Sprache “the speaking of language.” Die Sprache “language” is another nominalization of the verb sprechen “to speak.” Die Sprache ist das Sprechen des Gesprochenes “Language is the speaking of what is spoken.” Regardless of the grammatical form “speaking” takes – noun or verb, passive or active, past or present, continuous or indicative, first, second, or third person – don’t we mentally and even kinesthetically “mouth” it, as Meschonnic would say? Not only do we associate it with the mouth, in other words, with the lips and the teeth and the tongue and the palate, with the moving of breath through muscular passageways: we experience it. We perform it kinesthetically. If we have ourselves spoken, we speak inwardly when we read or think (witness) the word “speak,” or “speaking,” or “spoken.” This internalized or somatized kinesthetic reenactment of speaking in the reading or thinking of “speaking” casts a rather dark shadow of dubiety on Meschonnic’s claim that by saying “La langue . . . parle” Heidegger is literalizing and essentializing language, creating a “réalisme de la langue”/“realism of langue.” I take Meschonnic to be arguing there not that such was Heidegger’s intention, but that such is the effect of die Sprache spricht on his readers – but is it? Even if it could somehow be shown that Heidegger did intend such a literalization and essentialization, in fact, that intention and that proof could hardly prevent us from reembodying speaking in our mind’s mouths when we read his words. I submit, in fact, that Meschonnic’s description of the impact of Heidegger’s dictum on readers is simply wrong – or rather, perhaps, that his claim is empirical (some readers, including Meschonnic himself, may respond this way to Heidegger) but not necessary. I’m guessing that his errance in this matter has something to do with the fact that he is reading Heidegger in French translation – in a target culture where “la langue parle” is the common or established translation of die Sprache spricht – and that Meschonnic simply follows the Saussure of the Cours in associating la langue exclusively with the abstract systemic representation of language, a dead thing that cannot possibly speak, except perhaps by galvanic ventriloquism. But even if we are French readers with no German, there is no absolute reason why we have to let ourselves be trapped inside an established translation, or inside an established conceptualization of one word in that translation, or by the imagery associated with that conceptualization. As Sedgwick (70) notes of dares, we may feel periperformatively pressured by the

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126  Chapter 4 crowd of witnesses to take the dare; but we don’t have to give in to that pressure. We can renegotiate our (implicit, unstated) relationship with the crowd. As I noted before, we can “disinterpellate” by building a new alliance with them, based say on “wussiness.” Wussing out is perhaps an odd instantiation of Heidegger’s Romantic heroization of the authentic self – but it does take considerable courage, even heroism, to be a wuss when the crowd is determined to make one a hero. And even if we don’t rethink the French translation through the German derivation of die Sprache from sprechen and retranslate die Sprache spricht as la parole parle – even if we stick with la langue – we can remind ourselves that la langue is not just an abstract systematic representation of language. It is also (we like to say “literally”) the tongue, the actual muscle in the mouth that contributes so actively to speaking. In Meschonnic’s own terms, this would make la langue mouthable, speakable, in a dual sense: not just capable of being mouthed/ spoken, but charged inwardly with the felt kinesthetics of mouthing/speaking, which is to say, again to paraphrase Meschonnic, “not flesh, but maximum oralization.”

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5 The socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi

Let us step back from the microargument for a moment to ask, metaargumentatively: why is the periperformative crowd mind that we have been tracking over the last two chapters such a problem? Why, to begin with, has it been (until very recently) so little recognized? And why, when it is recognized, is it so often derogated, as in Heidegger, or in William Whyte’s (1952) coinage “groupthink,” as studied by Irving Janis (1972/1982)? Yes, obviously, when it functions as a mob mentality it is profoundly frightening, in its fierce and often violent suppression of rational thought; when it functions as patriotism or sentimentality, it feels like a straitjacket; as groupthink has come to be defined, it involves the suppression of conflict and dissensus, and tends to lead to group dysfunctionality (isolation from out-group influences, loss of creativity, the illusion of in-group invulnerability, and so on). In a rationalist and individualist intellectual tradition, we would rather not even think about such forces – and, to the extent that we find ourselves driven to think about them, we will certainly find nothing good to say about them. I say “until very recently,” though, because the crowd mind, or the hive mind, or “swarm intelligence” – or any of a number of other terms – has recently begun to receive considerable positive press, in Rheingold (2002), Newman et al. (2006), Shirky (2008), and similar texts. Talk of crowd-sourcing – and, in TS, crowd-subbing and other forms of wikitranslation – is nowadays all the rage. But it is equally striking, perhaps in overreaction against the negativity that for so long was directed at this phenomenon, that these new works tend to present only the positive sides of the crowd mind: Clay Shirky, for example, says nothing about the cyber-bullying that accompanies so much Wikipedia editing. Even more striking is the fact that this new work typically focuses only on the ways in which the crowd mind consists of human individuals working together, rationally, consciously, to achieve a collective task. The literature on communities of practice, too, tends to be more about collaboration than about the communal forces that organize our practices far “below” the level of our conscious awareness; and practical applications of CoP theory tend to be about “creating” communities of practice, which in turn tends to mean creating projects that will bring people together to achieve a common purpose. The mostly unconscious sociological phenomenon that I call icosis/ecosis, in other words, still flies mostly under the radar – to the point where I have on

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128  Chapter 5 several occasions been accused of inventing the whole thing. When Raymond Williams (1961: 64–88, 1977: 128–33) calls it “structures of feeling,” Marxists like (early) Terry Eagleton (1976: 21–42) tend to accuse him of humanism, idealism, and Romantic populism1; when Fredric Jameson (1981) calls it the political unconscious, readers assume that he means it metaphorically – especially given that he says nothing about how it works.2 It cannot possibly, in other words, be a real force. If it were, we would surely know something about it. In terms of the Western philosophical tradition, I suggest, the problem is that the post-Kantian project of developing a phenomenological explanation of objectivism – of plausibly explaining the qualitative impression we have that not only material objects but ideal objects like signs possess a stable ontology that is available for empirical study – has remained incomplete. In one historical light, that has been the great unfinished (Continental) philosophical project of the last two centuries: explaining how Kantian subjectivism is capable of fleshing out a real-seeming world. Liu’s retheorization of translation at the end of the twentieth century breathes the uneasy air of the poststructuralist reframing of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and of course many others, starting with the assumption that what we take to be reality is a discursive construct – but never quite getting around to explaining how that construct can possibly feel so real. Like the other discursivists, she suspects that she doesn’t have the intellectual tools even to ask the right questions, let alone offer a plausible answer, so she skirts around the issue allusively, and elusively, hinting at what her fellow critical theorists all know (or at least suspect) intuitively: that there is some kind of shared ground between thought and our experience of a real-seeming (and therefore possibly “material”) world. From a non-Western perspective, however, the problem looks rather different. From that perspective, or that loose collection of perspectives, the problem is that Western thought is mired in fruitless dualisms: either the individual human is an autonomous god who subjects all action to rational deliberation, never takes a step that is not perfectly planned in advance, never acts on a whim or makes a mistake – or else there are no individuals, only honeybees, perfectly controlled by the Hive Mind. The speaker or translator is either an all-powerful Heideggerian hero or Οὖτις Niemand “Nobody” – has no power or agency at all: is merely the physical site on which or instrument by which language or translation or some other quasi-mystical abstraction wields all power. As we saw in Chapter 3, Walter Benjamin’s kabbalistic mystification of translation in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” is the most elevated expression of that dualism: Benjamin’s translator is a bumbler who cannot possibly succeed, who is driven by and mired in all manner of error (such as the ridiculous notion that any “true” writer ever wrote for an audience), but in the process of committing those hapless errors somehow mysteriously awakens the all-powerful Intentions of the source language and the target language, and as those Intentions clash they drive the messianic history of humankind toward the eschatological glory of Pure Language.

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Socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi 129 Obviously, neither side of this dualism is capable of orchestrating the coming-tofeel-real of post-Kantian social-constructivism. If reality were constructed by rational agents who planned everything consciously, analytically, logically, intellectually, it would not only never feel real; it would lack the stability of the reality we experience in our situated embodiment. This is the usual argument against social constructivism. If to explain that stability and that feeling of reality we imagine a supernatural Creator who controls humans like pawns, we’re back to paranoid Christian supernaturalism, and of course also objectivism, the (super-) natural concomitant of such thinking. Reality feels real because it was created as reality by a real God. Those seem to be our choices.

5.1 Laozi on the entelechy of propensity (勢 shi) Given the fact that Liu is Chinese, I find it rather ironic that she neglects to invoke the great ancient Chinese alternatives to this Western dualizing tendency. For example, consider this famous passage from the Laozi: 道生之，德畜之，物形之，勢成之。是以萬物莫不尊道而貴德。道之尊， 德之貴，夫莫之命常自然。 (Chapter 51) dao sheng zhi, de xu zhi, wu xing zhi, shi cheng zhi, shiyi wanwu mobu zun dao er gui de. dao zhi zun, de zhi gui, fu mo zhi ming chang ziran. Way-making (dao) gives things their life, And their particular efficacy (de) is what nurtures them. Events shape them, And having a function consummates them. It is for this reason that all things (wanwu) honor way-making And esteem efficacy. As for the honor directed at way-making And the esteem directed at efficacy, It is really something that just happens spontaneously (ziran) Without anyone having ennobled them. (Ames and Hall 2003: 156) Note the sequence there in the first sentence (the first four lines in Ames and Hall’s translation): [1] 道生之 dao sheng zhi “dao gives birth/life to them” [2] 德畜之 de xu zhi “de nurtures them” [3] 物形之 wu xing zhi “wu shapes them” [4] 勢成之 shi cheng zhi “shi completes/coheres them” In Aristotelian terms, that is an entelechy, troped as the trajectory of a life: (1) 生 sheng is both birth/life as a noun and (here, as a verb) the giving of birth/life; (2) 畜 is both livestock (chu) as a noun and the raising (xu) of livestock as a verb;

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130  Chapter 5 (3) 形 xing is appearances, the look or shape of a thing, and here the shaping of things; and (4) 成 cheng is the bringing of completion or coherence to a thing. The agents performing those actions are (1–2) the field (道 dao) and the focus (德 de) after which the book takes its popular name, Daodejing; then (3–4) the emerging “things” that are actually processual events (物 wu) and the power or potentiality or propensity that seems to drive the process (勢 shi). Imagine this sequence as Laozi’s answer to the question that Liu doesn’t ask about how the legal ban the British wrote into the Tianjin treaty documents managed to ban 夷 yi from the speech of a billion and a half Chinese today. What would an explanatory model based on this passage look like? The all-important question of what agent(s) performed the action would require that we think more carefully about the four agents Laozi lists: 道 dao, 德 de, 物 wu, and 勢 shi. 道 dao and 德 de, traditionally translated into English as “the Way” and “Virtue,” are the implicit headings of the two sections of the Laozi, which as I say is why the book is popularly known as the Daodejing (formerly the Tao Te Ching), “The Classic of Dao and De.” A more comprehensive translation of 道 dao would be “everything,” the way things are, the way things happen; but Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall argue persuasively that it should be read not as a noun, and certainly not as a capitalized (and therefore implicitly deified) noun like the Way, but as a verb, making one’s way, so that “the way things happen” is a making things happen that way. When combined with the overriding Daoist instruction to 無為 wuwei “not act,” or not impose a coercive structure on action – to let things happen as they happen – this conception of 道 dao implies that the force “making things happen in a certain way” is channeled through, and in an important sense is, individuals and groups “letting things/events take shape through them.” Like the Hegelian Geist, which is not a transcendental quasi-deified Spirit but simply the aggregate byproduct of people doing things, the Laozian 道 dao is an “everything” that is a “doing things” whose directionality emerges out of people doing things, finding their way – but emerges without their control, without them consciously or deliberately steering it. That directionality also emerges out of nature doing things, the wind, the sun, the rain, the soil, the plants, the blood in our bodies, without a master plan, but also without randomness. In the ecological thinking of ancient Ruist (Confucian) and Daoist philosophy, the physical always flows into the spiritual and social, and the social always flows into the physical and spiritual. There is a kind of organic vitalism to 道 dao, a force that is organized without an organizer, that knows without imposing a rule on knowing (無知 wuzhi), desires without controlling what it desires (無欲 wuyu), feels without placing boundaries on feeling (無心 wuxin). As Ames and Hall (2003: 48–9) read this vitalism, it is organized through the habitualization of actions: The developed customs and habits of mind of the Daoist are a resource that conditions, influences, and attempts to optimize the range of creative possibilities without in fact causally determining the crafting of novel experiences. Such aggregated habits are irreducibly social, and are the unannounced social

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Socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi 131 propensity out of which individual hearts-and-minds express themselves as overt actions. For example, the insistent particularity associated with the uniqueness of a particular person must be understood both relationally and as a dynamic process within the context of a given natural, social, and cultural world. Particular character is an interpenetration of habits that has organized and made meaningful the more primary but not more important natural impulses. Considered synchronically, persons are irreducibly relational, entailing what they do for this specific community as well as the personal enrichment they derive from participating in its communal life-forms and culture. Viewed diachronically, each particular personality must also be understood as an ongoing and unrelenting awareness that attends every gesture and thought, and that is expressed as a refined disposition in all of its activities. Ames and Hall’s idea is that as doing, knowing, desiring, and feeling are habitualized, we no longer notice ourselves doing things, knowing things, desiring things, feeling things: the agency that “wants” or “decides” to do/know/desire/ feel has been driven underground, as it were, so that it feels as if someone or something else were doing the doing, knowing the knowing, desiring the desiring, feeling the feeling, through us. So that, roughly, is (1) 道 dao, the agent that 生之 sheng zhi “gives birth/life to them.” Ames and Hall translate (2) 德畜之 de xu zhi as “their particular efficacy (de) is what nurtures them”: as they read 德 de, it is “virtue” only as one particular focus or efficacy of the field of “goodness,” and more broadly means the focus or efficacy of any field – and the field that encompasses all fields, of course, is 道 dao. If 道 dao is Everything, 德 de is the way that that big Everything gets channeled into specific events, like raising or nurturing the young. If 道 dao is the way all things work, 德 de is the way a specific cultural configuration in 道 dao’s coauthorship of imperial China’s relationship with imperial Britain in the midnineteenth century “raised” or “nurtured” 夷 yi among Chinese speakers so as to make it first dangerous, then problematic, then awkward or uneasy, then taboo, then nonexistent (for example: I’m speculating). The 物 wu “thing, event, creature” in (3) 物形之 wu xing zhi “wu shapes them,” which Ames and Hall translate as “process,” is most familiar in ancient Chinese philosophy from the collocation “the ten thousand things/events” (萬物 wanwu). The character is made up of the 牜niu “cow, ox” radical and the 勿 wu “do not, must not, never” phonetic, which in turn was originally an associative compound made up of 刀 dao “knife” with a couple of extra丿丿 pie pie strokes on it indicating motion, namely, streaks of blood: the knife was used to slaughter (and thus negate) the ox. Ames and Hall (2003: 59–61) insist that in ancient Chinese 物 wu always retained the phenomenology of that motion – hence “event” or “process” rather than “thing.” 物 wu in this sense is very close to the Ruist concept of 命 ming “conditions” (traditionally translated more deifically as “decree” or “destiny”). As Shun (1997: 78) points out, Mengzi (Mencius) tends to use 天 tian much as Kongzi

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132  Chapter 5 (Confucius) does in the Analects, to account for “things which one regards as important but over which one has little control, and hence things with regard to which one feels a sense of dependence on some higher authority” – and to use 命 ming in very similar ways. The difference between the two usages in Mengzi, Shun adds, is “probably that the former emphasizes the source of such things and the latter the outcome” (76). Hence James Behuniak’s (2005: 111) suggestion that 天 tian be translated as “forces” and 命 ming as “conditions”: “Judging by the Dispositions Arise from Conditions document, ‘conditions’ denote any phenomena encountered in the course of emerging in formative transaction with the world – a broad notion, indeed. Confucians defer to the causal efficacy of the innumerable formative conditions that shape experience.” In Daoist terms, 天 tian is roughly 道 dao as channeled through 德 de and命 ming is 物 wu, the emerging things/events that condition the specific appearances, shapes, forms that actions take. According to ancient tradition, mostly plied by later Daoists, Daoism and Ruism represent opposite camps, the Daoists spiritual and poetic, the Ruists political and practical, and so on; certainly Warring States editions of the Laozi (which are mostly what we know) contain obvious jabs at the Ruists. In finding common ground between the two camps, therefore, I might be taken as forcing both groups into a shared mold that fits each badly. But this approach is not novel with me; as Slingerland (2003: 5) writes of one of the key concepts that I borrow and develop from Laozi, “the attainment of wu-wei 無爲 – ‘effortless action’ or action that is spontaneous and yet accords in every particular with the normative order of the cosmos,” it is not so much a spiritual or mystical discipline exclusive to Daoism but rather “serves as a central spiritual ideal and philosophical problematique of a particular group of pre-Qin Chinese religious thinkers who represent the core of what (following Donald Munro) I shall refer to as ‘mainstream’ Chinese thought: Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi.” And as many scholars have shown, that “mainstream” is actually quite broad. I don’t know what the 物 wu “events” were that continued to “shape things” in China after the initial triggering event of the signing and ratification of the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858–1860, so that a diplomatic ban spread to an entire populace; this third stage would require a complex ethnographic microhistory of “translation” in this extended sense. One might even use the Laozian notion of 物 wu to pluralize and expand the scope of Alain Badiou’s concept of the “event” (Feltham 2005) far past the use Liu (2014) makes of it: whereas she wants to expand “the event of translation” to a temporal process extending a few years and comprising the “social actions” performed by a small group of agents, a Laozian Badiou might want to encompass all human, natural, and supernatural history with it, but without agents, or at least without explicit concerted control of the event(s) by agents.3 In the final stage of the entelechy (4), 勢成之 shi cheng zhi, 勢 shi completes them; Ames and Hall translate that “having a function consummates them.” 勢 shi has a 力 li “power/force/capability” radical (at the bottom) that pictographically represents a plow: a tool that requires strength becomes the imagistic

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Socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi 133 conduit of strength, power, force. The other pictographic elements in the character are all earthy: 圥 lu “mushroom” over 土 tu “earth, dust, dirt” makes 坴 lu “soil, land” (at the top left); 丸 wan at the top right is a small round object, a pellet or a pill. Historically, in other words, 勢 shi is the strength that plows a field, but also the plow and the plowing and the field. Later, therefore, in what we are pleased to call “metaphorical extensions” but are actually just different situated/directed foci of the same cognitive field, 勢 shi also comes to mean “situation/conditions” (events’ current environment, like the Ruist 命 ming), “momentum/tendency/trend” (events’ entelechy), and “power/force/influence” (events’ ability to shape other events or their situations/trends). In discussing Mengzi’s use of the character (2A1), Behuniak translates it “propensity”: “One might be clever, but it’s better to make use of propensity [shi 勢]” (5; Behuniak’s interpolation). Stretching seedlings to make them grow faster may seem clever to some; most people know what horticulturists teach, that it’s best to let plants indulge their “propensity” to grow, not to help them grow (勿助長 wu zhu zhang, 2A2) but merely to make their environment (soil, water, sun: 命 ming as conditions) as conducive as possible to that propensity. (勿助長 wu zhu zhang “don’t help grow” is the Mengzian version of the Laozian 無爲 wuwei.) These translations all highlight the “situated/emerging nature” of a thing or event, as does “having a function”; 勢 shi can also be translated “outward appearances,” or “sign/gesture,” which would seem to point instead at the interpretive construction of that nature by observers. Ames and Hall’s translation “having a function” stresses the gerundive relationship between the two, the existential act or fact of functionality, of serving a certain function or having been functionalized in a certain way. Whatever 勢 shi is – and it “is” arguably all of these things, understood as a complex of forces and tendencies – it is 勢 shi that “completes” or “finishes” or “consummates” (成 cheng) “them,” whatever they are. 成 cheng is the phonetic of 誠 cheng “creativity” (as Ames and Hall 2001: 24 translate it): it is not so much the completion of a thing as it is the completing, the creative process of moving a thing or an event toward a completion that may never arrive. In that sense 成 cheng is close to Aristotle’s entelechy, which is not, traditional Western readings to the contrary, a lockstep march to a predetermined end but the actuality of life as moving through growth, change, transformation. Entelekheia is morphologically “the having of an end within” (en “within” + telos “end” + ekhein “to have”), but that “having” propels the thing or the event in a certain direction – a situated tendency or trend as a potentiality that in Greek is a power, a 勢 shi – with no guarantee that it will ever reach it. I assume, in fact, that Ames and Hall’s syntax in “having a function” is consciously or unconsciously modeled on Aristotle’s coinage for “having an end within”: Laozi and Aristotle are not theorizing exactly the same process here, but they are very close. The reigning idea is that the power that drives growth and change is a power that is loosely identified with the growing thing itself, and with its growth, and with the conditions in which it grows. The social origins of the propensity that drives all this – by which the ten thousand things/events are birthed by or out of the plowing of dao’s field,

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134  Chapter 5 nurtured by each insistent focus dao takes, shaped by other things and events, and nudged entelechially toward completion or consummation by that power that is also a shaping/shaped tendency or trend – are signaled by the close linkage between those propensities and social value: 尊 zun “honor” and 貴 gui “esteem.” Laozi makes it very clear that this value is not a conscious, deliberate, “propositional” value accorded to dao and de by individual human agents; he says that 萬物莫不尊道而貴德 wanwu mobu zun dao er gui de, lit. “(of the) the ten thousand things/events there is none that doesn’t honor/respect dao and value/esteem de.” The 萬物 wanwu “ten thousand things” would certainly include humans – it includes everything – but is not restricted to humans; and note how that implicit single negative (“not just humans”) is intensified by an explicit double negative (莫不 mobu “there is none that doesn’t”). Like the double negative that hints at Laozi’s anarchistic ideal for government – 無不治 wubu zhi “not not govern” (ch. 3) – this 莫不尊 mobu zun “not not honor” strategically undermines our tendency to ascribe honoring as an action to the deliberate agency of a rational agent (cf. also 莫之命 mo zhi ming “without command,” which Ames and Hall render “Without anyone having ennobled them”). It happens “spontaneously” (自然 ziran, lit. “from self so”) – which is to say that we have no idea who or what causes it to happen, what the agency is behind the honoring. But valuing is a core icotic activity, an affect-becoming-conation that, circulated through a community as “honor” or “esteem” for actions and attitudes approved by the group and as “dishonor” and “shame” for actions and attitudes disapproved by the group, collectively pushes normative “opinion” (Greek doxa) through persuading-becoming-believing (Greek pistis) into broad-based acceptance as “the plausibilities” (Greek ta eikota), and thus as truth, as reality, as the way things are (icosis). The 萬物 wanwu “ten thousand things” are more than human, but in circulating social value they are modeled on humans in groups, and may in fact be primarily the emerging effects of (largely unconscious) social processes. This perspective adds clarity to Liu’s formulations of the relationship between “meaning” and “value” in translation and translatability: There is good reason to believe that a new expectation is emerging from the recent [CTS?] theoretical work on translation. This expectation can be formulated in terms of such questions as How do signs and meanings travel from place to place in global circulations? Can a theory of translation illuminate our understanding of how meaning-value is made or unmade between languages? Is translatability a value in itself or a product of repeated exchange and negotiation in the translation process? What do we stand to gain or lose when we take up a position for or against the commensurability of verbal or nonverbal signs in multilinguistic or multisemiotic situations? (1999a: 2) Thought through the ancient Daoist and Ruist classics, “Is translatability a value in itself?” becomes a meaningless question: neither “translatability” nor “value” is

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Socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi 135 a stable object that can be plugged into a copulative equation like X = Y. “Translatability” is not exactly “a product of repeated exchange and negotiation in the translation process,” but any attempt we might want to make to think of it along those lines would in effect entail “producing” the affect-effects of that process as a kind of shadowy quasi-product. And obviously if translatablity is valued, it can only be valued (by human social groups functioning mostly politicallyunconsciously) through the same kind of “translation” process – especially if “the translation process” is understood broadly enough to include commissioning and research and editing on the front end and dissemination and reception on the back end – but that process is very far from “how meaning-value is made or unmade between languages.” Meaning, value, and meaning-value are not stable objects or products that are “made” or “unmade”; they are icotic valences with which communications circulating among members of a group are processually charged, with an entelechial move toward the kind of habitualized stability that helps maintain the illusion of 道 dao as “the way things are,” the familiarity of collectively organized and stabilized habit that makes unconscious 無爲 wuwei functioning seem like universal human nature. Obviously, we’re back in the vicinity of Marx discussing (3ab) Ideen, die aus ihrer Muttersprache erst in eine fremde Sprache übersetzt werden müssen, um zu kursieren, um austauschbar zu werden, bieten schon mehr Analogie; die Analogie liegt dann aber nicht in der [fremden] Sprache, sondern in ihrer Fremdheit: things can only circulate unconsciously, and so generate an unconscious tendency to universalize what feels familiar as “natural,” once the foreignness has worn off – once habit has numbed all sensation of effort – once the making of 道 dao “the way things are” has come to be governed by what feels like 無爲 wuwei “non-action.” Or again: Troubled by the uncertainty of commensurability among languages, translators and their critics have a tendency to approach the issue as if the problem resided in the inherent properties (value) of individual languages. This seems to suggest a level of intuitive comprehension of value in languages and cultures, although such intuition seldom succeeds in discouraging people from pursuing the possibility of equivalence, finding common ground, or achieving optimal pairing of meanings, and so on. (Liu 1999b: 13) “The inherent properties (value) of individual languages” there sounds like the discourse of real estate – as if individual languages had property values. And that suspicion is not wrong. What Liu neglects to unpack, though, is the complex process by which “properties” come to be regarded as “value,” and by which those values come to seem “inherent,” and so what the “intuitive comprehension of value in languages and cultures” entails, exactly. The idea would appear to be that the phenomenology of the source and target languages “wanting” or “requiring” us to say things in certain ways – what Benjamin calls their “Intentions” – is built up gradually through the practical experience of translating between them, which

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136  Chapter 5 begins to generate an intuitive impression of the languages’ stable and therefore “inherent properties,” like real estate holdings that have been in the family for so many centuries that they seem to belong to one by divine right. That feeling of not just ownership but justified ownership, even transcendentally justified ownership, is a value with which one learns to charge (icotize) those properties in social interaction (“circulation”) with others: as I noted in section 4.4, no meaning or value can exist without a human group to produce and understand it. Speakers of the source language come to feel that it is thus and such. It has xyz properties – inherently. Bilingual speakers of both the source language and the target language feel that the latter is different: it has abc properties, again inherently. The intuitive sense of incommensurability between them that emerges from this kind of isolated homolingually situated thinking would seem to militate against translatability, in “theory,” in the abstract (CT 1.1–10); but once the translator begins to mediate between them, such abstractions (Peirce would call them Firsts) melt into the clash of directionalities (Peirce would call them Seconds), out of which new tentative solutions begin to emerge (Peirce would call them Thirds). Or as Liu articulates this process: “such intuition seldom succeeds in discouraging people from pursuing the possibility of equivalence, finding common ground, or achieving optimal pairing of meanings, and so on” (13). Eventually, as enough translators have reached that kind of “common ground” or “optimal pairing of meanings” enough times, they begin to develop a habitualized phenomenology of equivalence and nonequivalence between the two languages, a phenomenology that seems to them so stable as to be objective (no longer just a phenomenology but an ontology) and virtually universal: this is how the two languages interact. Liu’s project is to undo or reverse the habitualizations that lead to such icoses: It bears pointing out, of course, that the circulation of meaning involves a great deal of coauthorship and struggle among the dominant and dominated groups over the meaning and distribution of universal values and civilizational resources. In order for the process of circulation to take place at all, the agents of translation on each side start out by hypothesizing an exchange of equivalent meanings, even if the hypothesis itself is born of a structure of unequal exchange and linguistic currency. What this means is that we need to investigate further how a particular sign or object is made into an equivalent of something else during the process of circulation and how, theoretically speaking, this act of translation articulates the condition of unequal exchange. (21)

5.2 Laozi and Mengzi on the shared heart There is also the question of how socially constructed forms might come to feel so real – but in ancient Chinese thought that is not a problem, because all human thought emerges out of 心 xin, a pictographic representation of the human heart

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Socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi 137 that is also used to mean both “feeling” and “mind,” and is increasingly translated into English as “the heart-mind” (so Ames and Hall, above); I translate it “heartbecoming-mind” or “feeling-becoming-thinking.” The first important thing to note about the centrality of 心 xin “feeling-becoming-thinking” in ancient Chinese philosophy is that it is not noticeably individualized: human groups are insistently conceived in terms of shared affect. One intimation of this notion is broached in Chapter 49 of the Laozi, where 聖人恆無心，以百姓心為心 shengren heng wuxin, yi baixing xin wei xin, literally “[the] sage constantly lacks heart/ feeling, takes hundred surnames’ heart as heart,” or, as Ames and Hall (153) translate that, “Sages really think and feel immediately. / They take the thoughts and feelings of the common people as their own.” “Their own” pulls us back to the buried and possibly dead metaphorics of property and ownership in Marx and Liu, which seems inappropriate to the ecological flows of identity in Laozi; I would suggest instead something like “The sage doesn’t have a separate stable heart; he takes the people’s heart as heart.” Not, in other words, as his heart, her heart; certainly not as something the sage owns, as his or her own, but rather: as heart. S/he doesn’t have a heart s/he can call his or her own; s/he shares a heart with the people. The sage participates in a collective heart that is always in process, always serving as a conduit for the collective feeling that keeps flowing through it. I have suggested elsewhere (Robinson 2015a: §3.6) that the Mengzian equivalent of this utopian conception of society as regulated by shared affect is 仁 ren, which is traditionally translated (beginning with two Protestant missionaries in the early to mid-nineteenth century, David Collie in 1828 and James Legge in the 1860s) as “benevolence.” As Liu (2014: 229–30) notes, it was translated in 1947 by UN Human Rights Commission Vice-Chairman Zhang Pengchun (張彭春, 1892–1957) as “two-man-mindedness.” As Paul Linebarger (1937/1973: 14) persuasively argues, however, it might be more usefully understood as “social fellow-feeling.” Just as for Laozi the sage takes 心為心 xin wei xin “(shared) heart as heart,” for Mengzi the 君子 junzi “exemplary person” is a 仁人 ren ren, a fellow-feeling fellow, someone who allows other people’s feelings, the feelings of the whole group, to flow through his or her actions, thoughts, words, and relationships. For it is only when what Laozi calls 無心 wuxin “no (isolated) heart” has been habitualized as second nature – not something one constantly strives to attain but what feels like the most natural thing in the world – that the sage becomes what Mengzi calls a 仁人 ren ren. As Mengzi puts it explicitly (6A11), however, this is not some special superhuman skill attained only by the sage or the exemplary person; 仁, 人心也 ren, ren xin ye, he says: fellow-feeling is human feeling. For Mengzi (7B16), only the 仁人 ren ren is even human; elsewhere (2A6) he says that to lack the four hearts (of compassion, shame, deference, and approval/disapproval) is to be not human (非人 feiren), a monster, a sociopath. As Ames and Hall (2003: 154) describe this notion of community as shared affect, in the specific context of Laozi Chapter 49: Human realization is achieved, then, not through the whole-hearted participation in communal life forms, but by life in community that forms one

138  Chapter 5

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whole-heartedly. We do not speak because we have minds, but become likeminded by speaking to one another in a communicating community. The “thoughts and feelings” of the common people describe the emergence of a heart-mind out of social transactions and effective communication. This is an optimizing process of self- and world-enlargement that is focused and consummated in the conduct of the sage. As I’ve mentioned, Daoists and Ruists are traditionally taken to be polar opposites in their philosophical and political thinking: the Ruists served as advisors to power, while the Daoists notoriously refused all such invitations, and, perhaps as a result, Chinese political culture and generally Chinese society has tended to be organized around Ruist ideals, while Daoist thought has been understood as otherworldly, transcendental, mystical. But in fact the utopian political thought of Mengzi, for whom the best kind of government is 仁政 ren zheng (1A5, 1B11–12, 2A1, 3A3–4, 4A1, 4A14) – a fellow-feeling government in which the emperor rules by taking the people’s heart as heart – is at least philosophically identical to Laozi’s. In practice we often see Mengzi trying to convince the emperor to do certain things to achieve that kind of government, which would seem to contravene Laozi’s 無爲 wuwei principle; but those things tend to consist mainly of surrendering to compassionate impulses, which again is very close to Laozi’s utopian “not-not-govern” anarchy in the famous passage from Chapter 3: 為無為則無不治矣。 weiwuwei ze wubu zhi yi. It is simply in doing things noncoercively That everything is governed properly. (Ames and Hall 2003: 81–2) And certainly, given that Mengzi’s utopianism has never been put into political practice, the fact that Ruists advised emperors and Daoists did not has little bearing on the philosophical convergence between the two camps on this one point. If the first important thing to note about 心 xin is that it tends to be understood as a collective force, indeed a social-regulatory force, the second is that for Mengzi (6A15) the heart thinks: the organs of the eyes and ears cannot think, he says, and so are easily deceived, but 心之官則思, 思則得之, 不思則不得 xin zhi guan ze si, si ze de zhi, bu si ze bu de, literally “The heart’s office/function is to think, thinks and engages, doesn’t think doesn’t engage.” Shun (1997: 150) notes that in contemporary (Warring States) Ruist texts, 思 si means a specific kind of thinking, namely “directing the attention to,” especially to a thing that one regards favorably, something one feels inclined to do, implying the work of affect, and especially affect-becoming-conation (feeling-becoming-motivation), in the directedness of this thinking. And when one considers that 官 guan originally meant a government office, later a government officer, someone in charge of making decisions, 心之官則思 xin zhi guan ze si “the heart’s office is to

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Socioecological thought of Laozi and Mengzi 139 think” also hints at “the heart is the officer that manages thought.” The affective directing/guiding/managing/commanding of thought/attention/perception/ focus in effect saturates cognitive/conscious apperception of the world with managerial or “officious” affect. This is almost exactly Damasio’s (1994) somatic-marker hypothesis, according to which affectively channeled and displayed “somatic markers” channel the lessons of experience into the guidance of thought. So far from being some strange “Eastern” conception of the heart at a thinking organ, in other words, 心 xin is very close to Western understandings of affect and conation as guides to cognition – as in common English phrases like “the heart knows better than the head,” which we take to imply that the cold cognitive logic that we trope as “the head” is weak and ultimately powerless without the guiding force of the affects and conations that we trope as “the heart.” If affect guides cognition, then, and affect is shared through groups, then shared affect guides group cognition. This is what I originally theorized as the “somatic exchange” – the circulation of shared evaluative affect through a group as the primary channel of social regulation – and have more recently been retheorizing along at once broader and more specific lines as icosis/ecosis, in which any group’s somatic exchange works entelechially to move the group’s shared feeling-becoming-thinking in a certain direction, namely, enhanced normativity. In icosis, the entelechy is a becoming-true: the group works to “plausibilize” normative opinions as truth, as reality, as identity, with the goal of getting group members not only to believe they are real or true but to feel their reality. In ecosis, the entelechy is a becoming-good: the group works to instill in its members a shared feeling of the reality of moral norms, not just as external injunctions but as internal inclinations. But note that the “good” of the becoming-communal becoming-good is not necessarily a utopian good. Laozi says, in a utopian spirit, that the sage takes the people’s 心為心 xin wei xin heart as heart; most of Mengzi’s advisory efforts were equally utopian, aimed at getting the emperor to rule through 仁 ren “fellowfeeling.” But it has often been noted that Mengzi’s efforts have never been realized in Chinese political history, and I see no evidence that Laozi or Mengzi believed that the becoming-communal of ordinary social groups was even mostly, let alone always, a following of the Daoist or Ruist 道 dao “way/path.” Indeed Mengzi complains that the common people are hardly even human; and while he says explicitly that this is because they do not surrender to 仁 ren as a group becoming-good, he also hints that it is – more invidiously – because the group becoming-good they do surrender to is a bestializing one. Each group ecotically normativizes and operationalizes their own “good”; and as we saw JeanLuc Nancy hinting in CT 1.19, some groups’ becoming-good comes to look and feel to some insiders and some outside observers like “violence, betrayal, and lies, leaving no possibility of measuring oneself against powerful follies.” To put that in my terms, in those groups becoming-communal becomes (in some affective eyes) a channel of becoming-violent, becoming-treacherous, becoming-­ mendacious, becoming-powerfully-foolish. The Ruist notion of 禮 li, traditionally translated “the rites” or “ritual propriety,” was an attempt to codify a kind of Ground Zero of communal

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140  Chapter 5 becoming-good for Chinese society. The problem was that it was a collection of becoming-good codes borrowed from different groups facing different social exigencies and so developing different (always emerging and shifting) norms of goodness – and the imposition of a rigid 禮 li code of ritual propriety on those differences and emergings invariably oversimplified them, and led to code-clashes and ­code-deficiencies. As I’ve shown elsewhere (Robinson 2015a: §3.5; 2016a: §3.9), everything Mengzi says about 禮 li amounts to an awkward attempt to sidestep this problem, without explicitly retheorizing it in the terms that he repeatedly adumbrates of divergent ecoses. But again, here too, even though Liu never asks the questions I have been endeavoring to answer about the collective creation of an “objectivist” and “universal” feeling of reality, I still insist that I am refining rather than refuting her approach. I find her basic theoretical orientation to translation exciting and productive, and have sought here to add scope and nuance to the rather broad strokes with which she sketches in her theoretical model. As I read her, Liu’s work of the 1990s was a theoretical provocation intended to point a direction rather than work out every theoretical detail; I take my task here to be one of advancing that project a few steps.

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Critical Theses on translation 3 Solomon circa 2014 Critical Thesis 3.1 “Translation is what enables people from different cultures to bridge the gaps that separate them, yet in the age of nation-states, culture has been appropriated by the practices and discourse of national identity” (Solomon 2014: 171). This recaps Sakai’s argument (CT 1.10, 2.12–13) about the regime of homolingual address and its erasure of translation (as part of the erasure of heterolingual address). Critical Thesis 3.2 “As for the modern nation itself, none of its claims to natural, organic status can hide its birth in colonial theories of race and species (which I shall denote by the term ‘anthropological difference’)” (Solomon 171). This is an extension of CT 3.1 from difference to hierarchy: in colonial theories of race, white-skinned Europeans are not just different from dark-skinned Africans or Indians but better; and in racialized colonial theories of species, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1993) notes, “the natives” are often relegated to the “lower orders” of animals. In Out of Africa, for example, Karen Blixen describes her contented “native” servants as domesticated pets, and Ngũgĩ comments: “What she is really saying is that her knowledge of wild animals gave her a clue to the African mind,” and “So to Karen Blixen, Kamante [her cook] is comparable to a civilized dog that has lived long with human beings, Europeans of course” (133). Solomon’s claim is that the modern European nation, for example, beginning in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, was constituted historically as a biologically organic whole in large part through such colonial hierarchies, by excluding non-Europeans as not quite human, or as lower forms of human. Critical Thesis 3.3 The modern project of perfecting (or, in Solomon’s coinage, “perfictioning” [175]) the human subject is organized around manufactured congruencies among “taxonomies of anthropological difference, social organization, and divisions of knowledge” (172) that Solomon calls “areas.”

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142  Critical Theses on translation 3 The “area” in Solomon’s new work seems to be an extension of what Sakai and Solomon (2006a) called the “amphibological region,” or “amphiboly” (CT 2.4). The new term is broad and vague precisely in order to cover as much ground as possible; it seems to encompass any kind of geopolitical unit, academic discipline, social grouping, racial or cultural or sexual or other anthropological category, or basically any category at all, including things like “intelligent,” “athletic,” “artistic,” “entrepreneurial,” “proactive,” and their negations. Solomon insists that the “area” is always “manifested or located exactly in the body,” but is also “a series of nodal points relayed in constantly shifting assemblages among bodies, tongues, and minds” (174). “Perfictioning” is Solomon’s term for the statedriven impulse at work in the creation and maintenance of these assemblages: Ostensibly resembling the latter-day inheritors of premodern empires, kingdoms, feudalities, et cetera, these areas (typified by the nation-state) could best be understood as an enormous apparatus of capture designed to subsume the productive capacity of society into the needs of capital. Within the organizational structure of the nation-state, the work of perfecting the race/ species is always an aesthetic question as much as a technological one. Hence, we might refer to the anthropological work of modernity as perfictioning (a neologism that combines the two words “perfection” and “fiction”) inasmuch as it invariably involves a typology of fantasized images concentrated around, or projected upon, the link between bodies and nations. (174–5) What does the typical American look like? Is he male or is she female, or is s/he somewhere in between? Straight or gay? Pink or brown? Tall or short? Old or young? Rich or poor? Can we tell just by looking when a person of Chinese extraction is Chinese-American, Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysian Chinese, Singaporean Chinese, or Hong Kong Chinese? What does the typical Indonesian look like? And so on. Aesthetic appearances, including dress, gait, facial expression, and tone of voice, need to be organized to be ideologically “coherent,” which is to say, socially and economically productive. He goes on: These assemblages are then grouped into populations. Hence, the project of perfecting the species through a concrete population of bodies grouped into areas invariably has to posit a split within the human species. This split, which was also present in Kant’s contradictory definition of “humanity” as both a universal quality shared by all members of a species and an ideal that was nevertheless unequally realized by different members or populations, has been a core component of the “modernity-project” throughout its history. I see a precursor of this Kantian strategy in Anghie’s description of Vitoria’s characterization of native peoples, who share universal reason but are burdened by a “personality” (which will later be called, once again, “national character”) that causes them to deviate from the universal norm. (174)

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Solomon circa 2014 143 This is the etiology of the anthropological differences-becoming-hierarchies in CT 3.2. Solomon calls urgently for a “critical counterhistory that will provide an account of the political and governmental technologies invented and mobilized, as translation has been, ‘to bridge the gap,’ when they were in fact participating in the consolidation and prolongation of the entire anthropological edifice of the colonial/imperial modernity (a racism vaster than any phenomenon known by that name today, for it includes virtually all other manner of social difference)” (174) – a point that, in connection with translation, looks forward to CT 3.8. The idea is that all human activities are mobilized, to the greatest extent possible, to support hegemony – and that we should be studying the practices and technologies that enable and support that mobilization. Critical Thesis 3.4 There is an affective structure to the processes by which areas are populated. That structure is “immunitarian to the extent that it protects the anthropological matrix that supports capitalist accumulation in the colonial-imperial modernity from being overturned” (Solomon 186); Solomon calls it a “postimperial etiquette.” Solomon isolates three affective components of that etiquette: ressentiment (CT 3.5), investment in the homolingual address (CT 3.6), and erudition (CT 3.7). His focus on affect seems to be most signally influenced by the work of Franco “Bifo” Berardi, of whom more in the Conclusion (CT 3.12–16); he takes the focus on “etiquette” from Alain Brossat, with a focus not only on the colloquial English sense of “good breeding” (with its Foucauldian implications of biopolitics) but what Brossat (2003: 36; quoted in Solomon 186) calls “the distribution of bodies in a dense space, via the mediation [truchement] of a system of rules named etiquette.” Solomon adds to Brossat’s definition an etymological shift that encompasses translation: Brossat uses the French word truchement to speak of a mediating role played by a “system of rules.” Although the term’s usage here certainly refers to a general effect of mediation, it is worth noting an older, yet still current, literary usage of the term that refers to a translator and translation. We might thus take this usage as an invitation to think about what would happen were we to substitute traduction for truchement – that is, “translation” for “mediation.” Doing so, we would find that etiquette is precisely the governmental technology that uses translation as a means of distributing bodies across dense space – that is, the space delineated by the apparatus of area. This definition of etiquette approximates Naoki Sakai’s understanding of translation based on homolingual address. As such, it constitutes the main operation of capture exercised by the apparatus of area. (187) In the broadest sense of translation, of course, it is not necessarily a mediatory activity practiced by individuals; ideas, images, attitudes, inclinations, motivations, conceptual frameworks, phenomenologies, and the bodies that feel and

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express these things can all be translated in time and space by collective forces. Solomon’s idea behind “the main operation of capture” is that bodies are normatively “placed” or “situated” in and through areas in order to make them what Nietzsche (1887/1892) calls more “regelmäßig und folglich berechenbar” (43)/“regulated and therefore calculable.” Critical Thesis 3.5 “The practice of ressentiment is by far the most ubiquitous response on both sides of the colonial/imperial divide to a refusal of cofiguration and an exodus from the apparatus of area” (Solomon 177). Ressentiment, Nietzsche’s term for the affective channel and performative selfpresentation of slave morality, is often understood as resentment or rancor produced in and through power differentials; Solomon notes that the theory of ressentiment developed by the phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874–1928) is based on the observation that normally or normatively “one side or the other in a typical social dyad (such as Master and Slave, or Male and Female) experiences the existence of the other in terms of existential foreclosure: since I can never have/be/feel what the other has/is/feels, I am motivated by an insatiable rancor” (177). While not denying that this happens, Solomon directs our attention to a deeper source of ressentiment, namely “the type that arises not between the terms of a dyadic pair, but in the relation of complicity that unites them” (178). In this type, Solomon notes, which is fundamentally a channel of cofiguration, the more powerful and less powerful members of the dyad (or larger group) may suspect and fear each other, may resent each other’s supposed unfair advantages, may in effect be at war with each other, but “they nevertheless work together. Although their mutual fear is undeniably real and strong, it is not as strong as their mutual fear and anticipation of the emergence of something new, something that neither falls within the dyadic pair nor is part of its trajectory” (178). This would be ressentiment as the affective etiology of conservatism, conformism, a nervous cofigurative clinging to the relative safety of “the devil you know” as a hedge against an unpredictable future. Solomon adds: It is . . . this form of ressentiment – a form of crisis management that aims to sustain a certain regime of biopolitical production – that is most common today. Ressentiment is not a personal psychological problem; it is an affective structure peculiar to the institutions of national translation in which we work, and it opens up subject positions for bodies placed within. Those who pretend that they are free from this structure are precisely the ones who contribute, through their disavowal, to the structure’s reproduction – even when they are deemed to be “fighting the good fight.” (178) Solomon’s most telling example of this complicity is capitalism’s “penchant for creating profitable crisis”: “Under neoliberal ‘biocapitalism,’ crisis has become a more or less permanent mode of operation for capitalist accumulation, so much

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so that there is a greater interest in the prolongation of crisis through regimes of permanent crisis management than there is in the resolution of crisis” (179). Because crisis creates fear, and fear creates ressentiment, and ressentiment tends to encourage subjected people to cling fearfully to even a miserable status quo, capitalism creates “regimes of permanent crisis management.” To the extent that this clinging is cofigurative, we are not just the passive victims of the various neoliberalisms; we are their (unequal) cocreators. More on biocapitalism in CT 3.12. Critical Thesis 3.6 “The second element essential to the affective structure of postcolonial etiquette is an investment in the homolingual address” (Solomon 179). Here Solomon incorporates Sakai’s model into the postimperial etiquette he is theorizing, with a temporal orientation: “The regime of translation constructed through the homolingual address lures subjects into projecting between retroactive and proactive alternatives: the images of a past-that-never-happened and those of a future-that-will-have-to-be-abandoned” (181). The “past-that-never-happened” is the origin myth according to which translation was always a mediation between discrete languages; the “future-that-will-have-to-be-abandoned” is a spatialized future in which “the dimension of future temporality as irruptive discontinuity is effaced” (182). In effect the regime of homolingual address effaces time by spatializing it: nothing ever changes, because nothing ever happens. In the attitude of heterolingual address, the past-becoming-present and present-becoming-future are always an “irruptive discontinuity”; the regime of homolingual address seeks to “rescue” communicative continuity from that irruptivity not only by spatializing it but by managing the slippage between temporality and spatiality affectively-­ becoming-cognitively: “Acting toward the future according to the schema of cofiguration constituted by the homolingual address produces a spatialized representation that effectively cuts off the temporality of the future as unrepresentable negation and creation. It eliminates, in other words, the possibility for new subjectivities that do not correspond to the oppositions installed by the schema of cofiguration” (182). Here it is specifically the irruption of heterolingual subjectivities into the regime of homolingual address that must be managed: the address that doesn’t communicate; the address that should make sense but (inexplicably) doesn’t. The homolingual attempt to manage these temporal discontinuities through spatialization generates the paradoxes whereby the translator becomes both necessary and impossible, the guarantor of communicability across linguistic and cultural lines who must be erased; as the translator-as-heterolingual-addressee/-er traverses these paradoxes, s/he becomes (CT 1.11, 2.10) a subject-in-transit. Critical Thesis 3.7 “The third element in the affective structure of area to which I would like to draw attention is erudition. In the meaning which I would like to ascribe to this term, it refers not just to the problems of access and class mobility, but also more generally to the socially meaningful qualification of ‘knowledge’ and the distribution of it among bodily bearers” (Solomon 183).

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146  Critical Theses on translation 3 Solomon notes that “we might not think of erudition in terms of affect, but . . . affect ‘sneaks’ into erudition through the particular way it individuates the body” (184). This means specifically, on the one hand, that erudition builds not just mental distance between the knower and certain classes of knowns but an affective-becoming-conative attitude of distance, “an attitude of indifference or disavowal” (184) that stains those knowns with distaste; and on the other hand, builds not just mental acceptance or recognition between the knower and the known but an affective-becoming-conative attitude of eager and enthusiastic and even self-satisfied engulfment, identification-as-incorporation. Thus for example one knows one’s family, one’s community, one’s favorite sports team, one’s car, one’s workplace, and one’s nation as self, as an extended or expanded self, what Arne Naess (1998; Huntsford 2002) calls “the ecological self”: one knows this self with participatory pleasure, and shares that pleasure with other in-groupers, other members of the group that know it as self, and the pleasure is intensified by the felt knowledge that it is felt by the others as well. Out-groupers can know that known too, but with distance, with distantiation, with attitudes of detachment that differ affectively from the way in-groupers know it: “they cannot, in other words, partake in knowledge as an affective structure of feeling that is based in ‘experience’ and shared among members of an imaginary community” (Solomon 184). Solomon’s examples of this are nationalism as felt by nationals and knowledge of the nation as felt by foreigners: obviously the nationalist “knows” his or her own nation in a radically different way than does the foreigner who has only read about the nation, or visited it as a tourist, or even lived in it without identifying body and soul with it. “Nationalism is precisely the modern political form that turns knowing into affect” (184). This is Sakai’s regime of homolingual address run through the phenomenology of affect: one does not just mentally identify with one nation or culture and disidentify with another; one affectively embraces one nation or culture as one’s own – indeed as one’s own embodied self – and distances oneself affectively from another. It should go without saying that the phenomenological regime of nationalist affect is nothing natural but is organized collectively (CT 2.5). We are taught, unconsciously – through ideosomatic programming, through icosis – to feel these things. As Solomon puts it: “Yet the category of experience-that-can-be-shared-sympathetically is determined in advance by the arena that capitalism, in the process of appropriating the state, establishes for the process of valorization. This is the arena of exchange value. Sympathetic knowledge, or national knowledge, is the form of exchange value that is being applied to the act of knowing understood in terms of fantasy – the fantasy of shared experience reflected in knowledge” (184). Given that erudition as Solomon theorizes it is also channeled into and through “areas,” which entail every conceivable kind of division – “the division of labor, to begin with, but also the disciplinary divisions of knowledge, the economic divisions of affect, and finally the individuating divisions of the body” (183) – this channel of postimperial etiquette takes a potentially endless multitude of forms. In academic contexts it tends to take the form of objectivism, “object-obsession

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Solomon circa 2014 147 and subjective disavowal” (185), and, more broadly, “the supposedly ‘natural’ correspondence between disciplinary divisions in the order of knowledge and various social divisions in the order of political organization” (185). This is the trenchant critique of “scientific” universalism: “Translation and address play an important role here, too, as erudition excludes or devalorizes certain kinds of knowledge that cannot be ‘translated’ into the quantitative forms and standardized denominations to which the definition of ‘knowledge’ is limited” (183). Science is universalist because anything that is not universalist is not science. Q.E.D. (If you’re rude enough to call that reasoning circular, you’re just trying to pick a fight.) Similar exclusions organize erudition in the financial world: “In today’s neoliberal regime, such exclusion is exercised through the standards set by financially motivated evaluation/surveillance bureaucracies, intellectual property regimes, and disciplinary boundaries” (183). Erudition thus constitutes for Solomon a globalizing epistemic regime: In short, the regime of erudition oversees the silent articulation of the reproduction of cleavages (reason vs. myth, speech vs. writing) and identities inherited from the imperial/colonial modernity to the neoliberal production of value through affect. The bearer of various forms (racial, ethnic, national, gendered, sexual, linguistic, et cetera) of social domination and exploitation that have accompanied modernity, erudition is above all concerned with bodies of accumulation. Whereas capitalist accumulation produces the bodies coded by political economy and translational accumulation produces bodies coded by civilizational and anthropological difference, erudite accumulation produces normalized bodies of knowledge as well as bodies normalized by knowledge. (185) Critical Thesis 3.8 “Translation operates today as a somatic technology, tethering bodies to the apparatus of area that hides the matrix of anthropological difference by naturalizing the nation-state” (Solomon 172). This is translation as handmaiden to the regime of homolingual address (CT 1.12–14, 2.13–16), or what Sakai calls “the regime of translation”: Naoki Sakai has been telling us for a long time that translation is a social practice (Sakai 1997). In it, the essential indeterminacy, hybridity, and openness of social relations is evident. Yet, Sakai also tells us, the dominant form of sociality established through the regime of translation in the modern era deliberately effaces such originary hybridity. The technical term that is used by Sakai to denote this form of sociality is the “schema of cofiguration,” which is premised upon the representational practices of the “homolingual address.” The identities created out of cofiguration are posterior to the translational encounter and mutually codependent, yet claim to be anterior and autonomous. This is the form of sociality that is essentially codified in

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the homogenizing machine of the nation-state, which would always like to present itself as an organic, historical entity when it is in fact an apparatus of posterior superimposition. (Solomon 176) What Solomon offers there is an accurate paraphrase of Sakai’s thought on this head. In Solomon’s own development of that thought, however, he goes much further, and argues that [a] colonialism predates and shapes [b] “the practices and institution of modern state sovereignty” (173) in Europe, [c] “the ideology of cultural difference” (173), and [d] the “bridging technologies” (173), including translation, developed to mediate across that gap. This historical sequence, he argues, made (d) translation a key player in the production and naturalization of not only (c) cultural difference but (a) colonialism and (b) the modern nationstate as well. It continues to produce those cultural differences and helps tie them to the national and postnational organization of colonial and postcolonial hierarchies through the apparatus of what Solomon calls areas: “Operating at a quotidian level,” he writes, “with a reach equal to or perhaps greater than law, translation has been a crucial technique for the establishment and consolidation of areas – that quintessential apparatus of modernity that correlates via a system of geo-mapping subjective formation to hierarchical taxonomies of knowledge and social organization” (173). Translation also obscures the role it plays in the consolidation of those formations by naturalizing its own “bridging technology”: “Translation today continues to play the role of ideology, preventing us from seeing how the ‘bridging technologies’ are in fact prolonging the agony of the domination under which we live, labor, and perish” (175). Included in this indictment, I think, is a broader conception of translation than simply as linguistic mediation across cultural lines; it would include the kind of semiocapitalist transcoding of personal data through the deep learning of neural nets that allows corporate computers not only to learn our consumer habits well enough to predict and so shape our future purchases – to “translate” our habits into code, and thus to recode our bodily practices as consumers of specific products and services – but also to transform the “source code” through what it learns about our habits, so as to offer us even more attractive products or services the next time. The corporation as “source author” translates its “source code” both for the consumer as “target reader” and into the consumer as “target code” – and the target code recodes the source text so that it becomes better able to address the target reader. This might be called the primal scene of translation as capitalist “growth” (reciprocal learning as a revenue-generator). It is in this sense at least (perhaps in some others as well) that Solomon charges translation with complicity in the corporate-state: “In relation to translation I would argue, in other words, that it must be considered in light of the reproduction of stateness (which is a way of producing and managing ‘anthropological difference’ for the sake of capital accumulation), and that it (translation) plays a crucial role in the management of the transition to a new type of world order based on the ‘corporate-state’ ” (172–3).

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Solomon circa 2014 149 It is also important to note Solomon’s insistence that translation is a somatic technology, however: because translation helps organize areas through the affective structures of postimperial etiquette, its contribution to our “agony” is affectively channeled as well. Translation as fearful status-quo-seeking conformism, through cofigurative/complicit ressentiment (the notorious timidity of translators and translation scholars, even supposedly radical Marxist ones like Lawrence Venuti: see Robinson 2011: 152–4 for discussion). Translation as investment in the regime of homolingual address: the reassuring stability of habitualized mediations from a stable source language to a stable target language. And translation as erudition, as the erudite division of texts and jobs into specialized domains, each with its stable registers and genres and styles (“text types”), each scrubbed clean of all messy complicity with political and economic processes, but each also coded affectively as “mine” or “not-mine,” part not only of “my world” but of “me,” “my self” – or else distanced as someone else(’s). Critical Thesis 3.9 “A nonrepresentational politics is by nature insurrectional, which means that it must fight against the ‘agents and agencies active in the invention of the ideological practices of everyday life in support of the reproduction of state power’ (Kapferer 2010, 5)” (Solomon 172). For Solomon, coming out of Sakai’s reading of Nancy, this insurrectional politics best resists and escapes the areas that reproduce state power by adopting the attitude of the heterolingual address, which is to say, by participating in Nancy’s exposed/distributed/spaced/dislocated community (see CT 1.19, 2.21) – a link that Solomon himself makes explicit by describing it as “the simplicity of thinking relation before the emergence of the two terms of which it is supposedly the expression – something like what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls Mitdasein” (197): C’est-à-dire qu’il [Georges Bataille 1897–1962] renonça à penser le partage de la communauté, et la souveraineté dans le partage ou la souveraineté partagée, et partagée entre des Dasein, entre des existences singulières qui ne sont pas des sujets, et dont le rapport – le partage lui-même – n’est pas une communion, ni une appropriation d’objet, ni une reconnaissance de soi, ni même une communication comme on l’entend entre des sujets. Mais ces êtres singuliers sont eux-mêmes constitués par le partage, ils sont distribués et placés ou plutôt espacés par le partage qui les fait autres : autres l’un pour l’autre, et autres, infiniment autres pour le Sujet de leur fusion, qui s’abîme dans le partage, dans l’extase du partage : « communiquant » de ne pas « communier ». Ces « lieux de communication : ne sont plus des lieux de fusion, bien qu’on y passe de l’un à l’autre ; ils sont définis et exposés par leur dis-location. Ainsi, la communication du partage serait cette dis-location elle-même. (Nancy 1986/2004: 64)

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150  Critical Theses on translation 3 That is to say he [Georges Bataille 1897–1962] gave up thinking the sharing [partage] of community and the sovereignty in the sharing or shared sovereignty, shared between Daseins, between singular existences that are not subjects and whose relation – the sharing itself – is not a communion, nor the appropriation of an object, nor a self-recognition, nor even a communication as this is understood to exist between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others: other for one another, and other, infinitely other for the Subject of their fusion, which is engulfed in the sharing, in the ecstasy of the sharing: “communicating” by not “communing.” These “places of communication” are no longer places of fusion, even though in them one passes from one to the other; they are defined and exposed by their dislocation. Thus, the communication of sharing would be this very dis-location. (Connor 1991: 25) The negation of location in dis- is specifically a refusal of what Nancy calls “communion” or “fusion,” which is the creation of an imaginary collective Subject in whom all communards (using that historical term in an extended sense) are fused or merged into a single being – an important model for Sakai’s regime of homolingual address. To the extent that this imaginary unity draws the boundaries around a “location,” inside which all entities are the same because all are part of the same unified Subject or Body, the dis-location of that location would entail not the physical scattering of the individual members or structures that constitute its imaginary being but the acceptance of difference, of distance, of our “externality” or foreignness to each other (CT 1.20–21, 2.2, 2.8), and therefore the acceptance of the inevitable partial failure of our addresses to each other (CT 1.5–9, 2.1). As Solomon writes: It might be useful to point out, however, that the ethics of national language is not a characteristic unique to this or that particular language but rather a common denominator shared by all languages when they are “counted” according to a “Romantic Ideology” (Agamben 2000, 65) of cultural individuation (Sakai 2009). This understanding views both language and people as individualized, determinate entities, and assumes an organic link of equivalency between the two. The “schema of cofiguration,” as described by Sakai, is precisely the means by which the “Romantic ideology” of language and people is transformed into an ethics and an aesthetics of everyday, lived experience. To engage in the practice of heterolingual address constitutes a refusal of the aesthetico-ethical constellation of cofiguration and a desire for liberation from it. (177) The “Romantic Ideology” of language – Ein Land, Ein Volk, Eine Sprache “One Land, One People, One Language” – that drives this regime of “cultural

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Solomon circa 2014 151 individuation” (every culture is unique, and uniquely unified) is effectively what Nancy calls “communion,” which in its extreme forms produces fascism, and even in its most “benign” or “democratic” forms often generates a mob mentality. The “schema of cofiguration” (CT 1.16, 2.4, 2.19), which Sakai tends to theorize at a global level, is here for Solomon at work naturalizing that Romantic ideology in very localized situations, transforming it “into an ethics and an aesthetics of everyday, lived experience,” so that it comes to seem like “the human condition.” Since what is thus naturalized is a whole ideologically coherent(ized) regime of knowing and being and doing and saying, what Solomon calls the area-apparatus, any representation of reality is always already complicit in state power. Hence the importance of what Solomon calls “nonrepresentational politics,” an orientation to Mitdasein or communal interaction that refuses to represent the other as this or that. As Solomon puts it: The most important ways of reappropriating erudition will have to come from transformations in the relation between knowledge and the body. This is another facet of permanently leaving behind the anthropological project modernity. We start by refusing to adopt an exceptional position, such as seen in the Cartesian split. For professional intellectuals, this means first and foremost that the construction of disciplinary objects must always be contested, if not refused. First, by questioning codes of domination in the objects presently considered “legitimate”; second, by questioning and rejecting the institutional imperative to devote one’s work to disciplinary objects at all. In place of disciplines devoted to objects that accumulate in the body of knowledge, we need disciplines devoted to knowledgeable practices of subjective transformation. (196) The “exceptional position” that we must refuse there is the assumption – ­foundational for Western thought, and thus for global modernity – that “we” (intellectuals in particular, understood as pure mind) are somehow exceptions to the rest of reality, in the sense of being somehow miraculously capable of standing back from it and representing it accurately. (The Cartesian split begins with the notion that the mind or res cogitans is radically separate from, and therefore has the ability to understand, the body or res extensa – including the entire physical world.) The “disciplinary objects” that we study – which is to say, that we represent in critical and skeptical ways that must still, for all our critical skepticism, adhere to disciplinary norms for the construction and thematization of those objects – are saturated in, and constituted by, “codes of domination.” The utopian “insurrection” that Solomon outlines here is undeniably difficult, and Solomon would certainly be the last person to minimize the difficulty: all logic, all argumentation, all critique, indeed all resistance to disciplinary domination, has been preshaped by the area-apparatus. His attempts to chart a possible pathway that this insurrection might take are cautious: he notes, for example, that the

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152  Critical Theses on translation 3 attempt to “question[] and reject[] the institutional imperative to devote one’s work to disciplinary objects at all” is precariously close to, and therefore vulnerable to, “the subjective investment in objects that is known as disavowal” (197). That is, the affective response to disciplinary objects that he calls disavowal – saying no to them, pushing them aside, distancing them, maintaining a “proper” “critical” distance from them – is itself a “subjective investment in objects.” How then does one refuse to represent those objects without affectively disavowing them? Must one refuse them without affect? That disavowal of affective response is already built into the mythology (ideology) of scientific method; any attempt to set affect aside only serves to redouble one’s affective participation in postimperial etiquette, in the area-apparatus. The positive flip side to this endlessly recursive negativity is the dislocated community, or what Sakai calls the attitude of the heterolingual address: Social relations enjoy the singular position of being the nonrepresentable, practical fulcrum between those two moments: they are both the originary point of departure and the element of determination-in-the-last instance. Armed with this sort of awareness, our interest in objects, be they disciplinary or transdisciplinary, pales in comparison to our eagerness to embrace the realm of cooriented ontology, “neither a return to the substantial object nor a so-called necessary anthropocentrism [but] an existentialism resolutely opposed to all homogeneity, to all ontological flattening as to all foreclosure of the common – an existentialism without reserve” (Neyrat 2013, 25). (Solomon 197) Critical Thesis 3.10 Insurrection requires that we become subaltern. Spivak’s (1985/1999) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is traditionally read as saying something like the subaltern cannot speak to power, because power is incapable of hearing the speaking of the subaltern, and that is a problem that must be rectified. I myself offered a version of that reading in Robinson (2013a: 158–66). Solomon expresses his incredulity at these bad readings of the essay, arguing persuasively that Spivak’s theme is actually that no, the subaltern cannot speak to power, or be heard by power, and that’s a good thing. Subalternity, he insists, is for Spivak not “a problem to be solved or an idea to be applied” but rather “a locus to inhabit [or] an invitation to cohabitation” (190; emphasis Solomon’s). That makes subalternity the insurrectional shared-subject-position of choice, the co-orientation to dislocated community. “The ‘subaltern,’ ” he writes, “is thus the name for the spacing that is undecidably both the concrete body of this or that downtrodden and marginalized individual and the possibility of a being that can no longer be configured through the matrix of anthropological difference. Not ‘humanity,’ not species-being, not an inheritor of the entire anthropological project of the colonial–imperial modernity devoted to perfictioning, but a true (and truly caring) stranger” (189). That “true stranger” is the foreigner that each of us is to every other, in the attitude of the heterolingual address. As long as we seek to

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Solomon circa 2014 153 “equalize” the unequal relations between “us” (as representatives of power) and “the subaltern” (as say a poor brown woman cut off from power), so that the subaltern can speak, so that “we” can hear, Solomon writes, we are indulging in “a confessional mode whose ultimate effect is to reinstantiate identity as a subject of representation” (193). The trick is to stop representing identities, and enter instead into dislocated heterolingual address. Just what it means to be “truly caring,” though, once that pallid notion has been peeled off the Hallmark greeting card and the self-help book, is anybody’s guess. Critical Thesis 3.11 Insurrection requires that translation become subaltern heterolinguality. By Sakai’s transformative logic, in the attitude of the heterolingual address (CT 1.9, 1.12, 2.2, 2.8) we are all foreigners to each other, and in addressing each other (and being addressed by others) we are all translating; what Solomon adds to that is Spivak’s subalternity and the utopian hope of insurrection: It is precisely at this point that Naoki Sakai’s unique account of the position of the translator really shines. What is revealed here is an essential, original hybridity and indeterminacy, present in every social relation, yet whose presence can never be fully represented or conveyed or captured. I would like to suggest that it is this “position” that is the only viable option for the intellectual of any location on today’s postcolonial/postimperial geocultural map who is concerned about the ethics of subalternity. So, for professional intellectuals, it is a question of becoming subaltern with regard to the postimperial etiquette, and then of using this process of becoming to expand the ranks of subalternity without end. (193; emphasis Solomon’s) Thus, heterolinguality as unrepresentability as subalternity. And, obviously, this is Solomon’s activist answer to power: subalternity without end. “The wish to be as numerous as possible in the sharing of indeterminate relations is a vow that befits the practice of the translator-subaltern, and the multitude(s)” (197; emphasis Solomon’s). Solomon also warns, however, against the temptation of affective representation, or representational affect, the attempt to “emulate” the subaltern, to use the subaltern as a stable identity-template for repeat patterning: This process of becoming must not be viewed through the terms of sympathy, much less appropriation; it must not, in other words, become an aesthetic project of mimesis and figuration through which the modern project of perfictioning, or fabricating racial/species perfection, can be realized technologically! Instead, the process of becoming subaltern has to be directly aimed at the apparatus of area, which is the main impediment to the maximization of

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subalternity without end. That injunction means that intellectuals will have to undertake or commit to a series of revolutionary changes in the oppositions that structure the “area-institutions” in which they work, beginning, in the context of a discussion about translation, with the valorization of authorship over that of translation, and extending beyond that specific context to the affective economy that is mobilized in support of the apparatus of area. (197; emphasis Solomon’s) This is a considerably more nebulous enterprise than simple sympathetic model­ ing; but as I understand him Solomon is calling for a kind of endless deconstruction, an undermining of representations that leads nowhere, certainly leads to no new representations. For example, when he mentions the importance of undermining “the valorization of authorship over that of translation,” he emphatically does not mean replacing “the valorization of authorship” with “the valorization of translatorship.” The idea would not be to make the translator into the new cultural hero: that would simply be to replace one area-institution with another. In a sense, just as (CT 2.9) the “non-philosophy of the future” emerges out of the multitude of “foreigners-without-the-foreign,” the nonrepresentative nonphilosophy of insurrection might be said to mobilize translation-without-thetranslator. If everyone is a translator, if everyone is always translating, then it becomes meaningless to talk about the translator. “This outline of the position of the translator leads me to suggest that for the professional university-based intellectual the ethical response to the problem of subalternity will not be found in speaking or listening, but rather in ‘translating’ ” (191). Except let us edit that: “This outline of the position of the translator leads me to suggest that . . .” Solomon’s peroration: Even as the state moves away from a classic national form of organization, the ideology of the nation-state continues to play an enormously influential role in the mobilization of affect and the short-circuiting of collective transnational resistance to the corporate surveillance machine. In view of this situation, I expect that translation and the heterolingual form of address will play an increasingly important role in the insurrections-to-come for a coinhabitable planet. (199)

Conclusion Critical Theses 3.1–11 summarize and comment on Solomon (2014) as the most recent and representative CTS manifesto; to begin to tie together some of the threads running through this book, I propose to continue that series with some follow-up points, especially emerging out of Solomon’s invocation of “biocapitalism,” “semiocapitalism,” and translation-as-insurrection. Critical Thesis 3.12 Biocapitalism is icotic capitalism.

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Solomon circa 2014 155 Cristina Morini and Andrea Fumagalli (Leonardi 2010: 235n2) define biocapitalism as “a process of accumulation that not only is founded on the exploitation of knowledge but of the entirety of human faculties, from relational-linguistic to affective-sensorial.” It “refers to the production of wealth by means of knowledge and human experience, through the use of those activities, both intellectual and corporeal, that are implicit in existence itself” (238). Because production is channeled not only through material conditions but also through “social contexts,” it ends up producing “societal forms,” and eventually “turns into a process of production and reproduction of itself, which is the fundamental activity of a living organism” (238). Increasingly this means that “the new organizational culture of enterprises” is understood as embodied and situated communities of practice: In fact, some new organizational models refer to the need to embody knowledge within enterprises. However, this knowledge is not explicit or objective, but rather relational: it encompasses the dynamic of a subjective knowledge that is “deeply rooted in action and in the engaging commitment to a specific context.” Cognitive labour organizations are interested not only in explicit knowledge, but also and more importantly in subjective (tacit) knowledge, everybody’s opinions (Nonaka 1994), and everything that relates to “motivation” (even drive-led motivation). (236) As a result – to return to the “analogies” we saw Lydia H. Liu tracing in Chapter 1 between translation (and generally verbal communication) and political economy – in biocapitalism “value” is derived not through the average output of labor but through “the intellectual and relational resources of subjects, and in their ability to activate social links that can be translated into exchange value, governed by the grammar of money” (Leonardi 236). This effectively blurs the “analogy” between verbal communication and political economy into identity: in the biocapitalist economy human social interaction is itself organized by “the grammar of money,” and, as that grammar’s most powerful and significant resource, wields an organizing influence over it as well. “Thus, what is exchanged in the labour market is no longer abstract labour (measurable in homogeneous working time), but rather subjectivity itself, in its experiential, relational, creative dimensions. To sum up, what is exchanged is the ‘potentiality’ of the subject” (236). So let us now ask: what is meant by “those activities, both intellectual and corporeal, that are implicit in existence itself”? What is “existence itself,” and what does it mean for an activity to be “implicit” in it? Is this a biologizing claim, a claim about the intrinsic “essence” of “nature”? Presumably not: I assume Morini and Fumagalli (or their English translator Leonardi) expressed their idea misleadingly, perhaps incompletely – or perhaps simply lacked an explanatory model that could account for the ability of human social “existence itself” to “reproduce itself.” Self-reproduction, they say, is “the fundamental activity of a living organism,” which does seem to refer us to some kind of biological “nature”; but what kind? Surely not sexual reproduction; their comments seem to point us rather in

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156  Critical Theses on translation 3 the direction of homeostasis, every individual’s and every group’s self-regulatory efforts to maintain an environment (internal and external) conducive to survival (and self-perpetuation). And while the theory of homeostasis is originally a biological theory, it is specifically biosocial: any life form’s homeostatic impulses are shaped by the group’s interactions with its environment. And given that one of their primary examples of this activity is the community of practice, which is specifically biosocially homeostatic, involving the largely unconscious accretion of social inter(re)active skills and networks that work to ensure successful task-completion and therefore group survival, but also group coherence, it does seem likely that their implicit view of “existence itself” is specifically biosocial: sociogenic, with a strong basis in the biological evolution of living beings’ nervous systems. Icosis is specifically a theory of embodied sociogenesis. It seeks to explain how social interactions are organized and regulated, but beyond that how the organization and regulation of social interactions come to feel like “human nature” – like a regulatory force that is “implicit in existence itself.” Like Morini and Fumagalli’s (Leonardi 238) account of biocapitalism “turn[ing] into a process of production and reproduction of itself,” icosis too is self-propagating, selfregulating, homeostatic, and so seems to perform “the fundamental activity of a living organism.” As an extension of my somatic theory, icosis rides on the back of somatic markers, which stabilize what individuals have learned from experience through social feelings of pain or pleasure, disapproval or approval – and which are then shared across bodies in a group, wielding a stabilizing influence over group behavior, but also group attitudes and motivations, organizing them around group norms. Icosis, derived from Greek eikos “plausible” and ta eikota “the plausibilities,” is the group somatic plausibilization of normative opinions as truths, realities, identities. It is a socioecological organization, normativization, and regulation of epistemology. It guides us so effectively – so affectively, and therefore so unconsciously – to normative understandings of what is real that what is icotically real feels real. Take money. Everyone knows that money is not little strips of paper and little round pieces of metal. Sometimes we act as if bills and coins were money, but we all know that it is only a symbolic representation of money, which is an abstraction. Money is also not the numbers we see on a computer screen. It is the “thing” (what?) to which those numbers point, to which those bills and coins point. But then if money is an abstraction, how do we become so attached to it? Why are we so willing to keep doing a job that we hate, keep putting up with a toxic boss, because the pay is good? Why will we cheat for money, lie for money, even kill for money? We know very well how invested we are affectively in money; but how do we explain it? How can we be affectively invested in an abstraction? What is the connection between abstraction and affect? Money, of course, is far more than an abstraction; the tendency to reduce it to one reflects the bad (disembodied) theory that has traditionally been applied to the regulation of social value – mainly, I suggest, because of the Platonic-­ Christian-scientistic disregard for affect, and generally the body, that has

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Solomon circa 2014 157 dominated Western thought for two and a half millennia. Any attempt to track meaning to the body is dismissed easily (because hegemonically) as cheap sentimentality, or physiological reductivism, etc. But the fact is, any attempt to reduce value to a numerical quantity is going to render it meaningless. Franco Berardi’s nightmarish portrayal of semiocapitalism in CT 3.13 is predicated on just this sort of reduction: the hyperabstract semiotization of value, which devalues and so dehumanizes human social interaction. Value is only secondarily a quantity; it is first and foremost a social feeling, a shared group phenomenology that is steeped in normativity – conative pressure to conform to group norms – and thus in the icotic regulation of group behavior. Icosis is driven and channeled by collectively felt evaluative processes. We come to accept the group’s normative epistemology because to challenge it is to court negative evaluation: disapproval, disgust, rejection. And because that epistemo­ logy comes to us somatomimetically, channeled through the simulation of other people’s body states in our own, and so unconsciously, we very often have only the vaguest idea what we believe, and even less awareness of how we came to believe it. We believe it (whatever “it” is), we think, because that’s simply the way things are. Biocapitalism is obviously a complex icotic system, channeled as it is through “the entirety of human faculties, from relational-linguistic to affective-sensorial” (Leonardi 235n2). The bio- prefix, which hints at “biology” but points most directly at bios “life,” implies the cooptation of embodied and situated social valuation processes for the capitalist determination of economic value – and thus of production and consumption, work and leisure, and so on. Biocapitalism is an icotic regime – but then every icosis is a regime, including, say, the icosis of planning/discussing/writing Imagist poetry in the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho in, say, 1910 (looking ahead to CT 3.15). Icosis is just a regime that works through highly nuanced, subliminal, collective channels that are extraordinarily difficult to theorize along mechanistic (“Fordist”) lines. The icotic organization of biocapitalism gives icosis a specific structure, but does not fundamentally alter its nature. Critical Thesis 3.13 Semiocapitalism is also icotic capitalism. “In a recent work,” Solomon (2014: 194) writes, “Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has described what he sees as the major affective traits of ‘semiocapitalism’ (Berardi 2009a). Chief among them is the pendulum that swings between depression and panic, from bear market to bull market.” That word “affective” already points to the somatic, and therefore potentially icotic, nature of semiocapitalism; but let us consider the issue more carefully. Berardi (2012: 104–5) writes: In the late-modern phase of capitalism, digital abstraction adds a second layer to capitalist abstraction: transformation and production no longer happen in the field of bodies, and material manipulation, but in the field of interoperativity between informational machines. Information takes the place of things, and the body is cancelled from the field of communication.

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We then have a third level of abstraction, which is financial abstraction. Finance means that the process of valorization no longer passes through the stage of use value, or even the production of goods (physical or semiotic). . . . The destruction of the real world starts from this emancipation of valorization from the production of useful things, and from the self-­replication of value in the financial field. This would appear at first blush to cancel not just bodies but the whole theory of biocapitalism: if “the field of communication” on which production and valorization rely and through which they are channeled is completely abstract, completely “in the field of interoperativity between informational machines,” then semiocapitalism and biocapitalism are oil and water, or numerical code and living tissue, and the affective tendencies called “bear market and bull market” would be descriptions not of the biocapitalist resources that run semiocapitalism but of consumers as outsiders and innocent bystanders. Then semiocapitalism is no longer a human social organization but a posthuman monster that is preying disastrously on human life: These new levels of abstraction not only concern the labor process – they encompass every space of social life. Digitalization and financialization have been transforming the very fabric of the social body, and inducing mutations. The process of production is merging in the infosphere, and the acceleration of productivity is transforming into an acceleration of the information flows. Mental disorders and psychopathologies are symptoms of this dual process of virtual derealization and acceleration. Digital abstraction, and the virtualization of social communication in general, has so deeply transformed the social environment that the cognitive processes of learning, speaking, imagining, and memorizing are affected. . . . What are the long-term effects of the automation of language learning? (106–7) “This digital-financial hyperabstraction,” he complains, “is liquidating both the living body of the planet and the social body” (111–12). But surely the extremist rhetoric of Berardi’s Jeremiad here undermines the force of his account. If semiocapitalism is having this pathologizing effect on us, on “the social environment,” surely it is not utterly divorced from that environment, and so from the human communities of practice that it is pathologizing. Yes, certainly “digital abstraction adds a second layer to capitalist abstraction,” but surely that doesn’t mean that “transformation and production no longer happen in the field of bodies.” If it is transforming those bodies, if one of the things it is producing is a rash of embodied psychosocial pathologies, then transformation and production do happen in the field of bodies, and it is sheer propagandistic exaggeration to claim otherwise. And yes, certainly “digital abstraction, and the virtualization of social communication in general, has so deeply transformed the social environment that the cognitive processes of learning, speaking, imagining,

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Solomon circa 2014 159 and memorizing are affected” – but to equate those changes with “the automation of language learning” is sheer demagoguery. The passage marked by that last ellipsis in the extract just above (see p. 199n2), leading to the claim about the automation of language learning, is all about children no longer being taught language by their mothers: the children of cognitive workers, he complains, are increasingly being left with nannies and grandmothers, and as a result are learning language from their iPads or whatever, because obviously only the biological mother can teach her own biological children their mother tongue. If they are left with anyone else, computers take over. This is not just silly; it is dangerous fear-mongering. I would say instead that “mental disorders and psychopathologies are symptoms of this dual process of virtual derealization and acceleration” precisely because “virtual derealization and acceleration” are embodied processes, effects that we experience in the body – and that the “we” who experience them in the body are not just the passive victims of semiocapitalism, as Berardi seems to imply, but its cofigurative engineers and producers and investors and manipulators (and translators) as well. As Berardi quite rightly notes, skyrocketing digital abstraction and the vertiginous acceleration of information flows are overloading the “attention market” (114) – and that very overload is the best evidence we have that this is still a human market, that embodied human beings run it, and therefore that the real problem is not that the market has been utterly dehumanized and disembodied and derealized, but that the digital tools that we have developed to help us “optimize” semiocapitalist productivity are outstripping our ability to manage them, and in response we are panicking. They’re our tools. It makes for better propaganda to call them our masters, our monstrous robot overlords, as if in some lurid science-fiction tale; and Berardi certainly has a loyal following of readers who crave just that level of sensationalism. But surely the pitch of panicky exaggeration he channels into all his writings and activist work is not sustainable? (Maybe my problem is that I’m an academic, not an activist.) If we retheorize semiocapitalism icotically, things look rather different – conflictedly different. Then on the one hand [a] the idealized theory is that the digitization of information flows is a good thing, something we can be happy about and proud of. Instant access to total information. Anything we want to know: there it is. Our smartphones, our tablets, our laptops connect us seamlessly and ubiquitously to the semiotic flows, and in so doing improve not only our lives but our ability to live our lives. We are not only all producers as well as consumers in the global semiocapitalist marketplace; we are getting better and better at simultaneously at producing and consuming. Our digital technologies are transforming us into superhuman beings. And yet . . . we can’t manage our passwords. We are somehow expected to manage several dozen of them, even well over a hundred – updating all of them every few months, or every time a Trojan horse rolls through the Net. And yet . . . we never have any down time. We’re always up, always on, always connected. And yet . . . no matter how powerful our motherboards are, our computers keep crashing, because we have too many windows open at the same time. As Berardi

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160  Critical Theses on translation 3 says, “the global mind went crazy because individual brains and individual bodies are not capable of limitlessly going faster and faster and faster” (114). That’s a bit overstated, but in the aggregate it’s a fair assessment. The sad fact is that [b] our digital technologies are too much for us. They’re undermining us. They’re tearing us apart. Berardi wants to portray (b) as our oversemiotized/overmediatized reality and (a) as a silly illusion; but the reality is that (a) and (b) are intertwined, part of the same biofeedback loop. We not only live both of them, breathe both of them, believe both of them; we circulate both through the same icotic circuits, the same ideosomatic loops of “plausibilization” and “truthification.” Each is an affectivebecoming-cognitive limit on the other; each is the impassable structure or stricture into which the other keeps crashing. Semiocapitalism is a reality – an icotic reality – because it is channeled so overwhelmingly through the communal organization of biocapitalism. There is no incompatibility between semiocapitalism and biocapitalism, because they are emphatically not stretched across the Cartesian split, semio=mind, bio=body. Icosis is always body-becoming-mind-becoming-body, always circulated collectively through the bodies-becoming-minds-becoming-bodies of whole populations in real time. Critical Thesis 3.14 Underneath the affective structure of postimperial etiquette that Solomon analyzes – Nietzsche’s ressentiment, Sakai’s regime of homolingual address, erudition – is a whole lower layer of affective organization that makes us love icotic capitalism, and feel loyal to it, and feel safe and comfortable in its arms. We love shopping online: free same-day delivery right to our door! No sales tax! No crowds! We love shopping at malls: the designer stores all in a row, the shiny surfaces, the sales and discounts (take an additional 30% off our low-low prices!), the parking lot or multistory car park, the food court. We love surfing the Internet; we are excited about the ubiquity of the infosphere. We love Marc Augé’s (1992; Howe 1995) non-lieux “non-places”: international airports, five-star hotels, supermarkets, theme parks, malls, the smoothedout spaces of what Augé calls surmodernité “supermodernity.” Even when we hate those things, we love them, because love for them is part of “the very fabric of the social body” that Berardi says is being destroyed by – but is simultaneously being constantly (re)created by – biosemiocapitalism. One of Berardi’s recurring themes is happiness. On the one hand: It is well known that the discourse of advertising is based on the creation of imaginary models of happiness that consumers are invited to replicate. Advertising is a systematic production of illusions, and therefore of disillusions, as well as of competition and defeat, euphoria and depression. The communicative mechanism of advertising is based on the production of a sense of

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inadequacy coupled with the solicitation to become a consumer, in order to feel adequate and to finally realize the happiness that has been eluding us. (2009b: 92) In other word, happiness works in capitalism as an imaginary carrot. The happiness that is shown to us in advertising images is not real, and not realizable; it is only a goad to consume. In reality these models of happiness are a “factory of unhappiness” (90). On the other hand, Berardi (2009a) notes that the unhappiness manufactured in that factory – our ubiquitous psychopathology – is, while useful as a goad to harder work and more open-handed “shopping therapy,” also wildly counterproductive to capital on two levels, damaging both our productivity (“Today capital needs mental energies, psychic energies. And these are exactly the capacities that are fucking up” [42]) and our consumerism: The economic crisis depends for the most part on a circulation of sadness, depression, panic and demotivation. The crisis of the new economy was provoked in a large part by a crisis of motivations, by a fall [of? in?] the artificial euphoria of the 1990s. This has led to effects of disinvestment and in part even to a reduction of consumption. In general, unhappiness functions as a stimulus to consume: buying is a suspension of anxiety, an antidote to loneliness, but only up to a certain point. Beyond this certain point, suffering becomes a demotivating factor for purchasing. There is therefore an elaboration of conflicting strategies. The masters of the world certainly do not want humanity to be able to be happy, because a happy humanity would not let itself be caught up in productivity, in the discipline over work or in hypermarkets. However, they try out useful techniques to make unhappiness moderate and tolerable, for postponing or preventing a suicidal explosion, for inducing consumption. (42–3) This passage mitigates his usual binary extremism somewhat: there is a middle ground between pure happiness and pure misery, called “moderate and tolerable” unhappiness. But this seems a rather grudging and timid attempt to expand his happy/unhappy binary only slightly on the unhappy side, and only in order to preserve the purity of some kind of “true” happiness on the other side. The notion that “the masters of the world certainly do not want humanity to be able to be happy, because a happy humanity would not let itself be caught up in productivity” seems to imply that a truly happy humanity would be somehow perfectly free of pathologies, perfectly and even paradisally healthy, as if we lived already in Elysium. In that state of pure and perfect happiness, presumably, we would also experience true love, true friendship, true loyalty, true caring, true professional satisfaction, and so on, untainted by all the horrible perversions of those affects that pass as the real thing here in this capitalist hell. But surely the

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162  Critical Theses on translation 3 mythologies that drive that imagination of purified affect are themselves the product of the capitalist and Protestant (and so on) ideologies and social practices that Berardi attacks? I would say rather that capital does want us to be happy, supremely happy – but on its own terms. Capital wants us to love shopping, love consuming, love going to work – again, on its own terms. Those terms obviously preclude the kind of “true happiness” and “true love” that Berardi (like the rest of us) so desperately longs for; but they also condition us to align our mythologies of true happiness and true love with the conditioned happiness and love that we feel for the products and practices of biosemiocapitalism, so that we become convinced that with a combination of luck and hard work we (will) have already (almost) made those mythologies come true – that in fact they are not mythologies at all but simply our (nearly perfect) reality. We live happily in the Seahaven Island of The Truman Show, with our wonderful families and our rewarding jobs. The realization that Seahaven Island is a giant fake, a TV show, makes Jim Carrey’s Truman bitterly unhappy, of course, and his undeceived bitterness is the role to which Franco “Bifo” Berardi has devoted his life: the whistle-blower, the teller of unwelcome truths, the brave soul who tears back the veil, the voice crying out in the wilderness. But it is only from that perspective of the undeceived, the erstwhile fool who has since wised up, that we may want to revise history and claim that Truman was miserable all along, that his happiness was a sham from the beginning of the movie. I would insist that while the social constituents of his happiness were a sham, his happiness was real. It had, again, an icotic reality. Everything in his reality – what he took to be his reality, because it was so utterly plausible (for him), because everything and everyone around him plausibilized it – made him happy. My point is not to suggest that we should accept our conditioned happiness, our love for the products and practices of twenty-first-century capitalism, at face value – that we should be in love with our happiness, and happy to be in love. My point is rather that we can study the icosis of capitalist happiness without letting our anger at having been deceived impose nightmarish distortions on our understanding. Yes, icosis is a “sham,” if you like – the group plausibilization of any truth, any reality, any identity is a construct, and therefore not “really real” in the naïve pre-Kantian objectivist sense – but then if we are determined to condemn that as a sham, everything is a sham. Berardi’s mythic “happy humanity” certainly is a sham. True love is a sham. The happiness we feel on a crisp autumn day as we walk across a green hill and down to a sparkling blue lake with the birds chirping in the trees is a sham. And so on. Our reality is icotically generated. The ending of The Truman Show – the notion that Truman can sail to the edge of the TV filming set and climb out, into real reality – is naïve objectivism. The real reality into which he climbs is the world of biosemiocapitalism, the world of “if you want to be competitive you must be connected, receive and process continuously an immense and growing mass of data” (Berardi 2009a: 42) that Berardi attacks so fiercely; and the utopia that Berardi imagines as the

Solomon circa 2014 163 real reality into which we must climb out of biosemiocapitalism looks a lot like Seahaven Island.

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Critical Thesis 3.15 The only effective channel of resistance to this affective regime is likewise an organization of affect, or an icosis/ecosis. While Solomon (CT 3.10) identifies translation-as-the-heterolingual-address as a potential channel of insurrection, Berardi wants the force that will free us from the nightmare of semiocapitalism – from the ever-accelerating flows of “digitalfinancial hyperabstraction” – to be poetry. “The voice and poetry,” he writes, “are two strategies for reactivation” (2012: 20), paraphrasing Giorgio Agamben (1982; Pinkus and Hardt 2006) to the effect that the voice is “the point of conjunction between meaning and flesh” and thus “the bodily singularity of the signifying process” (Berardi 20). “Poetry,” Berardi adds, “is the here and now of the voice, of the body, and of the word, sensuously giving birth to meaning” (21); it is “the insolvency in the field of enunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semiotic debt” (22). “Poetic language is the occupation of the space of communication by words which escape the order of exchangeability: the road of excess, says William Blake, leads to the palace of wisdom. And wisdom is the space of singularity, bodily signification, the creation of sensuous meaning” (22). “Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity” (147). “Poetry,” a “singular vibration of the voice,” is “language’s excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world” (Berardi 22). What is powerful in poetry, Berardi announces, is its “excess of sensuousness exploding into the circuitry of social communication and opening again the dynamic of the infinite gaze of interpretation: desire” (21): Desire is monstruous [sic], it is cruel, and noncompliance and nonrecombinability are at the inmost nature of singularity. Singularity cannot be compliant with a finite order of interpretation, but it can be compassionate with the infinite ambiguity of meaning as sensuous understanding. Compassion is sensibility open to the perception of uncountable sensuous beings, the condition for an autonomous becoming-other, beyond the financial freeze, beyond the techno-linguistic conformism that is making social life a desert of meaning. (21–2) Berardi’s activist rallying cry is: “When general intellect will be able to reconstitute its social and erotic body, capitalist rule will become obsolete” (142). In the process of reconstituting or reactivating that social and erotic body, the general intellect draws on poetry, but also on street demonstrations, which Berardi thematizes as a poetic channel of the flows of desire through the erotic body politic. This is not, in other words, a genteel reading of poetry by upper-class

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164  Critical Theses on translation 3 young ladies and gentlemen in a parlor or a bower: it is poetry as activism, as insurrection. To that end he draws heavily on the thinking of his old friend and collaborator Félix Guattari (1992; Bains and Pefanis 1995), especially the notion of the “refrain,” which Guattari calls “a semiotic concatenation (agencement) that is able to latch onto the environment. Cosmic, terrestrial, social, and affective environments can be grasped and internalized thanks to refrains that we have in our minds, in our sensitive and sensible brains” (Berardi 144–5), and the “aesthetic paradigm”: This concept redefines the historical and social perspective, and it is fully integrated into the vision of ecosophy. An environmental consciousness adequate to the technological complexity of hypermodernity, ecosophy is based on the acknowledgment of the crucial role of aesthetics in the prospect of ecology. Actually, aesthetics is the science dedicated to the study of the contact between the derma (the skin, the sensitive surface of our body-mind) and different chemical, physical, electromagnetic, electronic, and informational flows. Therefore, aesthetics has much to do with the modern psychopathology of contact, with the pathological effects of the acceleration of the info-flow and the precarization of social existence. Guattari views the universe as a continuum of diverse and interrelated entities in bodily contact with each other. It is both an organic and inorganic continuum, animal and machinic, mental and electronic, and the concatenation is made possible by ritournelles, semiotic markers of rhythm. Rhythm is the common substance of signs (word, music, vision) and the brain. The mind hooks onto the other (the other mind, nature, artificial, or social world) thanks to rhythmic concatenation. (145) For Berardi, drawing on Guattari, the refrain is not only “the sensitive niche where we can create cosmos elaborating chaos” (150); “social movements [too] can be described as a form of refrain: movements are the refrain of singularization, as they act to create spheres of singularity at the aesthetic and existential levels” (145). “Changing the order of expectations is one of the main social transformations that a movement can produce: this change implies a cultural transformation but also a change in sensitivity, in the opening of the organism to the world and to others” (151), and “the language of the movement as it tries to deploy a new refrain” (151) is poetry, and poetry is that language. “Insurrection is a refrain helping to withdraw the psychic energies of society from the standardized rhythm of compulsory competition-consumerism, and helping to create an autonomous collective sphere” (151). “Now we need refrains that disentangle singular existence from the social game of competition and productivity: refrains of psychic and sensitive autonomization, refrains of the singularization and sensibilization of breathing, once unchained from the congested pace of the immaterial assembly line of semio-capitalist production” (151). Or again, citing Deleuze and Guattari (1991; Tomlinson and Burchell 1996: 203–4; quoted in Berardi 150): “ ‘Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos

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Solomon circa 2014 165 that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos.’ ” As Berardi reinterprets this artistic/poetic chaosmos, or chaosmosis, it enters into the turbulence stirred up in the interactions between the individual and the environment by “the acceleration of info-stimula in the infosphere, by semiotic inflation, and by the saturation of attention and the conscious sensitive sphere of subjectivity” (150), and records that turbulence in order to reconstitute it, rechannel it into “the aesthetic conditions for the perception and expression of new modes of becoming” (150). One last point, to which we will return in CT 3.16 (and which harks back to section 1.2.2.3 and CT 2.9): Berardi cites Viktor Shklovsky’s прием остранения priyom ostraneniya “estrangement device,” which the structuralists tended to regard as a machinic reduction – when Shklovsky coined the term, after all, in 1916 or 1917, he was teaching young Russian soldiers to drive and repair armored cars in St. Petersburg – but which Berardi quite rightly restores to felt sensation, to an excess of sensuousness, which has the effect of restoring singularity to the phenomenology of reading poetry (see Robinson 2008: 89–100): “Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist theorist, says that the specificity of literary language lies in the ability to treat words according to an unrepeatable singular procedure, that in Russian he calls priem: an artificial treatment of verbal matter generating effects of meaning never seen and codified before. Poetical procedure is a form of enstrangement (ostranenie, in Russian) that carries the word far and away from its common use” (149–50). I will argue in CT 3.16 that what is most useful about Shklovsky’s specific theorization of the estrangement device (“enstrangement,” Benjamin Sher’s coinage for ostranenie, has never quite caught on) is that it doesn’t so much “carry the word far and away from its common use” but rather jars it just slightly loose from that common use. A usage that is too strange has little effect; the most powerful poetic effects are the slightly estranging ones. Critical Thesis 3.16 The convergence of (CT 3.11) reheterolingualizing translation and (CT 3.15) resomatizing poetry might be edgy experimental poetry translation – translation that makes us experience the gaps between us somatically as gaps, as difference. This is also the notion that Liu borrows from Marx, that we need to rough up the smoothness of the stabilized and so familiarized translation that promotes easy (unconscious) exchange in the target culture – and as Solomon (2014) notes with some urgency, this task is especially pressing now that the target culture is global, and the bridging codes that translate between the corporate-state(s) and the global target pool(s) of producers-and-consumers are inside us, and we have been coded not only to translate, not only to make our translations familiar, but to love them, to feel strongly and loyally attached to them. Take for example this poem by the Finnish poet Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014): Kuka piiloutui pariimme, ei voinut muuta, teki elämästään kokeen, eikä kukaan unohtamalla, ei muullakaan

166  Critical Theses on translation 3

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yliolkaisuudella kyennyt vahingoittamaan häntä sen enempää kuin itseään, enintään koettelemaan lämpöä, olisiko se, olisiko se sen vuoksi lakannut virtaamasta. Näki läpi ja kuuli läpi, ei sitten ihme, että siitä maailmasta tuli avoin. Rekola (1979: 488) We could begin by ordering a “semiocapitalist” (machine) translation: Translation 1 (Google Translate/“semiocapitalist” translation) Who hid pariimme, could not change, made a test of his life, and not forgetting anyone, not otherwise unscrupulousness could harm him any more as himself, no more than to prove heat, whether it would be, would it therefore ceased to flow. Saw and heard through the through, no wonder, then, that it was open to the world. Apart from pariimme “into our midst,” which Google Translate presumably couldn’t find in its Finnish database (it is an extremely unusual form), and so couldn’t process statistically into English, T1 is a useful gist. The reader with no Finnish can at least get a sense of what it’s about. I call it a semiocapitalist translation semi-jokingly: it is fast (almost instantaneous) because it is fully automated (no human pre- or post-editing to slow things down) and it is cheap – in fact free. We might in fact want to identify semiocapitalist translation as a kind of proleptic ideal toward which our technocrats strive – perhaps in vain, but no less intently for that. I say “perhaps in vain” because, though the Google version of semiocapitalist translation is pretty good, as machine translation (MT) goes, it is ultimately also pretty weak: • “Ei voinut muuta” is not “could not change” but “could do nothing else” (muuta is both the partitive of muu “other” and the root form of the verb muuttaa “to change,” used in negation – but not after an auxiliary verb like voinut “could” – and because Google Translate is not parsing sentences but amalgamating use-frequency statistics, it can’t tell the difference). • “Eikä kukaan unohtamalla” is not “not forgetting anyone” but “nor was anyone by forgetting (able to . . .)” (kukaan is “anyone” in the nominative, but it is the only noun near the transitive verb unohtaa (in the instrumentalizing

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Solomon circa 2014 167 adessive case as unohtamalla “by forgetting”), and statistically transitive verbs take direct objects, so Google Translate assimilates kukaan to direct objecthood – even though as a direct object it would be inflected ketään). • “Ei muullakaan / yliolkaisuudella” is not “not otherwise / unscrupulousness” but “not by other carelessness either” (ei muullakaan does collocate statistically with “not otherwise,” but only in the phrase ei muullakaan ta­valla/tavoin “not in other ways”; Google Translate, perhaps thrown offtrack by the line break, perhaps unable to tie the adessive -lla in muullakaan to yliolkaisuudella, reduces the latter to the nominative – which would be written yliolkaisuus). • “Siitä maailmasta tuli avoin” is not “it was open to the world” but “that world became open” (siitä maailmasta is morphologically “from that world,” “from” indicating a developmental trajectory, but Google Translate can’t handle the inflections, and imposes a statistical model on the passage based on an entirely different case ending, -lle [se oli avoin sille maailmalle “it was open to that world”]). And so on. Google Translate is notoriously helpless with case inflections, which not only distinguish grammatical subjects from direct and indirect objects – leading to the mistranslation of nominative kukaan “anyone” as the direct object of “forgetting” – but trace lines of social force through the various parts of speech, as in the adessive “-lla” suffix that makes unohtaa “to forget” into “by forgetting” and muu yliolkaisuus “other slipshodness” into “by means of other slipshodness.” Google Translate is forced to fall back on the nominative for almost everything – perhaps because in English almost every noun is uninflected and therefore looks nominative? When it takes a statistical guess at a prepositional phrase, as it does in “it was open to the world,” it typically gets it wrong. If the takeaway from this kind of error analysis of T1 is that Google Translate garbles the message with embarrassingly bad renditions that no human translator would ever even consider, however, and therefore that MT is still a very perfunctory and ineffectual channel of the semiocapitalist normativization of intercultural communication, it is important to notice just how egregiously this reading misses the point. The uncomfortable fact for that normativization is that anything out of the ordinary, the expected, the familiar, rocks the boat – ripples the phenomenological waters, introduces a potentially dangerous foreignizing turbulence into the calming and soothing flow of ideological norms through the system, and so has the counterintuitive effect of diminishing abstraction. When Berardi writes about digital hyperabstraction, he means hexadecimal code, presumably; Google-Translated poetry may be hex code at the programming level, but the web output is in odd-sounding verbal formations that are often strikingly counter-abstract. A human target reader reading T1 as a poem, for example, through the phenomenology of “I am reading a modernist poem,” may even find it in places quite inspired – and therefore affectively turbulent. For example, the beginning of the penultimate line, näki läpi ja kuuli läpi, is not particularly exciting in

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168  Critical Theses on translation 3 Finnish; it means “saw through and heard though.” The Google Translation “saw and heard through the through” is to my mind a marked improvement. It doesn’t “mean” the “same thing,” certainly, and so marks quite a sharp deviation from the norms that govern translation in the regime of homolingual address (and thus also, presumably, semiocapitalism); but by escalating the strangeness of the phrase it doesn’t just fall short of those norms. It sends them racing. In that sense semiocapitalist translation, by favoring the cheap fast abstractions of MT over what Nietzsche would call the far more “regelmäßig und folglich berechenbar”/“regulated and therefore calculable” programmability of the human translator, takes unnecessary risks; its statistical “guesses” risk estranging the target reader from semiocapitalist coding. If we take “biocapitalist” translation to mean the kind of “standard” or “normal” sense-for-sense translation that only an “experienced” or “professional” – read “biocapitalistically subjectified and harnessed” – human translator can create, surely that is the “safer” strategy for the regime of homolingual address: Translation 2 (“biocapitalist” verse translation) Who hid in our midst, could do no other, made of his/her life a test, nor was anyone by forgetting, or other indifference able to hurt him or her any more than her/himself, at most could test the warmth, whether it, whether it for that reason stopped flowing. Saw through and heard through, no wonder then that that world became open. I wonder, though, whether even T2 is boring enough to be “safe.” Doesn’t modernist free verse create affective turbulence by accentuating the disruptive effects all poetry has on normativized prose – just, for example, by “failing” to run all the way to the right margin? Wouldn’t a standardized “prose poem” or “prose ‘poem’ ” be safer? Something like T3: Translation 3 (“biocapitalist” prose translation) Who hid in our midst, could do no other, and in that way made of his life a test? Nor was anyone by forgetting or other indifference able to hurt him any more than he hurt himself. At most he could test the warmth, determine whether that was why it stopped flowing. He saw through and he heard through: no wonder, then, that that world became open.

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Solomon circa 2014 169 T3 seems far more “naturally” or “normally” coherent than T1 or T2, of course – as if verbal coherence were a natural default state of communicative normativity – as if norms, and conformity to norms, were a state of nature, into which loose verbiage automatically tumbled when not perversely jumbled up by a poet – but it is still full of non sequiturs. What is the normativized connection between “hiding in our midst” and “making his life a test”? What is “the warmth,” and what does it mean to test it, and what is the “it” that has “stopped flowing,” and what does that cessation have to do with “testing the warmth”? What was it he saw and heard through, and what world was it that became open, and what on God’s green biocapitalized earth does the one have to do with the other? In fact, wouldn’t a Hallmark-greeting-card poem translation conduce more effectively to normativization than T1–3? Isn’t the turbulent effect of modernist free verse in large part a byproduct of not rhyming, of not employing a regular meter, not adhering to a stable and predictable and above all clichéd prosodic scheme? Taking such a rendition as T4, the first few lines might go like this: Translation 4 (“biocapitalist” Hallmark greeting card translation) Who hid in our midst? Whose cheeks has he kissed? Who greatly was blessed At making a test Of striving and strife, By which I mean life? (Maybe that jingoistic transformation of the first two lines is cringe-worthy enough to illustrate my point about the relative safety of “biocapitalist” translation?) One has to ask, however, whether there really is such a thing as a “biocapitalist” translation – whether any given translation ontologically is in itself either complicit in or resistant to capitalism – “whether it, whether it for that reason stopped flowing” – whether biocapitalism flows in its own right, and so might stop flowing in its own right, or whether it flows because we think it flows – whether it is a crowd-performance in which we are always inevitably and inextricably complicit – and so whether, whenever it seems to us to have stopped flowing, it is still flowing and we are only deluding ourselves that it has stopped. Implicit in that slapdash line of whethering is the worry that it may never stop, because (CT 3.13) we want it to keep flowing, because we love the flow, because the flow gives us a deep primordial feeling of satisfaction and reward, a glow of happiness, an aura of life everlasting. Is the flow of bio- or semiocapitalism through a translated poem a mere audience effect? Is the circulation of biosemiocapitalist signs and values and meanings through anything – including our nervous systems – a mere audience effect?

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170  Critical Theses on translation 3 To put that in High Romantic terms (section 1.3), can the poet save us from the capitalist hell in which we live simply by “speak[ing] the password primeval,” uttering the poetic Logos as eschatological act – by unveiling for us the paradise in which we actually live, so that we enter into it simply by realizing that we were in it all along? If there is any truth at all to this High Romantic dream – and the eschatological hope that Berardi holds out for poetry and that Solomon holds out for ­translation-as-heterolingual-address would seem to suggest that there might be – could the obstacle to be overcome by the translator-poet possibly be not so much (T1) automated semiocapitalist translation or (T2–4) a certain “wrong” or “harmful” translation strategy, like sense-for-sense translation, but the ideosomatic/icotic programming that makes us turn every translation into more biosemiocapitalism? And if that’s the case, can anything at all ever be done? Is poetry-as-insurrection even possible? How does one break that programming? Solomon seems to suggest that translation-as-heterolingual-address is the chief channel of resistance – but what if we are only able to adopt the attitude of heterolingual address (while translating, while reading translations, while addressing others or being addressed by them) once we have already broken that programming? What if biosemiocapitalism is so powerful because it is an audience effect that has conditioned us and keeps conditioning us to keep reproducing it(self), a crowd that we want and need to keep performing, so that any effort at resistance (from others, aimed at us, or from us, aimed at others) is automatically transformed by the biosemiocapitalist regime of homolingual address back into more of the same? These are the questions that the latter-day foreignists – say, Berman and Venuti – continue to beg: what is a foreignizing translation, and how does it wield its transformative effect? How does leaving a Gefühl des fremden “Feeling of the Foreign” in a translation – “in” a translation, as if a translation were a hypostatic container that could stably and reliably hold that feeling inside it – transform the biosemiocapitalized target reader ethically/politically into a dissident? What is the psychosocial medium through which translations transform ethical inclinations from unconscious conformism and so compliance into resistance? To what extent has that medium been endopoliticized and so pre­ideologized, coopted in advance by biocapitalism for the reliable production of normative audience effects? If the mindless submission and complicity that Venuti attacks as the capitalist product of domesticating translation is a normative crowd-performance, to what extent will it continue to perform the normative crowd-self in every target reader, and so continue to generate the biocapitalist phenomenology even when confronted with the Feeling of the Foreign in a supposedly “resistant” or “dissident” translation? Like Liu, Venuti too withdraws behind the veil of poststructuralist discursivism so as not to have to ask these questions, and thus not to be held accountable for his failure even to recognize that they are the most important questions of all to ask and to answer. Let us therefore stop and see if we can’t untangle the skein a little.

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Solomon circa 2014 171 As I noted in section 1.4, the theory of foreignization is akin to, and comes out of the same German Romantic tradition as, Marx’s implicit analogization of domesticating translation; from the outset foreignism has set itself in opposition to what I suggested might be understood as the “homolingual” or “gold standard” or “universal TQA model” of equivalence, namely, the requirement that the translator translate so that it seems as if the source author originally wrote the text in the target language. If the “domestication” of the foreign text tends to naturalize the translation in the target culture, and so in Marx’s terms serves to make it exchangeable – and in Schleiermacher’s terms to make it blend imperceptibly into the target culture, so that it does not stand out as of foreign origin, to be valued for its semi-assimilated foreignness – the standard instruction for the foreignizing translator is to retain the source text’s Feeling of the Foreign, and so to denaturalize the translation’s impact on target readers. If we cling to this Schleiermacherian construction of foreignism, I suggest, its radicalism remains perforce quite superficial. Though it sets up a principled resistance to the standard domesticating universal theory of equivalence, what it offers us in its place is no more than a rival universal(izing) theory of equivalence. Friedrich Schleiermacher at the Royal Academy on that day in late June, 1813, wanted to compete for the right to define a new gold standard for translation into German; and (in this reading) the latter-day foreignizers simply follow suit for French and American English, respectively. They are all universalists. Their foreignizing opposition – translate not as if the source author had written the target text directly, but as if the target reader were reading the source text directly, with weak proficiency in the source language – to the dominant translational “universal” is not an antiuniversalism but a competing universalism. As I suggested in Robinson (2013c: ch. 4), however, there is also another way of construing foreignism, which occasionally flutters its wings even in Venuti. According to this other way, the key to foreignism is not Feel-of-the-Foreign equivalence but any kind of strangeness, as part of a resistant phenomenology of estrangement. It is this latter construction that to my mind would best resonate with Solomon’s cautious utopian hints at the end of his article; for example, T5: Translation 5 (estranging/foreignizing translation) Who hid in ‘mongst us, cdnt help but, made ‘er life a test, nor cd any1 hurt ‘er more’n hisself, not thru 4gettin r other nonchalance, @ most cd test 4 warmth, izzat um,

172  Critical Theses on translation 3

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cd that b why it stopt flowin? Saw n heard thru n thru, no wonder that ‘ere world oped up. Rekola’s poem is written in standard Finnish – in fact in Finnish that these days feels a bit bookish. Its only slight hint at spoken conversational Finnish, in fact, is the repetition in olisiko se, olisiko se “would it, would it be.” There is, in other words, no source-textual justification whatsoever for the strangeness of my rendering. In the normative crowd-performance that we’re letting Solomon call biosemiocapitalism, that is code for: “Translation 5 is unacceptable.” Its strangeness is simply beyond the normative pale: • •

• •

the txtese: 4 for “for,” @ for “at,” cd for “could,” any1 for “anyone,” r for “or,” b for “be,” thru for “through,” n for “and” the colloquialisms from wildly different dialect regions that wouldn’t necessarily be found in text messages: “ ‘mongst,” “more’n,” “hisself,” “izzat um,” “that ‘ere” and so on the inspired Google Translate “error”: Saw n heard thru n thru the one über-poetic archaism: “oped”

Note also, however, that T5 does not disrupt communal meaning-stabilization entirely, the way Symboliste and dada and various later poetic experiments have sought to do. Berardi (2012: 21) notes that the neoliberals borrowed the term “deregulate” from Rimbaud, who sought the dérèglement de tous les sens “deregulation of all senses”: just as nineteenth-century moralism was too confining for the Symbolistes, so too does any set of beliefs or values remain too confining for the neoliberals, who seek to free the profit motive and marketplace competition from all “moralistic” regulation. (Not all regulation of the market is moralistic, of course; some is, like any attempt to protect consumers from the more dehumanizing effects of the rapacity that drives the neoliberal profit motive. But even apparently non-moralistic regulation, like protections against cartels and trusts that seek to guard capitalist competition against its own worst impulses – to guard capitalism, basically, against the capitalists – is perceived by neoliberals as moralistic, because it places supposedly arbitrary limits on potential profit.) In any case, clearly in T5 I didn’t go for maximum estrangement through the deregulation of all senses; for that I could at the bare minimum have run say T2 through a word-randomizer and then through a dadabot like dadadodo, to generate T6: Translation 6 (deregulated/dada translation) and it no

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Solomon circa 2014 173 who any that to midst no nor indifference that her in her other most do was through at himself world hid more wonder of his life her able warmth stopped flowing that a other the heard anyone could forgetting it saw whether became or hurt then than for by could him whether our through test open made reason or test What, then, is the difference between the estranging impact of T5 and the estranging impact of T6? And before we answer that question, in fact don’t both T5 and T6 look rather tame and, well, human compared with something like these first few lines of T7 (further dadaized from T6)? Translation 7 (hyperderegulated/extreme dada translation) &&&&&&%&&&$&&$$$$ itttttt no who (m)any l&mine-yoursy  that to midst || two mist || too missed   2 msssssssssssstsssssssssssssst   ((((asst2t ins-tit2t)))) no ± nor ± nore ± gnore ± ignore ≠     in{dif}{fer}ence  tha(her)t  IN  othe(her)r If we reject Berardi’s fond nostalgic pre-Kantian notion that what makes poetry a powerful channel of the resomatization and therefore deautomation of language is reference to a real-world object – say, “our midst” and “do” and “made” and “her life” and “test,” etc. – is there any way left to us to distinguish among the estranging effects of T5, T6, and T7?

174  Critical Theses on translation 3

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I suggest that the manifesto that Viktor Shklovsky borrowed from Broder Christiansen (1909: 118–19) might help us make that distinction: Warum ist uns fremdsprachliche Lyrik, auch wenn wir die Sprache erlernt haben, niemals ganz erschlossen? Die Klangspiele der Worte hören wir doch, wir vernehmen Reim um Reim und fühlen den Rhythmus, wir verstehen den Sinn der Worte und nehmen Bilder und Vergleiche und Inhalt auf: alle sinnlichen Formen, alles Gegenständliche können wir erfassen. Was fehlt uns noch? Es fehlen uns die Differenzimpressionen: die kleinsten Abweichungen vom Sprachgewohnten in der Wahl des Ausdrucks, in der Kombination der Worte, in der Stellung, in der Verschränkung den Sätze: das alles kann nur erfassen, wer in der Sprache lebt, wer durch ein lebendiges Bewußtsein des Sprachnormalen von jeder Abweichung unmittelbar getroffen wird wie von einer sinnlichen Erregung. Das Normale eine Sprache reicht aber noch weiter. Jede Sprache hat ihren charakteristischen Grad von Abstraktheit und Bildlichkeit, die Häufigkeit gewisser Gewohnheit: jede Abweichung davon empfindet nur in voller Stärke, wem die Sprache als Muttersprache vertraut ist; ihn aber trifft jeder Anderssein eines Ausdrucks, eines Bildes, einer Wortverbindung mit der Stimmung eines sinnlichen Eindrucks. Das ist der Grund, warum wir fremdsprachliche Lyrik niemals ganz verstehen: es fehlen uns hier zur Synthese des ästhetischen Objekts wesentliche Momente. Dabei gibt es die Möglichkeit einer Differenzverdopplung und einer Differenzumkehrung. Eine bestimmte Distanz vom Gewohnten kann ihrerseits wieder Ausgangspunkt und Maß für Abweichungen sein, sodaß von hier aus nun jede R ü ck k e h r zum Gewohnten als Differenz empfunden wird. Why is the lyrical poetry of a foreign country never revealed to us in its fullness even when we have learned its language? We hear the play of its harmonics. We apprehend the succession of rhymes and feel the rhythm. We understand the meaning of the words and are in command of the imagery, the figures of speech and the content. We may have a grasp of all the felt forms, of all the objects. So what’s missing? The answer is: differential impressions. The slightest aberrations from the norm in the choice of expressions, in the combinations of words, in the subtle shifts of syntax – all this can be mastered only by someone who lives among the natural elements of his language, by someone who, thanks to his living consciousness of the language-normal, is immediately struck as with a sensuous arousal, by any deviation from it. Yet, the domain of the norm in a language extends far beyond this. Every language possesses its own characteristic degree of abstraction and imagery. The repetition of certain sound combinations and certain forms of comparison belong to the realm of the norm, and any deviation from it is felt fully only by a person for whom the language is intimate as a mother tongue.

Solomon circa 2014 175

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Every change of expression, of imagery, of a verbal combination, strikes him as a felt experience . . . Moreover, there is the possibility of dual and inverse differentials. A given deviation from the norm may, in its turn, become the point of departure and yardstick for other deviations. In that case every return to the norm is experienced as a deviation . . . (Sher 1990/1998: 21; translation modified slightly)1 Christiansen, of course, is not talking here about translation; he’s talking about reading foreign poetry, poetry written in a foreign language that we read fluently (but not quite fluently enough). Arguably implicit in his argument, however, is the possibility that the feeling of slight deviation from local norms that we feel in the mother tongue but not in the foreign tongue might be imported into the mother tongue by the translator. To the extent that those Differenzimpressionen “differential impressions” are experienced as “strange,” as Shklovsky’s incorporation of Christiansen’s theory into his theory of остранение ostranenie “estrangement” suggests they necessarily would be, and to the extent that the German (post-)Romantic theory of estrangement from Novalis on Befremdung and Hegel and Marx on Entfremdung to Brecht on Verfremdung implies (fremd) that what is strange (fremd) is also foreign (fremd), this importation of a Gefühl des fremden “Feeling of Strangeness” into the target text might also be read as the importation of a Gefühl des fremden “Feeling of the Foreign,” or foreignization. What is new and different feels strange, and to some may therefore feel foreign. As in those two constructions of foreignism mentioned above, however, there is a significant difference between estrangement as a poetic strategy (for Shklovsky) that became a political strategy (for Brecht) involving the defamiliarization of the familiar, and foreignization as a translation strategy involving a striving for a universalistic brand of equivalence. Translation 5 is designed to be estranging, but it can only be construed as foreignizing in the broader – less restrictive, less universalistic, less dogmatically equivalence-based – sense of the term. To the extent that we take foreignism to be a prescriptive strategy for achieving translational equivalence, T5 is beyond the pale – and therefore a potential candidate for (CT 3.10) Solomon’s honorific “translation-as-channelof-resistance” status. This is especially true given the strong affinities between (post-)Romantic/ modernist estrangement and (CT 1.5, 1.11–12, 2.8, 3.10) Sakai’s notion of “the attitude of the heterolingual address.” To the extent that we are all foreigners to each other, all address is an estranging form of translation. Translation in this broad sense, as reheterolingualization, would thus work through an intensification of the Differenzimpressionen “differential impressions” that send the regime of homolingual address racing. The translator as (CT 1.11, 2.10) subject-in-transit occupies the sliding site of the strange-becoming-familiar precisely in order to reinject a heterolingual becoming-strange back into every titration of familiarity.

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176  Critical Theses on translation 3 And of course in the attitude of the heterolingual address, we are all that translator. We are all subjects-in-transit. The trick is to recover that attitude. Without it, we are just dumb old homolinguals, trapped in isolated language communities, yammering away predictably to our Stepford wives (and husbands and same-sex partners and children and colleagues) in the L1, whose utter familiarity, if Berardi is right, increasingly has an insidious deregulating effect on us. What is significant in Christiansen’s Differenzimpressionen “differential impressions,” and so also in Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement, is that they are fractal: they generate an imperceptible sensation of deviation from an established linguistic Kanon “canon,” as Christiansen (118) says, and so work a shifting middle ground between perfect anesthetized conformity to norms and the utter revolutionary derailment of norms. The movement from T6 to T7 is effectively a nervous/excited Brownian motion away from the middle in the purificational direction of that latter extreme: in T6 the senses are deregulated, but not completely deregulated, and so we create T7, obviously several steps closer to the nihilistic ideal. And of course since there are (“are”) glimmers of sense in (“in”) T7 too – since our phenomenological penchant for order keeps trying to impose a coherent interpretation on every laborious step we manage to take toward perfect sensory/semantic deregulation – we keep pushing, and keep never quite reaching our goal. There are many problems with this. One, which Berardi hammers at with great passionate abandon, is that this deregulation of the senses has become endemic in financial capitalism, which so completely dominates our lives that it channels alienation into us through everything that is closest and most familiar to us. Another, which he doesn’t seem to notice, is the analytical problem, which, I suggest, lies in a certain impulse to binary nihilism. If the deregulation of the senses in poetry and finance is the implacable enemy he depicts – the globalized hegemony that makes nothing possible, the virally disseminated abstraction that destroys meaning and civil society everywhere, so that everything is ruined and there is no meaning anywhere, no happiness, no pleasure, no social engagement – then the only possible alternative to that enemy is some kind of mythic premodern utopia that has been perfectly purged of the enemy. In this sense Berardi is effectively himself a nihilist too: because he believes that under neoliberalism nothing is possible, his utopian hope that poetry can restore embodiment to our lives is impossible too, indeed merely the flip side of the nihilism he attacks. If all is impossible, our only hope is an equally impossible one. What Christiansen offers us – and what Shklovsky borrows from Christiansen in the development of his theory of остранение ostranenie “estrangement” – is a theory of the “normal” use of language that is grounded not in reference to real-world objects, as Berardi’s is, but rather in a communal phenomenology, a shared feeling for the linguistic norms of the speech-use community. It is when these Sprachnormalen “language norms” come to feel too restrictive that we rebel against them, with silliness, with bathroom humor, with word play, with poetry, and ultimately, as Berardi notes, with extremist “deregulatory” poetry, poetry that seeks to free our senses (both sensory and semantic) from communal

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Solomon circa 2014 177 regulation entirely (T7). As Shklovsky reformulates Christiansen’s model, however, estrangement is mobilized for a homeostatic regime: a feeling of strangeness becomes a powerful counterforce against too much familiarity, but a feeling of familiarity too can become a powerful counterforce (Differenzumkehrung “inverse differentials”) against too much strangeness. Essentially Berardi is ranting against the former gone wild, the viral emptying-out of communal meaning into alienation and depersonalization – but instead of calling for a better homeostatic regulation of the strange and the familiar, he invokes a tired old binary logic according to which the only possible alternative to the depersonalizing abstractions of finance is the maternal embodiment of “poetry.”2 (Thanks for the Hallmark birthday card, Mom.) The icotic/ecotic model developed in this book suggests that our social processes and practices are always embodied, always situated, always collectivized, and always collectively normative – that, in other words, it is not just counterproductive but wrong to set embodiment over against disembodiment, the “concrete” against the “abstract,” mothers against the info-sphere. Whatever we experi­ sychosocial – ence, we experience in the body, in situations, and in groups. Our p ­affective-becoming-conative-becoming-cognitive – ability to process experience can be overloaded, and often is, in the world of genocide, war, and semiocapitalism; in Robinson (2013a) I tracked the traumatizing effects of that “allostatic” overload, and the survival of those effects in whole populations across multiple generations, even centuries. Berardi is absolutely right that this is a phenomenon that must be not only studied but treated, using for example the schizoanalytical treatment methods developed by Félix Guattari and inserted into his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze (1972, 1980), but also explored in his later solo books, especially perhaps Chaosmosis (1992; Bains and Pefanis 1995/2006). Allostatic overload and the resulting traumas may be experienced as disembodiment, even depersonalization/dehumanization, as it was by Tolstoy (Robinson 2008: ch. 1), and as it is by Edwidge Danticat’s characters (Robinson 2013a: §1.2); but even the experience of disembodiment is embodied. Critical Thesis 3.17 The divergences between TS and CTS are real and significant, and may well continue; but TS scholars who care about the complexity of the discipline’s shape and trajectory should be learning as much as possible from CTS scholars. The caricature that I presented in the Preface of the differences between CTS and TS – partly borrowed directly from CTS dismissals of TS – is that CTS studies the historical realities that are constitutive of the ideological formations that TS takes to be reality, namely the reproduction in a target language of texts written in a source language. The only TS work that seems at all interesting or useful to CTS scholars tends to be postcolonial translation studies, which was pioneered by scholars who did not identify as working in TS at all, because they weren’t particularly interested in questions of (non)equivalence between a source text and a target text; but in recent CTS publications there seems to be no inclination at all

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178  Critical Theses on translation 3 to engage with, or even to read, more recent postcolonial studies of translation. Over the last two decades CTS interest in TS has dropped precipitously from minimal to zero. One could wax indignant about this. One could even wax resentful. Is Descriptive Translation Studies really completely irrelevant to CTS? Is skopos theory? Could CTS not benefit at all from sociological studies of translation? And, personally: Lydia Liu (1995) found Robinson (1991) interesting and useful – but I’ve published a few things since then, and quite a few of those more recent publications fill in some of the most glaring gaps left by hasty CTS theorizations, especially regarding the socioaffective channels by which the various homolingual regimes (separate national languages, the translator as mediatory hero, universal equivalents, etc.) are formed, stabilized, and maintained. As I’ve pointed out several times along the way, in CTS these things just sort of happen – and my somatic and icotic/ecotic models can explain how they happen. But I suggest we resist the temptation to vent our egotism, and instead of taking CTS scholars to task for their real or imagined shortcomings concentrate instead on what we can learn from them. As I’ve noted, the first substantial take-away for TS scholars in CTS is the historicization of what we take to be the “primal scene of translation”: two speakers of different languages who can’t understand each other, a third who can speak both mediating between them. But there is much more we can learn from CTS than that. Sakai may not be able to theorize how the regime of homolingual address is actually consolidated socioecologically, but he has created a theoretical framework that will allow us to track both the turbulences within and between national languages, dialects, sociolects, even idiolects, and the ideological pressures that create the paradoxes whereby the translator is both lionized and invisibilized as a mediator between languages. His theorization of the translator as a subject-in-transit (CT 1.11) is brilliant, and surely of multifarious use to TS scholars. Liu for her part may not be able to theorize how competing “universal equivalents” come to be enshrined as professional norms – let alone how a legal ban on a single Chinese character in 1858 could have made that character disappear from the speech of billions of Chinese speakers over the ensuing century and a half – but her initial thoughts on that historical process in Liu (1999b, 2004) offer a salutary series of correctives to TS foreignism, and opens up numerous new avenues of research for students of translation history. In addition to the expansion of TS research that familiarity with CTS might help bring about, there is also the awkward but instructive fact of TS indignation at not being regarded as the indispensable experts on translation. There has been a considerable amount of TS hand-wringing in recent years about whether TS is really a discipline at all – and, if it is “only” an interdiscipline, whether that even counts for anything – and our hurt pride at being excluded and ignored suggests not only that we are indeed a discipline, but that our insecurity about that disciplinary status reflects our immaturity as a discipline. The very fact that we know who is a TS scholar and who is not, and care deeply about recognition

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Solomon circa 2014 179 by outsiders for the work of insiders, makes it very clear that we have circled the wagons, and are hunched down behind them, protecting our disciplinary territory from both usurpers and those who would ride on by without even seeing our camp. Is it possible that we are as invisible to our scholarly colleagues in other disciplines as our translator-and-or-interpreter selves to the people who have historically relied on our mediatory services? Maybe the lesson to be learned is: there’s work to do. Let’s get over ourselves and keep doing it.

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References 189 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1985/1999. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” Wedge 7.8 (Winter/Spring 1985): 120–30. Reprinted in Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 269–311. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. “The Politics of Translation.” In Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 179–200. London and New York: Routledge. Stambaugh, Joan, trans. 1996. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translation of Heidegger 1927/2001. Albany: SUNY Press. Steinberg, Erwin. 1965. “K. of The Castle: Ostensible Land-Surveyor.” College English 32.3: 185–89. Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press. Tomlinson, Hugh, and Graham Burchell, trans. 1996. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Translation of Deleuze and Guattari 1991. New York: Columbia University Press. Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1887. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Fues. Venuti, Lawrence. 1986. “The Translator’s Invisibility.” Criticism 28.2: 179–212. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 2000/2012. The Translation Studies Reader. Third edition. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 2012. “Genealogies of Translation Theory: Locke and Schleiermacher.” Online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwsSizglruY. Accessed January 24, 2013. Weinsheimer, Joel, and Donald G. Marshall, trans. 1975/1989. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. Translation of Gadamer 1960/2010. New York: Crossroad. Whyte, William H., Jr. 1952. “Groupthink.” Fortune (March): 114–17, 142, 146. Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Stephen S., trans. 1997. Jean-Claude Martzloff, A History of Chinese Mathematics. English translation of Martzloff 1987. New York: Springer. Wimsatt, W.K., Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley. 1954. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, 3–18. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Zhang, Qiong. 1999. “Demystifying Qi: The Politics of Cultural Translation and Interpretation in the Early Jesuit Mission to China.” In Liu 1999d: 74–106. Zohn, Harry, trans. 1968/1982. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator.” In Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations, 69–82. Glasgow: Fontana.

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Notes

Preface 1 The TS scholars Liu (1995) cited were eleven: Andrey Fyodorov (1953), Roman Jakobson (1959), Achilles Fang (1959), Georges Mounin (1963), J. C. Catford (1965), George Steiner (1975), Anton Popovič (1976), Antoine Berman (1984; Heyvaert 1992), Douglas Robinson (1991), Willis Barnstone (1993), and Eugene Eoyang (1993). With Fyodorov, Mounin, and Catford in the mix, it is perhaps no wonder that she later came to believe that all TS scholarship is about linguistic equivalence. Her discussion of Steiner was largely negative, dealing with his rather simplistic characterization (based on Fang) of “the Chinese language.” She seems to have liked my Translator’s Turn, and borrowed my “tropics” as one of her own organizing tropes, in both 1995 and 1999b; but even that didn’t incline her to reserve some faint praise for TS scholarship in her later dismissals.   In addition, she cited the pioneers of postcolonial translation theory, who do not typically consider themselves TS scholars: Talal Asad (1986 – not in her “Selected Bibliography”), Vicente Rafael (1988), Eric Cheyfitz (1991), and Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) – an anthropologist, a historian, and two Americanists. And she cited work by four philosophers whose thinking about translation has proved extraordinarily influential for TS: Walter Benjamin (1923/1972; Zohn 1968/1982), Martin Heidegger (1950/1986; Hofstadter 1971), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/2010; Weinsheimer and Marshall 1975/1989), and Jacques Derrida (1985). Barbara Johnson (1985) was cited as well, from the same collection (Graham 1985) in which Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel” appeared; her ruminations on “Taking Fidelity Philosophically” don’t generally inspire much comment from TS scholars.   Ironically, though she subtitled her monograph Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China, 1900–1917, Liu (1995) cited only two Chinese TS scholars, both in English: Achilles Fang (方志浵 Fang Zhitong 1910–1995), whose article from Reuben Brower’s 1959 collection “Some Reflections on the Difficulty of Translation” she rather ruefully characterized as “outdated”; and Eugene Eoyang (欧阳桢 Ouyang Xun b. 1939), whose monograph The Transparent Eye had appeared at a late stage of her writing, in 1993. The 200-plus sources she cited in Chinese are all literary, scholarly, and lexicographical texts from or about her decade-and-a-half modern period in early-twentieth-century China. She apparently had no interest in what Chinese thinkers, scholars, and translators had said about translation through the ages; and Martha Cheung’s (2006) anthology was still a decade in the future. What she knew about Chinese translation theory she apparently learned from a working paper delivered by Joshua Fogel at Indiana University in 1993.

Notes 191

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2 The one translation theorist that Liu (2014: 149n2) partially exempts from this blanket dismissal is Walter Benjamin: “Although more sophisticated than that of other theorists, Walter Benjamin’s conception of translation in ‘The Task of the Translator’ ultimately endorses this manner of reasoning. In his notion of Pure Language, translation holds out a promise of meaning in messianic time, if not in secular temporality.” Benjamin in 1923 is “more sophisticated” than every TS scholar since. How many of them, I wonder, has she actually read?

Critical Theses on translation 1 1 See sections 3–4–5 of “The Double-Bind of Translation Quality Assessment (TQA)” in Chapter 2 for this kind of Hegelian synthesis-as-anesthesis; as I argue in Robinson (2008: 187–90), the double-bind anesthetizes “good citizens” (those who do not end up in the psych ward) by “trapping” them in paralyzing contradictions from which the only “sane” escape is “forgetting,” not thinking about them, agreeing to disagree. 2 See Zhang (1999) on the early Jesuit missionaries’ use of Christian theological readings/translations of Chinese philosophical texts, in an attempt to show that Chinese religion is actually commensurate with Christianity; Liu (1999c) on an American missionary’s Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, and Dudden (1999: 168) on the Meiji regime’s use of assimilative interpretive strategies in reading that Chinese translation in order to transform Japan into “a full participant in the industrializing, mass militarizing, nationalizing world”; Hevia (1999: 192) on the introduction of the Hindi/Sanskrit loanword “loot” into the English lexicon in the late nineteenth century to celebrate the “sense of opportunity that empire building offered to the bold and daring,” and so on. 3 Martzloff’s (1987: 103) French: “Ce type de phénomène rendait pour le moins hasardeuse la transmission du concept d’existence si important en mathématiques (parallèles, constructions géométriques, raisonnements par l’absurde dans lesquels on prouve qu’un certain objet mathématique n’existe pas).” 4 This may seem a hasty jump from Nancy to my own icotic theory; the middle steps in that jump are complicated, but run through passages like this: Au lieu d’une telle communion, il y a communication : c’est-à-dire, très précisément, que la finitude elle-même n’est rien, qu’elle n’est pas un fond, ni une essence, ni une substance. Mais elle paraît, elle se présente, elle s’expose, et ainsi elle existe en tant que communication. Il faudrait, pour désigner ce mode singulier du paraître, cette phénoménalité spécifique et sans doute plus originaire que toute autre phénoménalité (car il se pourrait que le monde paraisse à la communauté, non à l’individu), pouvoir dire que la finitude com-paraît et ne peut que com-paraître : on essaierait d’y entendre à la fois que l’être fini se présente toujours ensemble, donc à plusiers, que la finitude se présente toujours dans l’être-en-commun et comme cet être lui-même, et que de cette façon elle se présente toujours à l’audience et au jugement de la loi de la communauté, ou plutôt et plus originairement au jugement de la communauté en tant que loi. La communication consiste tout d’abord dans ce partage et dans cette comparution de la finitude : c’est-à-dire dans cette dislocation et dans cette interpellation qui se révèlent ainsi constitutives de l’être-en-commun – précisément en ce qu’il n’est pas un être commun. . . . Cette exposition, ou ce partage exposant donne lieu, d’entrée de jeu, à une interpellation mutuelle des singularités, bien antérieure à toute adresse de langage (mais donnant ce dernier sa première condition de possibilité).

192  Notes

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La finitude comparaît, c’est-à-dire est exposée : telle est l’essence de la communauté. (Nancy 1986/2004: 72–3) In place of such a communion [the perfect fusion or subsumption of all finite beings into a single unified Subject, the mythical conception of community that Nancy opposes, and that partly informs Sakai’s conception of the regime of homolingual address], there is communication. Which is to say, in very precise terms, that finitude itself is nothing; it is neither a ground, nor an essence, nor a substance. But it appears, it presents itself, it exposes itself, and thus it exists as communication. In order to designate this singular mode of appearing, this specific phenomenality which is no doubt more originary than any other (for it could be that the world appears to the community, not to the individual), we would need to be able to say that finitude co-appears or compears (com-paraît) and can only compear: in this formulation we would need to hear that finite being always presents itself “together,” hence severally; for finitude always presents itself at a hearing and before the judgment of the law of community, or, more originarily, before the judgment of community as law. Communication consists before all else in this sharing and in this compearance (com-parution) of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of being-in-common – precisely inasmuch as being-in-common is not a common being. . . . This exposure, or this exposure-sharing, gives rise, from the outset, to a mutual interpellation of singularities prior to any address in language (though it gives to this latter its first condition of possibility). Finitude compears, that is to say it is exposed: such is the essence of community. (Connor 28–9)   Some basic definitions: “la finitude com-paraît”/“finitude compears” means something like “humans are finite beings, not gods or other transcendent spirits, and their finitude ‘appears’ or emerges in finite interactions” – which is to say, it “se présente toujours ensemble, donc à plusiers”/“always presents itself ‘together,’ hence severally.” This is more or less what Sakai means by heterolingual address: because we are alien to each other, foreigners to each other, radically separate, all communication is a finite and imperfect attempt to cross the gaps between us, and that attempt will always more or less fail; but it is by more-or-lessfailing together that we live in community. What we take to be our individuality is largely a group construct; and groups construct such identities by accepting and living with alterity. Another term Nancy uses for this mutual alienness is “exposure” (“est exposée”/“is exposed”): our finite connections/interactions with others are “externally positioned,” in the sense that every position is external to every other. Yet another is “dislocation,” but he juxtaposes that dislocation strategically with Althusser’s “interpellation,” which I take to escalate that attempt to cross the gaps between us into the imposition on the gaps of some sort of normative order. Just as, in Althusser, the police officer interpellates or “hails” a person on the street, shouting “Hey you there!”, and so subjectifies that person as subject to the ideological state apparatuses s/he represents, so too in communication we hail each other and so attempt to subject each other to some sort of emerging group order or regulation. Nancy never identifies this emerging order as somatic, as I do, let alone as icotic; but he does call it “une interpellation mutuelle des singularités, bien antérieure à toute adresse de langage (mais donnant ce dernier sa première condition de possibilité)”/“mutual interpellation of singularities prior to any address in language (though it gives to this latter its first condition of possibility),” which is strongly suggestive of what I call the somatic exchange. In

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Notes 193 somatic theory, the somatic exchange – and its socioecological extension as icosis and ecosis – is in fact precisely this kind of prelinguistic conditioning of human social connectivity that makes “adresse de langage”/“address in language” possible; and it does constitute a kind of prelinguistic and so preconscious form of judgment: “la finitude . . . se présente toujours à l’audience et au jugement de la loi de la communauté, ou plutôt et plus originairement au jugement de la communauté en tant que loi”/“finitude always presents itself at a hearing and before the judgment of the law of community, or, more originarily, before the judgment of community as law.” The somatic exchange as the engine of social regulation is a circulation of evaluative shared affect – and the evaluations or value-based judgments channeled through it are specifically “unworking” (undecided, unplanned, unactualized, and so apparently effortless) enforcements of communal norms. I read Nancy’s diffident suggestion that “car il se pourrait que le monde paraisse à la communauté, non à l’individu”/“it could be that the world appears to the community, not to the individual” as a cautious gesture in the direction of icosis: the group plausibilization of opinion as reality, truth, and identity, stabilized preconsciously by the somatic exchange.

Chapter 1 1 Liu’s assertion that the invention of the feminine third-person pronoun 她 ta imposes a “masculine identity retroactively” on 人 ren, and that that identity is “contradicted by the etymology of its otherwise ungendered radical ren” (29), makes me wonder two things: [a] do etymologies ever “contradict” (un)gendered identities? and [b] can we really know with such certainty that the etymology of 人 ren is/was “otherwise ungendered”? The theme of (a) “contradiction” implies not only stable identities, with clear boundaries between them – (b) 人 ren penned up in the “ungendered” enclosure for all time until the May Fourth movement, when it was unceremoniously transferred to the “masculine” enclosure – but a conative pressure on the logic of separation prohibiting change. If 人 ren is (and has always been) in the “ungendered” enclosure, it must stay there, or risk logical incoherence.   The patriarchal nature of Chinese culture also makes me wonder whether 人 ren was really so perfectly and purely ungendered for all those millennia leading up to the early twentieth century. Birdwhistell (2007), for example, argues – to my mind persuasively – that while Mengzi seems to be encouraging male leaders to rule like mothers, when he talks about 人 ren “people” he actually means “men.” Would Liu want to argue that Birdwhistell is just anachronistically imposing a modern feminist sensibility on the ancient Chinese texts? Were they actually far more gender-neutral than Birdwhistell claims?   The larger question is how an “etymology” is determined, and by whom. Who decided, and when, that 人 ren was purely an ungendered person or people until the early twentieth century? It that determination was actually made, if it wasn’t just Liu’s guess, it was made by “scholars,” presumably – Chinese philologists or linguists – and presumably ungendered ones. They would certainly not have been predominantly or exclusively male, or patriarchially inclined to universalize their own experience as “generally human.” Because if that were the case, there would have been a universal equivalent at work in their scholarly determinations – and Liu would have wanted to historicize that equivalent, show how it arose, how it competed with other possible emerging equivalents, how it emerged victorious, etc. And what about it led to its victory – say, its ability to euphemize gender politics out of sight. Since she seems disinclined to historicize that process, 人 ren must have been “naturally” or “intrinsically” gender-neutral.

194  Notes

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  And what of ordinary Chinese speakers over those millennia? Did none of them ever say 人 ren and mean “man” or “men”? More to the point, how many of them would have had to masculinize 人 ren for Liu to be wrong? Ten million? One million? A thousand? Ten? If a single ordinary Chinese speaker back in the Song or the Ming Dynasty was the only person (man? woman?) ever to say 人 ren and mean “man” or “men,” would that count as a knockdown counterexample? 2 Here is the whole passage, in Marx’s (1867) German and Moore and Aveling’s (1887) English: In ihrer Verlegenheit denken unsre Warenbesitzer wie Faust. Im Anfang war die Tat. Sie haben daher schon gehandelt, bevor sie gedacht haben. Die Gesetze der Warennatur betätigten sich im Naturinstinkt der Warenbesitzer. Sie können ihre Waren nur als Werte und darum nur als Waren aufeinander beziehn, indem sie dieselben gegensätzlich auf irgendeine andre Ware als allgemeines Äquivalent beziehn. Das ergab die Analyse der Ware. Aber nur die gesellschaftliche Tat kann eine bestimmte Ware zum allgemeinen Äquivalent machen. Die gesellschaftliche Aktion aller andren Waren schließt daher eine bestimmte Ware aus, worin sie allseitig ihre Werte darstellen. Dadurch wird die Naturalform dieser Ware gesellschaftlich gültige Äquivalentform. Allgemeines Äquivalent zu sein wird durch den gesellschaftlichen Prozeß zur spezifisch gesellschaftlichen Funktion der ausgeschlossenen Ware. So wird sie – Geld. In their difficulties our commodity owners think like Faust: “Im Anfang war die Tat.” [“In the beginning was the deed.” – Goethe, Faust. (Translators’ interpolation)] They therefore acted and transacted before they thought. Instinctively they conform to the laws imposed by the nature of commodities. They cannot bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as commodities, except by comparing them with some one other commodity as the universal equivalent. That we saw from the analysis of a commodity. But a particular commodity cannot become the universal equivalent except by a social act. The social action therefore of all other commodities, sets apart the particular commodity in which they all represent their values. Thereby the bodily form of this commodity becomes the form of the socially recognised universal equivalent. To be the universal equivalent, becomes, by this social process, the specific function of the commodity thus excluded by the rest. Thus it becomes – money. 3 In my literal translation I render betätigten sich as “became active”; but note that the root of the verb is Tat “act.” They “be-acted themselves,” which it to say, they activated themselves, became active. 4 For my coinage “metalocutionary implicature” see Robinson (2003: 148–53). 5 In the “Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen”/“Circular Letter on Translation”: Man muss die Mutter im Hause, die Kinder auf der Gasse, den einfachen Mann auf dem Markt danach fragen, und denselben auf das Maul sehen, wie sie reden, und danach übersetzen, so verstehen sie es denn, und merken, dass man deutsch mit ihnen redet. (Luther 1530/1963: 21) You’ve got to go out and ask the mother in her house, the children in the street, the ordinary man at the market. Watch their mouths move when they talk, and translate that way. Then they’ll understand you and realize that you’re speaking German to them. (Robinson 1997/2002a: 87) 6 We note that in RPP-4 Marx mentions (d) Faust and (e) Im Anfang war die Tat but misses both (a) the eschatological and (b) the translational element in RPP-2;

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Notes 195 in RPP-3 Shell also mentions (d) Faust and restores (b) the translational (but again ignores [a] the eschatological) element, and in RPP-5 Liu, with no apparent knowledge of RPP or RPP-2, and with only Shell’s (RPP-3) report of RPP-4, strips RPP-3 of (d) Faust, leaving only (e) die Tat. 7 I derive “icosis” from Aristotle’s eikos “plausible,” ta eikota “the plausibilities,” and his insistence that, given a choice between a story that is true but implausible and a story that is plausible but untrue, we will always prefer the latter, because we have been socially conditioned to believe “icotized” or “plausibilized” stories. For extended discussions of icosis, see Robinson 2013c, 2015a, 2016a, 2016b, 2017; for the somatic theory on which icotic theory is grounded, see Robinson (1991, 2003, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013a, 2013b). 8 The idea of “endless semiosis,” which Peirce floated as a possibility in 1866, was picked up by Jacques Lacan and Umberto Eco and others and became something like the signature trope for poststructuralist thought, under the rubric of “the endless chain of signifiers”; Peirce himself was still peddling it in 1902 (CP 2.92). But as Short (2004: 219–26; 2007: 53–9) shows, Peirce began rethinking it in 1903 (CP 2.242, 2.275), and that same year declared his old theory absurd: It follows at once that this relation [of determining an interpretant] cannot consist in any actual event; for in that case there would be another actual event connecting the interpretant to an interpretant of its own of which the same would be true; and thus there would be an endless series of events which could have actually occurred, which is absurd. (CP 1.542 [1903])   Between 1903 and 1907 Peirce solved the problem, first by theorizing the interpretability of a sign as its immediate interpretant (CP 4.536, 539 [1906]), then by realizing (MSP 318) that habit imposes a good-enough end on semiosis: “it is the habit itself, and not a concept of it, that is the ultimate interpretant of a concept” (Short 2007: 58).   Liu devotes the first chapter of The Clash of Empires to a reading of Peirce; but doesn’t get as far as a rethinking of this “absurd” early notion of his that seemed so sexy to the poststructuralists. In fact, of course, barring the complete destruction of all animate life, semiosis is ongoing; what Peirce declares absurd is only the endlessness of any specific semiosis. He is a pragmatist: unlike the poststructuralists, he is satisfied with the “good enough” (fallibilistic/credibilistic) end that collective habits help us impose on specific semioses. Whenever he considers the kind of macrosemiosis that might (in Liu’s example) lead to the tabooing of a specific Chinese character among billions of Chinese speakers, his perspective is vitalistic: evolution is always guided by the commens, the collective Mind of the community. What bothers me about Liu’s casual invocation of the super-sign as a “signifying chain” is that she completely ignores the issue of guidance. If the “super-sign” of yi/barbarian was/is a social actor that made the character yi “disappear,” if it had agency and so a “will” or “intentionality” of some sort, the idealized randomness of a poststructuralist “signifying chain” will not suffice as an explanatory model. 9 Early on Baudrillard (1972: Levin 1981: 153; see Liu 1999b: 31) takes a stab at theorizing the materiality of the sign, but to my mind without much success: Similarly, the referent is maintained as exterior to the comprehension of the sign: the sign alludes to it, but its internal organization excludes it. In fact, it is now clear that the system of needs and of use value is thoroughly implicated in the form of political economy as its completion. And likewise for the referent, this “substance of reality,” in that it is entirely bound up in the logic of the sign. Thus, in each field, the dominant form (system of exchange-value and combinatory of the [signifier] respectively) provides itself with a referential rationale (raison), a content, an alibi, and, significantly, in each this articulation is made under the same metaphorical “sign,” i.e., need or motivation.”

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196  Notes   It’s one thing for the “substance of reality” to be “bound up in the logic of the sign,” as an image – but that doesn’t actually bring the Kantian Ding an sich into the sign as a materiality. It simply reiterates the Kantian position, according to which what we think of as the “substance of reality” – including the apparently material referent of each sign – is an image, a nonmaterial construct of signification, and the materiality or thinginess of the Ding an sich remains outside that “logic of the sign.” 10 Obviously this ironic account of “the materiality of the sign” does not attempt to solve the complex conundrum of signification; it only seeks to undermine one fairly lame and lazy attempt to solve it. Frankly, I could never understand why so many poststructuralist thinkers gravitated toward the trope of materiality, given the roots of poststructuralism in Kantian Idealism: wouldn’t the obvious answer be that what we take to be the “reality” to which signs refer is a social construct, an ideality that is phenomenologically “materialized” through icosis? Then, yes, language and “reality” are of the same stuff – but that stuff only seems material. 11 Short (1996: 527) states flatly that “it is the process of interpretation . . ., and not the interpretant per se, that confers intentionality on the sign. It confers intentionality on both the sign and the interpretant. And it does so, only because it is goal-directed. It is the teleological structure of semeiosis that explains the intentionality of its parts.” And again: The sign’s “action” . . . depends on its relevance to the purposes of an agent; only so does it have an effect. The sign makes or can make a difference: in that sense it “acts”, when it acts at all. But it acts only through influencing an agent that, independently of that sign, is pursuing some purpose. Talk of a sign’s action is only another way of talking about how a sign determines its interpretant. Nothing is a sign except for its objective relevance to the purposes of possible agents. (Short 2007: 172; see also 1981: 200) 12 This is Peirce’s late (1906) formulation of the commens: There is the Intentional Interpretant, which is a determination of the mind of the utterer; the Effectual Interpretant, which is a determination of the mind of the interpreter; and the Communicational Interpretant, or say the Cominterpretant, which is a determination of that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place. This mind may be called the commens. It consists of all that is, and must be, well understood between utterer and interpreter, at the outset, in order that the sign in question should fulfill its function. (1992–1998: 2.478)   The “com-mens,” or “with-mind,” is both the “determination of that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place” and the group mind that icotically “determines” that group mind. It is a self-organizing or homeostatic social ecology that facilitates communication among its members by bringing their (bodiesbecoming-)minds into close normative conformity. That conformity, and the communication that is facilitated by it, is never a perfect “fusion” – we are always individuals, no matter how effectively we are icotized – but it fuses us well enough to make mutual understanding possible (not inevitable). I read “It consists of all that is, and must be, well understood between utterer and interpreter, at the outset, in order that the sign in question should fulfill its function” in synch with Peirce’s earlier insistence that the agapastic purpose of “affect[ing] a whole people or community in its collective personality” is “the development of an idea”: what is “well understood between utterer and interpreter, at the outset,” is the product not of discussion or negotiation but of cultural conditioning, which is to say, of icosis.

Notes 197

Chapter 2 1 In fact a collection of my “double-binds on translation” is now being translated into Chinese for publication in the PRC.

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Critical Theses on translation 2 1 “ ‘To be exposed’ means to be ‘posed’ in exteriority, according to an exteriority, having to do with an outside in the very intimacy of an inside” (Connor 1991: xxxvii). I have not been able to locate the French original for this translation. 2 As Nancy (64–5) writes of Bataille: C’est-à-dire qu’il renonça à penser le partage de la communauté, et la souveraineté dans le partage ou la souveraineté partagée, et partagée entre des Dasein, entre des existences singulières qui ne sont pas des sujets, et dont le rapport – le partage lui-même – n’est pas une communion, ni une appropriation d’objet, ni une reconnaissance de soi, ni même une communication comme on l’entend entre des sujets. Mais ces êtres singuliers sont eux-mêmes constitués par le partage, ils sont distribués et placés ou plutôt espacés par le partage qui les fait autres : autres l’un pour l’autre, et autres, infiniment autres pour le Sujet de leur fusion, qui s’abîme dans le partage, dans l’extase du partage : « communiquant » de ne pas « communier ». Ces « lieux de communication » ne sont plus des lieux de fusion, bien qu’on y passe de l’un à l’autre  ils sont définis et exposés par leur dis-location. Ainsi, la communication du partage serait cette dis-location elle-même. That is to say he gave up thinking the sharing [partage] of community and the sovereignty in the sharing or shared sovereignty, shared between Daseins, between singular existences that are not subjects and whose relation – the sharing itself – is not a communion, nor the appropriation of an object, nor a self-recognition, nor even a communication as this is understood to exist between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others: other for one another, and other, infinitely other for the Subject of their fusion, which is engulfed in the sharing, in the ecstasy of the sharing: “communicating” by not “communing.” These “places of communication” are no longer places of fusion, even though in them one passes from one to the other; they are defined and exposed by their dislocation. Thus, the communication of sharing would be this very dis-location. (Connor 1991: 25)   “Le Sujet de leur fusion”/“The Subject of their fusion” would be something like Sakai’s regime of homolingual address; “le partage qui les fait autres”/“the sharing that makes them others” would be the heterolingual address.

Chapter 3 1 The objectivist command-giver in TQA 1v-z claims that human languages and the works written in them, Popper’s World Three, will survive the apocalypse, apparently because – though as an objectivist that voice would normally repress this association, and only whispers it in the TQA double-bind in the dream-voice of the unconscious – they can still be read and understood in Benjamin’s mind of God. The hermeneutic command-giver (TQA 2d) counters that Popper’s World Three is on life support from World Two: human subjectivity. 2 See Robinson (1985: 26–8, 246–47n10; 1998b: 369–71) for discussion of the Romantic apocalypse.

198  Notes

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Chapter 5 1 For a more measured and admiring rethinking of Williams on “structures of feeling” in later work, see Eagleton (1991: 48–9). 2 Jameson (1981: 9) certainly points us in the right direction, with lines like “Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or – if the text is brandnew – through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.” But what exactly does the metaphor of “sedimentation” mean there? 3 Liu (2014), alas, seems to have lost interest in CTS; she neither explains Badiou’s concept of “event” nor puts it to interesting use, but says only: In light of my initial question – “Can the eventfulness of translation be thought?”—I would say yes, but not until we begin rethinking the relationship amongst text, interpretation, and event. If all acts of translation – and by extension, all textual work – take place within specific registers of temporality and spatiality, do all translated texts qualify as events? The answer hinges on how the idea of “event” is defined or philosophically worked out, but such is not the task of the present essay (I assume that the reader is familiar with Alain Badiou’s rigorous philosophical work on the subject – see, especially, Badiou 2005 and 2009). (151)   “The task of the present essay” is apparently to tell a few stories about translations that were performed over time, on a series of occasions: “Reflecting on the temporalities of this translation and its dissemination, I was immediately struck by its peculiar eventfulness and realized that this translated text was by no means a singular event – I saw at least a triple event at the moment of its creation” (153). It’s hard to imagine who might find this interesting, or why.   Worse, she punctuates her lackluster exposition with unintentionally humorous quips: “George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm are read and taught in more languages than Michail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, even though the latter, in the opinion of a literary critic like myself, is a superior writer” (148). If she actually were a literary critic, she would know that the abstract aestheticism of pronouncements like “the latter . . . is a superior writer” and invidious references to the popularity of other writers went out of fashion decades ago, and are made these days only by the most conservative emeriti at parties thrown by younger colleagues in English and modern language departments. The bathos of “in the opinion of a literary critic like myself” is painfully redolent of NAS members, who, like Liu, scorn political utility as an “extra-literary” consideration, but who, one would think, would share nothing else in common with a poststructuralist theorist like her. Why is it, then, that aesthetic judgment takes a backseat when it comes to excluding certain writers but would play a decisive role when it comes to including other writers in the literary canon? This begs the further question of where politics stands in regard to literature, an old or perhaps not so old a question. Is the making of the literary canon fundamentally political? Or is it merely a case of politics interfering with literature? (148)   I cringe, I writhe in sympathetic agony, over a line like “This begs the further question of where politics stands in regard to literature, an old or perhaps not so old a question.” The hobbled pomposity of every colligation there sounds far too much like an ill-trained critic at some regional teachers’ college circa 1970 who

Notes 199 has just discovered, with considerable horror, that politics and literature sometimes mix – and doesn’t know what to do with that shocking information. Can Lydia H. Liu, who holds an endowed chair at Columbia, and is the editor of Tokens of Exchange and author of Translingual Practices, The Clash of Empires, and The Freudian Robot, really have written these embarrassing squibs?

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Critical Theses on translation 3 1 Benjamin Sher translated this passage as quoted by Viktor Shklovsky from Gyorgiy Petrovich Fedotov’s 1911 Russian translation, but, due to Shklovsky’s typo (Cyrillic В [Roman V] for Б [Roman B], for Broder), was unable to track down even the name of the German author, let alone the actual original text in German. As a result, Sher followed Fedotov’s interpretations of Christiansen; wherever those interpretations take us too far afield from the key points Christiansen is making, I have modified his translation to reflect Christiansen’s German. For discussion of Shklovsky’s use of this notion, see Robinson (2008: 122–6, 280n37, 282n40). 2 Berardi’s paeans to mystical motherhood are embarrassing: The techno-linguistic machine is giving language to human beings, and also taking the place of human beings in language for the current generation. The first generation that learned more words from a machine than from their mothers has a problem concerning the relationship between words and the body, between words and affection. The separation of language learning from the body of the mother and from the body in general is changing language itself, and is changing the relation between language and the body. As far as we know, throughout human history access to language has always been mediated by trust in the mother’s body. The relation between the signifier and the signified has always been guaranteed by the body of the mother, and therefore by the body of the other. (101)   There is only one body from whom children can learn language. They don’t learn language from the bodies of fathers, grandmothers or grandfathers, aunts or uncles, teachers or preachers, let alone their peers: the mother’s body is sacred. What he means by “as far as we know . . .” is apparently “in the myth of motherhood on which I was raised . . .” – which is presumably Catholic and so mariolatrous. As far as I know, the attempt to wean language-learning from the bodies of mothers and others is as old as what we call “civilization” – I mean literacy education – but it too is channeled primarily (though mostly unconsciously) through the bodies of teachers and fellow students, and tends to be most successful (though we tend to ignore this) when the child feels comfortable with those bodies. Also as far as I know, the kind of “separation of language learning from the body” against which Berardi rails is indeed pathological, but again (a) has been around for a long time, whenever people try to use words they have learned from books without communal embodied support (“you talk like a book,” we say – and we all know the phenomenon of novice writers finding words in a thesaurus and egregiously misusing them, because they have no embodied support for the use of those words from the community of other speakers), and (b) is relatively rare, and affects only a tiny proportion of language-use.   Or this: In the sphere of neoliberal capitalism, because of the capture of feminine nervous and physical energies by the machinary [sic] of global exploitation, mothers are less and less the source of language: they are separated from the bodies of children by salaried labor, by the networked mobilization of their

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200  Notes mental energies, and also by the globalization of the affective market. Millions of women leave their children in Manila and Nairobi and go to New York or London to look after the children of cognitive workers who leave their own children at home to go to offices. Mothers are replaced by linguistic machines that are constantly talking and showing. The connective generation is learning language in a framework where the relation between language learning and the affective body tends to be less and less relevant. What are the long-term effects of this separation of language from the mother’s body? What are the long-term effects of the automation of language learning? (107)   Again, only one caretaker can teach the child embodied language use. The women who leave the Philippines or Indonesia to “mother” children in Hong Kong, so their female employers can do cognitive work, tend to leave their children with their own mothers – but for Berardi, slave to the maternal mystique, neither the mother’s mother nor the hired surrogate mother is the mother, and so doesn’t count. And if the mother is not teaching her children language, a machine is. This is such an absurd (il)logical leap over the excluded real-world middle of other communal bodies that it is astonishing to find such drivel in print.   The sensible argument for Berardi would be that biocapitalism changes the bodies of its subjects, so that what is channeled into children’s language learning is not no body but a corrupted or sick body. That’s a defensible proposition.

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Index

1984 (Orwell) 198 abductive translation (Hartama-Heinonen) 62 address 77; see also heterolinguality; homolinguality adressivnost’/addressivity (Bakhtin) 124–5 affect xii–xiii, 20, 28, 108, 135, 138–9, 143–7; and academic disciplinarity 152; economy of 154–8, 160–4; and emulation 153–4; and the global market 200; and interpretive sway 119; in nationalism 146; and the neoliberal production of value 147; regulatory/evaluative 65, 67; shared/ socio/group 34, 65–6, 119–20, 137, 139, 193; situated 97; and the structure of postimperial etiquette (Solomon) 143–6, 149, 154; turbulence of 167–8 affect-becoming-conation (Robinson) xv, 28, 134, 138, 146; kinesthesis-becoming- 108; as somatic guide to cognition 139, 160, 177 Agamben, Giorgio 87, 150–1, 163 agency xiv, xvi, 54–5, 57; collective 116; depersonalized 59–66, 113; habitualized 131; as icosis/ecosis 67, 134; personalized 109; possessed by language 102, 128; vitalistic 108 aktivniy tip/active type (Bakhtin) 119 alienation (Marx/Brecht/Willett) 47; alien-without- (Sakai/Solomon) 84; blended with familiarity 119 allgemeine Äquivalent, die (Marx) 16, 39, 45 allostatic overload 177 Althusser, Louis 192

Altieri, Charles 44 American Apocalypses (Robinson) 198 American Pragmatism and Transcendentalism 80 Ames, Roger T. 129–34, 137–8 amphibological region (Sakai/Solomon) 80–1, 142 Analects (Kongzi) 132 analogy 48–51 And Quiet Flows the Don (Sholokhov) 198 Angelelli, Claudia xi Animal Farm (Orwell) 198 anthropological difference (Solomon) 141 “Anyone, the” (Heidegger/ Blattner) 117 aporia 96–7 areas (Solomon) 141, 143, 148, 152 Aristotle 50, 69–70, 133, 195 Asad, Talal xi, 190 “Aufgabe des Übersetzers, Die” (Benjamin) xv, 100, 107, 111, 128 Augé, Marc 160 Aveling, Edward xiv, 34, 39–40, 194 Badiou, Alain 198 Bains, Paul 164 Baker, Mona xi, 73 Bakhtin, Mikhail 81, 85, 113, 118–19; synched with Benjamin 109–10 Barnstone, Willis 190 bastards (Deleuze/Guattari) 89 Bataille, Georges 149–50, 197 Bateson, Gregory 67–8 Baudelaire, Charles 100, 110 Baudrillard, Jean 27, 37, 195–6 Beardsley, Monroe C. 44

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202 Index Becoming a Translator (Robinson) 36, 55 Befremdung (Novalis) 47, 175 Behuniak, James, Jr. 132, 133 Being and Time (Heidegger) xv Benjamin, Walter x, xv, xvii, 27–8, 53, 64, 100–12, 124, 128, 135, 190–1; synched with Bakhtin 109–10 Benveniste, Émile xv, 13, 25, 113, 118, 121, 124–6; on “one” 115–16 Berardi, Franco “Bifo” xiv, 157–65, 167, 170, 172–3, 176–7, 199 Bergman, Mats 62 Berman, Antoine 170, 190 biocapitalism 144–5, 154–8, 160, 168–70, 200 biopolitics 88, 99, 143 Birdwhistell, Joanne D. 193 Blake, William 55, 163 Blendlinge (Schleiermacher) 89 Blixen, Karen 141 Bloom, Harold xv body language 108 borders, as lands and lines 85–6 Boulanger, Pier-Pascale 45 Bourdieu, Pierre 37 Brassier, Ray 84 Brecht, Bertolt 111, 175 Brod, Max 19–20 Brossat, Alain 143 Brower, Reuben 190 Burchell, Graham 164 Burke, Kenneth xv, 64–6 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak) 152 Capital (Marx) 40–1, 47, 51 capitalism xii, 3, 44, 144–6, 169–70, 199–200; and the deregulation of the senses 176; and domesticating translation 11, 58–9, 172; icotic 154–63; see also biocapitalism; semiocapitalism Cartesian split 151 Castle, The (Kafka) 17–20 Catford, J.C. 190 chaosmos (Joyce/Deleuze/ Guattari) 165 cheng (誠 “creativity”) 86, 133 Cheung, Martha xvii, 190 Cheyfitz, Eric xi China and the Christian Impact (Gernet/Lloyd) 25

Chine (Gernet) 25 Christiansen, Broder 174–7, 199 “Circular Letter on Translation” (Luther) 194 circulation 160; of blood 41; of books 61; of gold 59; of ideas 35, 41, 45–6, 49, 58, 135; of meanings 61–2; of money 41, 52, 61; of signs 51, 60; of value 134 Clash of Empires, The (Liu) 56, 195, 199 Clavius, Christoph 25 coauthorship (Liu) 33, 37, 136 cofiguration, schema of (Sakai) xi–xiv, 21–3, 30, 37, 58, 144–5, 147, 150–1; and coauthorship (Liu) 33 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 54 Collie, David 137 commens (Peirce) 63, 192, 196–7 commensurability 34, 36, 46, 86, 134–5 communauté désœuvrée, La (Nancy) 29 communication (as opposed to address) 7–8, 77, 86 community 112, 116, 131, 134, 137–8, 146, 199; as commens (Peirce) 63, 192, 196; dislocated/nonaggregate/ heterolingual (Sakai) 22, 24, 28–9, 82, 149–50, 152; ecotic (Robinson) 110; as Gemeinschaft 44; as homolingual communion/fusion (Nancy/Sakai) 5–7, 10–13, 22, 27, 44, 63, 77, 80, 83, 98, 146, 176, 192–3, 197; national 90; as oikos xii; of practice 155–6, 158; TS xi, 10 Confucianism 80, 87, 132, 134–5 Connor, Peter 28, 44, 116, 197 Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure) 35, 69, 125 creativity 86, 133 credibilism (Peirce/Robin) 195 crowd 85, 160; as das Man/ periperformativity xv, 113, 116–17, 120–1, 123, 125–6, 127, 169–70, 172 culture repertoire (Even-Zohar) 49 dada 173 Damasio, Antonio 139 Danticat, Edwidge 177 dao (道 “field, way-making,” Laozi) 129–31, 135

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Index  203 Daodejing (道德經 “Classic of Dao and De,” Laozi) 130 Daoism xvi, 28, 75, 80, 98, 130–2, 134–5, 138–9 Dao of Translation, The (Robinson) xvii, 62, 80, 137, 140, 195 dares (Sedgwick) 125–6 das Man (Heidegger) xv, 108, 113–23 de (德 “focus,” Laozi) 129–30, 131 “Dead, The” (Joyce) 118, 119 Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle, The (Robinson) 140, 195 defamiliarization (Shklovsky/Lemon/ Rice) 47 Deleuze, Gilles 88–9, 164, 177 de Man, Paul xvii, 100 depersonalization: of agents xiv, 59–66; blended with personalization 119; as capitalist alienation 177; in third-person pronouns (Benveniste) xv, 13, 113–14, 116–17, 121, 123–4; of translators in borderlands 86 deregulation of all senses (Rimbaud) 172, 176–7 Derrida, Jacques 97, 120, 190 Devisch, Ignaas 27 Differenzimpressionen/differential impressions (Christiansen) 174–7 Ding an sich (Kant) 196 Discourse in the Novel (Bakhtin) 110 discursivism 60, 128, 170 disinterpellation (Althusser/ Sedgwick) 126 dislocation (Nancy) 97, 149–50, 192 Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture (Robinson) 80, 152, 177, 195 Dispositions Arise from Conditions 132 domestication 141; in translation 11, 16, 48–51, 58–9, 170–1 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 119 double-bind xvi, 67–8, 72, 197 double-voicing (Bakhtin) 118–19 dramatistic pentad (Burke) 64 Dudden, Alexis 191 Eagleton, Terry 128, 198 Eco, Umberto 195 ecological: self (Naess) 146; thinking, in ancient China 130 ecosis (Robinson) xii–xiii, 127, 139, 163, 193; in Benjamin 110;

as periperformativity 120; in schizophrenogenesis 67 Ein Land, Ein Volk, Eine Sprache (Fichte) 1, 3–4, 90, 150 Elements (Euclid) 25–7 Elements of International Law (Wheaton) 191 Emerson, Carol 109, 118–19 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 80 endless: chain of signifiers 57, 79, 87, 195; recursive negativity 152; renewal of language (Benjamin) 106–7; stalling, in aporetic rhetoric 97; subalternity (Spivak/Solomon) 153–4; translation 29 enstrangement (Shklovsky/Sher) 165 Entäußerung (Marx) 47, 51 entelechy (Aristotle) 69–70, 133, 139 Entfremdung (Hegel/Marx) 47, 51, 175 enunciation (Benveniste/Sakai) 4–5, 8, 28, 78, 82, 163; of the target text 10, 13, 15; of translation 13, 15–16, 23 Eoyang, Eugene 190 equivalence x–xii, 15–16, 24, 30, 34, 59, 68, 72, 75, 135–6, 177, 190; analogical 38, 61; economic 50; hypothetical 16, 37, 55–6, 100; as ideological structures 53; and nonequivalence 25, 33, 36, 41, 46, 55; stabilized 41, 53, 56, 58–9, 64–5, 100; tropes of xv, 15, 54–5, 113, 123; universal(ized) xiv, 16–17, 33, 36, 39, 48, 50, 52, 58–9, 64, 73, 100, 171, 175, 178, 193–4 erasure: of address 81; of translator 10–12, 14, 145 Eriugena, John Scotus 82 erudition (Solomon) 143, 145–7, 149 estrangement (Shklovsky/Brecht) 47, 165, 174–7 Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature (Robinson) 47, 165, 191, 195, 199 Euclid 25–7 Eurocentrism 23, 26, 34; anti-, 96 event (Badiou) 198 Even-Zohar, Itamar 49 “Everyone, the” (Heidegger/ Funkenstein) 117 Exorcising Translation (Robinson) 23, 34, 80, 96, 195

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204 Index exposure (Nancy) 83, 192 exteriority/externality (Sakai/ Solomon) 84–5

groupthink (Whyte) 127 Grundrisse (Marx) 35, 38, 41, 46 Guattari, Félix xiv, 88–9, 164, 177

fallibilism (Peirce) 195 Fang, Achilles 190 Faust (Goethe) 38–40, 53, 194–5 Fedotov, G.P. 199 feeling-becoming-thinking (心, Mengzi/Robinson) 137 Feeling Extended (Robinson) 99, 195 feeling of the foreign, the (Schleiermacher) xiii, 47, 59, 170–1, 175 fellow-feeling (仁 ren, Mengzi/ Linebarger) 137, 139; in government (仁 政 ren zheng, Mengzi) 138 First-Year Writing and the Somatic Exchange (Robinson) 195 Fogel, Joshua 190 foreign blended with local 119 foreigners: -without-the-foreign (Sakai/ Solomon) 84, 154; we are all to each other 8, 10, 28–9, 47, 77, 89 foreignizing translation 11, 48, 58–9, 167, 170–1, 175 Foucault, Michel 13, 78–80, 82–3, 143 Franke, William xvii free indirect discourse xv, 118–21 Freudian Robot, The (Liu) 199 Fumagalli, Andrea 155 fusion 42; of horizons (Gadamer) 82; of subjects (Nancy) 149–50, 196–7 Fyodorov, Andrey 190

habitualization 36, 52, 136, 148–9, 198; in Ames and Hall 130–1, 135, 137; in Marx/Shklovsky 47, 52, 54–6; in Peirce 40, 195 Hall, David L. 129–34, 137–8 Handlungstheorie 40, 101 Hardt, Michael 163 Hart, Roger 24–6 Hartama-Heinonen, Ritva 62 Hartmann, Geoffrey 111 heart-becoming-mind (心, Mengzi/ Robinson) 137 heart thinks (心之官則思, Mengzi) 138–9 Hegel, G.W.F. 15, 21, 67, 99, 128, 130, 175, 191 Heidegger, Martin xii, xv, xvii, 1, 113–26, 127–8, 190 Heraclitus 82 Heritage, John 72 heteroglossia (Bakhtin) 81 heterolinguality 47–8, 78, 97, 145; as address xii–xiii, xiv, 4–16, 27–8, 57, 77–9, 81, 83–6, 97, 141, 145, 150, 152, 175–6, 192, 197; as channel of insurrection 163, 165, 170; as dislocation 98, 149, 153; as emerging temporality 16; and foreignization 11; as foreignness 3, 6, 10, 15, 28–9, 47, 78, 84, 152; as heteroglossia (Bakhtin) 81; as “one” periperformativity 85; as subalternity 153–4; as translation 16, 29, 47, 145 Hevia, James 191 Heyvaert, Stefan 190 Histoire des mathématiques chinoises (Martzloff) 25 History of Chinese Mathematics (Martzloff/Wilson) 25 hive mind 128 Hofstadter, Alfred 124, 190 Holquist, Michael 109 Holz-Mänttäri, Justa 40 homolinguality xi–xiii, xv, 3, 5–17, 23–4, 27, 29, 44, 48, 77–84, 86–90, 94, 97–8, 136, 141, 143, 145–7, 149–50, 168, 170, 175–6, 192, 197; in the affective structure of postcolonial etiquette (Solomon)

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 82, 190 Gefühl des fremden, das (Schleiermacher) xiii, 170, 175 Geist (Hegel) 130 Gemeinschaft 44 German Romantics 1, 3–4, 80, 175 Gernet, Jacques 25 Gesellschaft 44 gesellschaftliger Tat (Marx) 118 Global English 3–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 38–9, 53, 194–5 gold standard 35, 58–9 Google Translate 166–7, 172 Gorlée, Dinda L. 62 Graham, A.C. 25 Graham, Joseph 190 Grammar of Motives, A (Burke) 64

Index  205

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160; as anesthesis 15; formation of 178; as the source author writing the target text 89; transcendent, in Benjamin 106 Horizonverschmelzung (Gadamer) 82 House, Juliane xvi, 67, 72 Howe, John 160 Huntsford, Roland 146 Husserl, Edmund 128 icosis (Robinson) xii–xvi, 28, 58, 67, 139, 154–6, 163, 191–3, 195, 196–7; of Benjamin’s vitalism 64, 107–8, 110; as the commens (Peirce) 196; of das Man (Heidegger) 123; as embodied sociogenesis 156–7, 160; of happiness 162; of homolinguality 8, 16, 55, 79–81, 99, 120, 136; in Marxism 127–8; of nationalism 146; as periperformativity 120; as valuing 134–6 identification-as-incorporation (Solomon) 146 ideosomatic programming (Robinson) 146 illocutionary force (Austin) 120 “Im Anfang war die Tat” (Goethe) 38–9, 55, 194 implicature: conversational (Grice) 39, 44; expressive (Grice/Altieri) 44; metalocutionary (Grice/ Robinson) 194 incommensurability 10, 14–16, 23–7, 34, 46, 86–7, 136; between Western languages and Chinese 25–7 Inoperative Community, The (Nancy/ Connor) 27–9 inscription (Sakai) 28 insurrection, through nonrepresentational politics 149–54 intellectual mechanism (Liu) 34, 56, 58 “Intentional Fallacy, The” (Wimsatt/ Beardsley) 44 intentions: in language (Benjamin) xv, 100–1, 128, 135; as social ecology 108–10 interpellation (Althusser) 192; dis-, 126 interpretant (Peirce) 52, 55 “In the beginning was the Deed” (Goethe) 38

intralingual/interlingual/intersemiotic translation (Jakobson) 29–31 Introducing Performative Pragmatics (Robinson) 72 Jakobson, Roman x, 27, 29–31, 190 James, William 82 Jameson, Fredric 128, 198 Janis, Irving 127 Japanese: community 1; Meiji modernization 191; national language/subject ix–x, 15, 18, 23, 30–1; readers of Foucault 78, 82–3; studies 22, 30; translations 83; Western cofiguration 21 Johnson, Barbara 190 Jowett, Benjamin 24 Joyce, James xv, 118–21 Joyce’s Voices (Kenner) 118–21 Jullien, François 78–9, 83 Kafka, Franz 17–20 Kant, Immanuel 142; Kantian thought 18, 87, 196; post-Kantian thought 6, 72, 128–9; pre-Kantian objectivism 162, 173 Kapital, Das (Marx) 38, 40–1, 45, 51 Kenner, Hugh xv, 118–21 knowledge without a knowing subject (Popper) 70, 75, 101 Kongzi (Confucius) 131–2 “Kugelmass, Translator” (Robinson) 73 Lacan, Jacques 195 Language and the Study of Language (Whitney) 25 language speaks (Heidegger/ Hofstadter) 113–14, 123–6 langue, la (Saussure) 125–6 Laozi xvi, 75, 81, 127, 133, 136–9; on propensity (勢 shi) 129–36 Laruelle, François 84 Legge, James 24–5, 137 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 82 Leonardi, Emanuele 155, 157 Levin, Charles 195 li (禮 “ritual propriety,” Kongzi/ Mengzi) 28, 139–40 Linebarger, Paul 137 Liu, Lydia H. ix–xvi, 4, 16–17, 24–5, 27, 33–66, 67, 118, 128, 129, 134, 136–7, 140, 155, 165, 170, 190–1, 195; on the banning of yi

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206 Index (夷 “non-Han”) by the British xiv, xvi, 2–3, 37, 55–8, 64–6, 123, 130–1, 178; on Benjamin 100, 102, 109; on the event (Badiou) 132, 198–9; on the gendering of ta (她) 193–4; on the Manchus as “foreigners” 2–3; on the social act (Marx) xiv, xvi, 17, 38–9, 52–7, 59, 61, 113, 123; on tropes of equivalence xv, 54–5, 113, 178 Lloyd, Janet 25 Luther, Martin 47, 194 Lydon, Katherine 27 Macquarrie, John 114, 121–2 majoritarianism (Deleuze/Guattari) 88–9, 99 male/female 144 Manchu (滿族) 2–3 Marchaisse, Thierry 78–9, 83 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake) 111 Marshall, Donald G. 82, 190 Martzloff, Jean-Claude 25–6, 191 Marx, Karl xiv–xv, 16, 33–66, 135, 137, 165, 171, 175, 194 Marxism 111, 128, 149 Massumi, Brian 88–9 Master-Slave dialectic (Hegel) 96, 144 materiality of the sign 58, 60–1, 104, 195–6 maximum oralization (Meschonnic) 126 Meek, Mary Elizabeth 25, 113, 115 Mengzi (Mencius) xvi, 24–5, 28, 87, 127, 131–2, 136, 193 Meschonnic, Henri 45; on Heidegger 114, 124–6 Mezzadra, Sandro ix–x, xiv Milton, John 55 ming (命 “conditions,” Mengzi) 131, 133 minoritarianism (Deleuze/Guattari) 88–9, 96–7 mirror neurons 108 mongrels (Schleiermacher) 89 Moore, Samuel xiv, 34, 39–40, 194 Morini, Cristina 155 Mounin, Georges 190 Muir, Edwin and Willa 19–20 Munday, Jeremy xi mystical motherhood (Berardi) 158–9, 199–200

Naess, Arne 146 Nancy, Jean-Luc xii, 1, 27, 29, 44, 83, 97, 139, 149–51, 191–3, 197 narratoriality, of the translator 120 national: character 142; culture 22–3; history 34; identity 141; ideology 154; interiorities 85–6; knowledge 146; language ix–xi, 1, 4, 14–15, 21, 30, 33, 58, 86, 88, 90–1, 93, 95, 99, 109–10, 150, 178; nationalism 1–3, 58, 114, 146; nationalizing 191; organization of (post)colonial hierarchies 148; social domination 147; subject(ivity) 14, 23, 99; trans- 44, 88, 154; translation 144 nation-state xii, 22, 44, 85–6, 91, 96, 141–2; as affective self 146; naturalized 141, 147–8 naturalization 47; of the nation-state 147 neoliberalism 44, 144 New Culture Movement 36 Newman, Mark 127 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 141 Nicolaus, Martin 38, 41–2, 44–7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 128, 144–5, 168 Niranjana, Tejaswini xi, 190 non-lieux/non-places (Augé) 160 non-philosophy of the future (Laruelle/ Brassier) 84, 97, 154 nonrepresentational politics, as insurrectional 149–54 Nord, Christiane 40 Novalis 175 objectivism 70, 73, 128–9, 140, 146, 162, 197 Occidentalism xiii, 3–4, 23, 40, 47, 96 Olson, David R. 70, 101 “one” (semipersonal pronoun) xv, xvii, 113–23 One Land, One People, One Language (Fichte) 1–5, 90, 150 Orientalism 23, 26 Orwell, George 198 ostranenie (Shklovsky) 47, 165, 176 outsider-without-outside (Sakai/ Solomon) 84 Papastathi, Maria 114 Pefanis, Julian 164

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Index  207 Peirce, Charles Sanders 39–40, 52, 57, 60, 62–3, 136, 195, 196–7 perfictioning (Solomon) 142 performative xv, 69, 77, 116, 125; author and translator blocked from 120; event blended with periperformativity 117, 119; and the periperformative witnesses 85, 116, 120–1; Romantic Primordial 39, 53–4; in slave morality (Nietzsche) as ressentiment 144 Performative Linguistics (Robinson) 194, 195 periperformativity (Sedgwick) xv, xvii, 116–17, 119–20, 125–6; and continuity between author and das Man/translator 120; and free indirect discourse xv, 118–21; intercultures 86; middle zone between first and third persons 113, 124; and “one” xv, xvii, 116–18; and witnesses 85, 116, 120–1, 123 perlocutionary effect (Austin) 120 phenomenology 19, 45, 53, 57, 165, 167, 176; biocapitalist 170; of equivalence 70, 136; of estrangement 171; of foreignness 52, 103; group 157; heterolinguality as 81; as homolinguality 81, 146; of language Intentions (Benjamin) 135; of materiality 196; as naturalized/ icotized “reality” 53, 60, 65; of objectivism 128; of processuality 131; socioaffective xvi; of value 157 Pinkus, Karen 163 Plato 69 poetry 163–73 Pokorn, Nike K. xvii political unconscious (Jameson) 128, 198 Popovič, Anton 190 Popper, Karl 67, 70–2, 101, 197 postcolonial 148; etiquette (Brossat/ Solomon) 143–5, 152; subalternity 153; translation studies x, 33, 177–8, 190 poststructuralism 47, 54, 57, 59–60, 104, 113, 128, 170, 195–6, 198 practice of translation 22, 87–8 propensity (勢 shi, Mengzi) xvi, 129–36 pure language (Benjamin) xv, 101, 110, 128, 191 Pym, Anthony xi, 33

“Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign, The” (Liu) xiv, 34 Quine, Willard Van Orman x Rafael, Vicente xi, 190 Ransdell, Joseph 62 raznorechie (Bakhtin) 81 regime 37, 163, 191; as area-apparatus (Solomon) 151; of biopolitical production 144–5; of cofiguration (Sakai) 80; epistemic 45, 147; homeostatic 177; of homolingual address (Sakai) xi, xiii, 5–8, 10–13, 15–17, 27, 29, 44, 48, 77–83, 86–90, 94, 98–9, 141, 145–7, 149–50, 160, 168, 170, 175, 178, 192, 197; as icosis 79, 157; neoliberal 147; of pronominal personalization (Benveniste) 85; of translation (Sakai) xi–xiv, 14–15, 22–3, 30, 33, 99, 145, 147 reine Sprache, die (Benjamin) 101, 110 Reiß, Katharina 40 Rekola, Mirkka 165, 172 ren (仁 “fellow-feeling,” Mengzi) xvi, 28, 139; translated as “benevolence” (Collie/Legge) 87, 137; translated as “two-man-mindedness” (Zhang) and “social fellow-feeling” (Linebarger) 137 Rendall, Steven 100, 102–6, 111 ren ren (仁人 “fellow-feeling fellow,” Mengzi) 137 ren zheng (仁政 “fellow-feeling government,” Mengzi) 138 representation (Sakai) 4–5, 77; of communication 7; majoritarian 95–7; naturalized 90–1; of translation 11, 22, 58, 87 ressentiment (Nietzsche/Solomon) 143–5, 149 Rheingold, Howard 127 Ricci, Matteo 25–6 Rimbaud, Arthur 172 ritual propriety (禮 li, Mengzi) 139–40 Robinson, Douglas x, 44, 190 Robinson, Edward 114, 121, 122 Romantic xiii, 47; act 54; apocalypse 111; poststructuralist theory 54; Primordial Performatives 39, 53–4; vitalism, in Benjamin and Bakhtin 110

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208 Index Sakai Naoki ix–xvi, 1–31, 33, 77–99, 142; on Benjamin 27–8, 102; on cofiguration xi, 21, 23, 37, 80, 147, 150–1; on the enunciation/practice of translation 13, 15–16, 22–3, 87–8; on heterolingual address xii–xiii, 1, 3–7, 11, 28–9, 47–8, 57, 77–82, 98, 141, 143, 145–50, 152–3, 192, 197; on homolingual address xi–xiii, xv, 3, 5–8, 17, 29, 44, 48, 54, 77–84, 90, 98, 141, 145–50, 178, 192, 197; on intralingual and intersemiotic translation (Jakobson) 29–31; on Kafka 19–20; on majoritarianism/minoritarianism (Deleuze/Guattari) 88–9, 94, 96–8; on the regime of translation xi–xiv, 14–15, 22–3, 30, 33, 99, 145, 147; on the representation of translation xi, 16–17, 22–3, 58, 83, 87; and Schleiermacher 11, 89–90; on the translator as subject in transit 12–14, 85, 120, 145 Sartre, Jean-Paul 82 Saussure, Ferdinand de 35–6, 45, 69, 125 Saussy, Haun 24–5 Scheler, Max 144 schema of cofiguration see cofiguration Schleiermacher, Friedrich 58–9, 89–90, 171 Schleiermacher’s Icoses (Robinson) 11, 59, 90, 171, 195 Sedgwick, Eve xv, 116, 119–20, 125–6 Sein und Zeit (Heidegger) xv sémantique sérielle (Meschonnic) 45 semeiotic (Peirce) 52 semiocapitalism 148, 154, 157–60, 162–3, 166–70, 172, 177 Semiotranslating Peirce (Robinson) 62 semiotranslation (Gorlée) 62 “Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen” (Luther) 194 serial semantics (Meschonnic/ Boulanger) 45 Shell, Marc 38–40, 47, 51, 53, 54, 194–5 Sher, Benjamin 165, 199 shi (勢 “propensity,” Mengzi) xvi, 129–30, 132–4 Shirky, Clay 127 Shklovsky, Viktor 47, 165, 174–7, 199 Sholokhov, M.A. 198

Short, T.L. 62, 195–6 Shun Kwong-Loi 131–2, 138 Siewirska, Anna 114 signifier and signified (Saussure) 52 skopos theory x, 178 Slovo v romane (Bakhtin) 110 social: act xiv, xvi, 8, 17, 38, 39, 48, 51–9, 61, 113, 123, 132, 194–5; constructivism 129; ecology xiii, xv, 58, 65, 98, 101–2, 119–20, 196 socioaffective: ecologies 34, 65–6; pressures 119–20; regulation 177–8 sociological translation studies xi, 33, 178 Sokel, Walter 19 Solomon, Jon ix–x, xiii–xiv, 10, 44, 77–99, 141–55, 157, 160, 163, 165, 170–2, 175 somatic exchange (Robinson) 139, 192–3 somatic-marker hypothesis (Damasio) 139 “Some Reflections on the Difficulty of Translation” (Fang) 190 speech act, performed by individual or group 120 Spivak, Gayatri 152–4 Sprache spricht, die (Heidegger) 113–14, 123–6 stabilization 80, 82, 156, 193; of aporias 97; of communication 46, 86; and destabilization 13–14, 44; of (non) equivalences 33, 36–7, 41, 46, 53–6, 58–9, 64–5, 73, 100; of habits 54, 56, 135; of language 99; of markets xii, 16; of meanings 62, 172; of social relations 4; through somatic markers (Damasio) 156; of source and target into separate languages 14; of (readerly experiences with) texts 70, 87; of translation 165, 178 Stambaugh, Joan 114, 122 Steinberg, Erwin 19 Steiner, George 190 stranger-without-estrangement (Sakai/ Solomon) 84 structures of feeling (Williams) 128, 198 subalternity, as translational insurrection 153–4 subject in transit, the translator as 12–14, 85, 120, 145, 175, 178 subjectivism, Kantian 128 super-sign yi/barbarian (Liu) 56–8, 195

Index  209

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surmodernité/supermodernity (Augé) 160 sway 75 ta (他 “[s/?]he”) 36–7, 65, 193–4 “Taking Fidelity Philosophically” (Johnson) 190 “Task of the Translator, the” (Benjamin/Zohn) 100, 191 Tat, die (Goethe) 40, 53–4, 194–5 “They, the” (Heidegger/Macquarrie/ Robinson/Stambaugh) 114–15 Think-Aloud Protocols x Thoreau, Henry David 80 tian (天 “forces,” Mengzi) 131–2 Tokens of Exchange (Liu) xiv, 24, 199 Tolstoy, Leo 177 Tomlinson, Hugh 164 Tönnies, Ferdinand 44 “Tours de Babel, Des” (Derrida) 100, 190 translatability 23–7, 55, 134–5; global 34–5; in the mind of God (Benjamin) 100–1; without a translating subject 102 translating-without-translating 89 translation: and domestication 11, 16, 48–51, 58–9; and foreignization 11, 48, 58–9; invisibilized and exceptionalized 87–8, 90–1; practice of 22, 87–8; representation of 11, 22, 58, 87; as somatic technology (Solomon) 147; as subaltern heterolinguality 153–4; -without-thetranslator 154 Translation and the Problem of Sway (Robinson) 75, 149, 195 Translation as a Purposeful Activity (Nord) 40 Translation Quality Assurance (House) xvi, 67–75, 171 translation studies (TS) ix–xii, 4–6, 8, 10–12, 38, 58–9, 72–4, 82–3, 88, 92–4, 99–101, 118, 177–9, 190–1; Cultural Turn xi, 33; Descriptive 33; and narratoriality 120; postcolonial x, 177–8, 190; and the primal scene of translation 1, 15, 54; sociological turn xi, 33, 178 translatorisches Handeln/translatorial action 101 “Translator’s Task, The” (Benjamin/ Rendall) 64, 100

Translator’s Turn, The (Robinson) xv, 55, 123, 190, 195 Translingual Practice (Liu) x, 199 Transparent Eye, The (Eoyang) 190 tropes of equivalence (Robinson/ Liu) xv, 54–5, 113; created by das Man 123 Truman Show, The (Weir) 162–3 unitary language 95–6, 99, 109–10 universalization: of humanity 143; of hypothetical equivalence (Liu) 17, 36, 39, 48, 50, 52, 58–9, 178 unrepresentability as subalternity 153 untranslatability 16, 23–7, 86–7 value 96, 115, 172; in biocapitalism 155–6; of commodities 39, 194; and disciplinary shapes 92–3; equal in equivalence 14, 16–17; exchange/ circulation of 34, 48, 50–1, 56, 58–9, 146, 195; as icosis 120, 136, 193; as meaning 34–5, 37, 47, 52, 58, 61–6, 102, 134–5; neoliberal production of, through affect 147; as norms 75, 78, 79, 95–6; and propensity 134; as property 24, 135; in semiocapitalism 157–8, 169; of tokens 60; universalized 136; as valuing 62, 171 Van der Auera, Johan xvii–xviii Venuti, Lawrence 49, 58–9, 73, 148, 170 Verfremdung (Brecht) 47, 175 Vermeer, Hans 40 vitalism xvi, 80, 102, 108, 110, 130, 195 wanwu (萬物 “the ten thousand things,” Laozi) 134 we are all to each other: foreigners 8, 10, 28–9, 47, 77, 89; translators 10, 47 Weinsheimer, Joel 82, 190 What One Does (Heidegger/Robinson) 111, 121–3 Wheaton, Henry 191 Whitehead, Alfred North 82 Whitman, Walt 53 Whitney, William Dwight 24–5 Who Translates? (Robinson) 88 Whyte, William 127 Williams, Raymond 128, 198 Wilson, Stephen S. 25–6

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210 Index Wimsatt, W.K., Jr. 44 witnesses (Sedgwick) 120 World Three (Popper) 70–2, 101, 197 World Two (Popper) 72, 197 wu (物 “event, thing,” Laozi) 129–30, 131–2 wuwei (無爲 “noncoercive action,” Laozi) 28, 75, 130, 135, 138 wuxin (無心 “feeling without trapping feeling in individual skin-bags,” Mengzi) xvi wuyu (無欲 “desiring without controlling what is desired,” Mengzi) xvi wuzhi (無知 “knowing without controlling knowing,” Mengzi) xvi, 81

xin (心 “heart-becoming-mind,” Mengzi) 136–9 xin wei xin (心為心 “heart as heart,” Laozi) xvi, 137, 139 Xu Guangqi 25–6 yi (夷 “non-Han”) banned by British xiv, xvi, 2–3, 37, 55–8, 64–6, 123, 131, 178 “you” (semipersonal pronoun) 116–17 Zappa, Frank 117 Zen monks 78, 82–3 Zhang Meifang xvii Zhang Pengchun 137 Zhang Qiong 191 Zohn, Harry 100, 190