09 2003 Public space as translation processI will discuss here the idea of public space in relation to the concept of so-called cultural translation. This concept has been deployed recently (at the end of the eighties and in the nineties) within the postmodern - and especially postcolonial - reflexion to solve some of its most challenging problems, like the problem of universality in culture, or the problem of emancipation in the social and political space which we consider to be historically - to use Ernesto Laclau' term - beyond the emancipation. Let
us begin with a very concrete vision concerning the
political and cultural future of the European Union.
In his latest book published this year in Germany, French
philosopher and post-Marxist Etienne Balibar tackles
the problem of a common European culture.[1]
He argues that we cannot say yet what shape such a European
culture would take: whether it would be a mechanical
sum of the national cultures of the EU-members or, more
universalistically, a kind of amalgam charged with completely
new qualities. If a nation is always a language community, than Europe can be imagined, according to this idea, only as a kind of translation community. Of course, here we immediately face the next problem: If a national language - as we all have experienced it in our education, which is always already national, both in its idea and its institutional practice – has this quality to build and reproduce a nation (to provide the nation with its identity), then what is the social or political quality of translation qua language?[3] Balibar does not give us the answer to what new kind of political community the European Union should be developed into. Instead he suggests a new cultural revolution, which he expects to solve this problem. This revolution should begin by abandoning the still dominant concept of education based on Humboldt's philosophy of language, which ascribes the crucial role in the process of nation building to language. Balibar's counter concept - that of the European language as translation - is not simply a utopia. Balibar finds it already practically realized, in fact on two levels: The first is that of the European intellectual elite in the tradition of rootless, exiled writers and intellectuals such as Heine, Joyce, Canetti, Conrad, etc.; the second is the level of different migrants who occupy the lowest position in the hierarchy of the European labour market. However, the largest and still dominant middle-level - that of the monolingual national school systems - still hasn't been seriously contested by the concept of translation, emphasizes Balibar.[4] What
is particularly interesting about Balibar's vision of
the new European public space being generated out of
the concept of translation, is that he ascribes a genuine
political - actually an emancipatory – effect to it.
At this point, let me raise the crucial question: how does translation actually liberate, emancipate, how does it bring about a "positive" social change?[6] In answering this question I will concentrate on the models of translation, which charge the notion of translation with an emancipatory potentiality and a subversive political and cultural effectiveness in a more direct way. There are basically two models of this kind. I will call them the dialectical and the transgressional. The
first belongs to the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt
school and its theoretical reception of psychoanalysis.
Habermas explains
the whole process of this reintegration of the excluded
– both the return of the excluded symbolical content
into the sphere of public communication and the return
of the excluded individual into the community – using
the old Hegelian term of "self-reflexion"
(Selbstreflexion). He identifies this self-reflexion
explicitly with translation: "Translation of the
unconscious into the conscious". It is only (self-)
reflexion as translation that can ultimately sublate
repression. Within
so-called postmodern and postcolonial discourse, the
concept of translation and its political meaning has
been defined completely differently. In
the historical space shaped only by the mutual relations
of these identities there is no more room for a subject
of history or political change, there is no common public
space that could be understood according to any kind
of universalist logic, there is no fundament of society,
such as the well known Marxist material, economic base
of the social whole, there is no grand narrative of
a universal emancipation, etc. Instead of political change – which has become unimaginable – we are talking now of cultural subversion. If public space should still have some political meaning in that sense, than it can be defined only in terms of cultural subversion. However, this is not the old notion of public space, which used to play the central role in the democratic reproduction of the old modernist, enlightened, transparent society. This
circumstance also applies to the so-called postcolonial
condition. However, in contrast to Habermas and his
late modernist vision of the social role of public space,
the notion of translation in postcolonial theory is
not directly connected to the concept of public space.
It is now the so-called third space, which plays the
political and social role of public space in a completely
different way. The third space is the space of hybridity,
the space of – as Homi Bhabha writes in The
Location of Culture – subversion, transgression,
blasphemy, heresy etc. He believes that hybridity –
and cultural translation, which he regards as a synonym
for hybridity – is in itself politically subversive.
Instead
of the old dialectical concept of negation, Bhabha talks
about negotiation or translation as the only possible
way to transform the world and bring about something
politically new. In his view, an emancipatory extension
of politics is possible only in the field of cultural
production: "Forms of popular rebellion and mobilization
are often most subversive and transgressive when they
are created through oppositional cultural
practices."[8] American
feminist philosopher Judith Butler uses Bhabha's concept
of cultural translation to solve one of the most traumatic
problems of postmodern political thought – the problem
of universality.[10]
This
understanding of political change has been exposed to
the criticism which is articulated under similar premises
of postmodern and/or postcolonial reflexion and which
operates with the notion of translation as well.
Let
me explaine her concept very briefly: Spivak knows very
well that by means of today's theoretical reflexion
we can radically deconstruct almost every possible identity
and easily disclose its essentialism as being simply
imagined, constructed, etc. However, the politics proper
still works with these essential identities – such as
nation for instance – as if it does not know they are
only our illusions. [1] Étienne Balibar, "Sind wir Bürger Europas? Politische Integration, soziale Ausgrenzung und die Zukunft des Nationalen", Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003. [2] Ibd., p. 289. [3] Balibars vision obviously implicates that the European community should be something - in its social and political sense - essentially different from an ordinary nation state. [4] Ibid, p. 289. [5] Ibid. [6] In answering this question I will skip the classical romantic theory of translation, like that of Humboldt. It focuses exclusively on so-called linguistic translations as a practice of national literature. Its social role - as it was defined by Humboldt, Herder or Schleiermacher – exhausts itself in the building of nation as a language community or, more concretely, in an enrichment of the national mind (Der Geist der Nation). I will also skip Walter Benjamin's translation theory , which is theoretically crucial for the later development of Derrida's concept of deconstruction and its use in postcolonial theory. [7] To emphasize the social character of this process, Habermas explicitly uses a concrete social metaphor: the excommunication or isolation of the criminals from their social community. [8] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 20. [9] John Beverly, Subalternity and Representation, Arguments in Cultural Theory, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999. p. 100. [10] Judith Butler, "Universality in Culture", in: Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, edited by Joshua Cohen, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotisms, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, p. 45–53. See also J. Butler / E. Laclau / S. Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London; New York: Verso 2000. [11] Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York : Methuen, 1987, p. 205. |
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