German as Contact Zone edited by Eva Parra-Membrives, Miguel Ángel García Peinado, and Albrecht Classen volume 3 TRANSLATION, TEXT AND INTERFERENCES volume 4 Russell West-Pavlov German as Contact Zone Towards a Quantum Theory of Translation from the Global South Umschlagabbildung: Johannesburg, Maboneng precinct, 2013 © Tatjana Pavlov-West Bibliografi sche Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografi e; detaillierte bibliografi sche Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb�dnb�de abrufbar� Gefördert vom DAAD aus Mitteln des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) © 2019 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfi lmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr�de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 2194-0630 ISBN 978-3-8233-8143-3 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9143-2 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-8233-0173-8 (ePub) www.fsc.org MIX Papier aus verantwortungsvollen Quellen FSC ® C083411 ® 5 Contents Acknowledgements � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 9 Introduction � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 13 Rostov-Luanda-[Berlin] � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 13 Berlin coming and goings � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 15 German as contact zone � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 18 Generalized translation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 20 Plan of the book � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 27 PART 1: Translation in theory � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 35 Chapter 1: Turning Translation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 37 From translation in culture to culture as translation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 37 Defending and infringing the translational border � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 39 Translation and cultural catachresis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 42 The relationality of translation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 46 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist � � � � � � � � 51 Language beyond language � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 53 Provincializing language … or not � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 55 Objection 1�1: Self-referentiality, systemicity, sovereignty � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 58 Objection 1.2: Historical precursors: Enlightenment, the colonies, the Holocaust � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 60 Objection 2: The entanglement of icon, index and symbol � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 66 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman � � � � � � � � � � � � � 73 Translation at the heart of things themselves � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 76 Interlude: Provincializing language means provincialization as process � 80 Provincialization and porosity, translation and verbing � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 83 Chapter 4: Translation as information � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 89 Translation, information, life � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 94 The semiosphere as translation worlds � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 104 6 Contents Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 113 Quantum (gravity) theory � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 116 Quantum translation theory � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 123 Chapter 6: Quantizing German � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 131 Quantizing language � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 131 Quantizing German � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 137 Foreign languages in German � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 139 PART 2: Theory in translation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 145 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 147 Reconnection � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 148 Translating Sebald Translating Conrad � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 153 Marlow’s grove of death � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 156 Text as contact zone � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 162 Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner � � � � � � � � 165 Translation and Transition � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 167 Translating Translation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 171 Eich as translator � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 176 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … � � � � � � � � � � 181 Walking � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 185 History � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 189 War � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 193 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 197 The near-future � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 201 Translating (or failing to translate) for the future � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 208 What says the clock? � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 214 PART 3: Translating Translation in Teaching � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 219 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating a Sonnet by Derek Walcott � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 221 Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’ � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 224 The sonnet and creative constraint � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 226 Postcolonial resistance? � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 236 Landscape, teaching and translating � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 242 Contents 7 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 249 Ausländisch für Deutsche—Foreignish for Germans � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 249 Foreign languages in the German-language school � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 251 Translation in the classroom � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 257 Resonance as translation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 261 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, race, translation and the contemporary crisis in Germany � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 265 Racism as a global phenomenon � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 269 Systemic connections � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 272 Connections: Performatives, Affect and Agency � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 277 The Classroom in the World � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 280 Conclusion: Before I die � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 287 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 297 The fate of the Federal Republic in the twenty-first century � � � � � � � � � � � 302 Polylingual schools and a pluricultural society as the starting point for new approaches to EFL � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 307 EFL as a model for diversity learning � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 308 Ambivalent evidence from textbooks � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 310 The ‘real existing’ classroom as opportunity: what now? � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 316 Bibliography � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 319 9 Acknowledgements This book emerged in tandem with and in the wake of the long drawn-out process of my acquisition, after two decades of residence in the Federal Republic, of German nationality. Like many others in my situation, the application for German citizenship ran parallel to the effort to retain the prior nationality—a stumbling block for German legal tradition. According to a long-standing principle within German citizenship law dual nationality is to be ‘avoided’ (an exception is made for EU citizens). It is however gradually becoming the de facto norm in naturalization procedures (von Münch 2007: 159-72); in 2006 the proportion of naturalizations with retention of the prior nationality for the first time exceeded the 50 %-mark and has been rising slowly ever since, reaching almost 65 % a decade and a half later (Worbs 2008: 26; Bundesbeauftragte für Integration 2016: 433; Statistisches Bundesamt 2018: 126). My experience was thus illustrative of the curious anomaly of a nation that clings, at the level of official discourse, to a legal concept of a singular national identity but, at the level of quotidian administrative practice, increasingly admits more complex configurations of plurinationality. Draft bills seeking to harmonize the juridical framework of citizenship with a slow but ineluctable diversification of civil society have repeatedly been tabled in the Bundestag since the mid-1990s (Deutscher Bundestag 1995); perhaps the shelf-life of this book will witness the genuine inauguration of German citizenship regulations as a happily hybrid contact zone unburdened by assumptions of normative mononationality� For their generous support in the lodging of the dual citizenship application I would like to thank Karin Amos, Frank Baasner, Robert Dixon, Bernd Engler, Martin Hertkorn, Jürgen Leonhardt, Philip Mead, Dorothea Rüland, Monique Scheer, Bernd Villhauer and Andrew J. Webber. Thanks are also due to many others as they have aided me in my journeys in and out of my own ‘German contact zones’: to Rhys Bezzant, who taught me the rudiments of the German language in Melbourne; to Dieter Buff, who mentored me during my first teaching posting at Pascal-Gymnasium, Münster; to Catherine Proescholdt, who tutored me through the Cambridge German Diploma that, two decades later, aided me in the naturalization procedure; to Helmut Peitsch, who guided me in my first steps into the world of German scholarship from the far shores of South Wales and has remained a friend and mentor ever since; and to Matthias N. Lorenz, a close friend and valued colleague since my 10 Acknowledgements time in Lüneburg (and who assisted in procuring a copy of the film by Sissako with which I open this volume). Going back even further in my own diasporic-exilic academic biography, I would like to acknowledge those academic mentors who supervised my early work on translation studies: Marion Campbell at the University of Melbourne in my honours year; and Jean-Pierre Guillerm at the Université de Lille III and Maud Ellmann at the University of Cambridge for my respective doctorates. A special word of thanks is also due to John Kinsella, sometime Public Intellectual Visiting Fellow in the Tübingen ‘Literary Cultures of the Global South’ project in 2016, co-author, debating and walking companion, and a figure in one of the chapters in this book—and to our colleague and common friend Philip Mead, who put us in contact, thinking we might have some interesting things to say to each other. Likewise, I am grateful to Ivan Vladislavić, Thomas Brückner and Mark Sanders, who came to Tübingen for a memorable workshop on ‘Translating South Africa’ in 2016; discussions with them have likewise resulted in a chapter in this book. A subsequent discussion with John Kinsella on the slopes of the Achalm in 2018 contributed some important ideas to that chapter as well. Thanks more generally to Thomas Brückner, Michael Hulse and Katharina Meyer for direct feedback on my chapters about their translations. An ongoing dialogue with Sudesh Mishra has contributed much to the book. Susana Garbe and Johannes Garbe gave useful comments on some of the material in the chapters on literary translations. And of course to Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Matthias Schmerold and Joseph Steinberg for technical advice and support and for their assistance in the preparation of the text, many thanks are due. Thanks to the anonymous external reader who made valuable suggestions for improving the text at a late stage in its genesis� I am grateful to Fernando Resende and Beatriz Polianov for giving permission to reprint a version of an article that originally appeared in Contracampo in 2017 (chapter 11). I am similarly grateful to Suman Gupta, Satnam Virdee and Amanda Estell-Bleakley for giving permission to reprint as chapter 13 a longer version of an essay previously published in a special number of Ethnic and Racial Studies under their guest editorship� The chapter is derived in part from the article in ERS published on 15 June 2018 and available online at: wwww.tandfonline.com/ [https: / / doi.org/ 10.1080/ 01419870.2018.1468918]. Thanks are due to the following publishers for permission to reprint selections from the work of the poets I have discussed: to Arc (Todmorden) for reprint lines from John Kinsella’s Poems ‘After “Friedensfeier” ’, ‘After Hölderlin’s ‘Walk’ ”, ‘Subtexting “Der Spaziergang” ’, ‘Searching “Der Spaziergang” ’, and ‘After Hölderlin’s “Der Winkel von Hardt” ’, in The Wound (2018); to Jonathan Cape (London) (via Farrar Straus and Giroux), for permission to reprint lines Acknowledgements 11 from ‘The Star Apple Kingdom’ in Derek Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom (1980); to Carcanet (Manchester), for permission to cite Michael Hamburger’s Hölderlin translations ‘The Nook at Hardt’, ‘Celebration of Peace’, and ‘The Walk’ from Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragements (Anvil, 2004); to Farrar Straus and Giroux (New York), for permission to reprint lines from Pierre Joris’ Celan translations in Breathturn (2016) and from Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’, ‘The Return to the Trees’, and North and South’ in Collected Poems 1948-84 (1986); to Hanser (Munich), to reprint lines from Klaus Martens’ translation of Walcott’s poems ‘Das Königreich des Sternapfels’ in the volume of the same name (1989), and ‘Der Morgenmond’ in Erzählungen von den Inseln (1993); and to Suhrkamp (Berlin) for permission to reprintlines from Celan’s Die Gedichte (2003) and Eich’s Träume (1953/ 1973). I wish to register my debt to the German Federal Ministry of Research (BMBF) and the German Academic Exchnage Service (DAAD) for support for this publication via the Thematic Network project ‘Literary Cultures of the Global South’ (grant no. 57373684). Thanks finally, of course, to Tatjana, Joshua, Iva and Niklas, fellow travellers and fellow translators—in the widest sense of the word—one and all. Walkürenstraße, Berlin © J. Wawrzinek, 2019. 13 Introduction Rostov-Luanda-[Berlin] Mauretanian-Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda (Sissako 1997) is one of the most curious road movies produced in recent decades. The film tracks the protagonist Dramane (who is played by and may be close to Sissako himself) in his quest through Luanda, the capital of Angola, and two other Angolan rural centres, to find a long-lost friend named Baribanga. Baribanga is a former fellow student from the era when Dramane/ Sissako trained at the Moscow Film Academy in then Soviet Russia. The two Africans met on the long train-ride from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don, where both were to take part in a Russian language course, and became friends, but have lost contact in the years after the collapse of the Soviet world. Dramane wonders what has become of his friend after decades of civil war in Angola, and undertakes to track him down. The quest takes Dramane/ Sissako from Paris back to his native Kiffa in Southern Mauretania, prior to making the journey to war-scarred Luanda, the capital of Angola, as well as to several other regional towns in Angola. Finally, in a surprising turn of events, the journey takes the questing protagonist back to Europe—to East Berlin, where Baribanga is now living, but about to return home after the years of exile. In the final scene of the film, Germany and its capital become a ‘contact zone’—an eerie place of meeting, where presence and absence, arrival and departure, and finally, speech and silence, overlap. Sissako’s film, in which a bewildering range of languages are spoken on the screen, gains another overlay of language in its final moments. In the last, almost mute scene, not a word of German is spoken. Yet the language is present in visual form: in the subtitles at the bottom of the screen—and in a brief glimpse of a street-sign, one that is programmatic for the import of Sissako’s film (and also for the underlying thesis of this book): ‘Walkürenstraße’ [‘Valkyrie Street’] (Sissako 1997: 56: 47). The street does exist in the real-life East Berlin suburb of Karlshorst (it can easily be located on Google Maps streetview, or visited in person if you so wish). But Sissako’s semi-mute filmic text is more interested in exploiting the mythic-allegorical resonances of the street-name: in Germanic mythology, the valkyries were the beings that accompanied warriors fallen in battle to Walhalla. Sissako’s mythicological pun is not merely about Dramane’s imminent task of 14 Introduction accompanying Baribanga back to the erstwhile battle-grounds of South-Western Africa after the cessation of Cold War hostilities. It is also about his own place within an elaborate allegory of transportation and translation, whether geographical, linguistic, cultural or mnemonic� Within that allegory, Germany and the German language are also translated� But not merely translated—they are more profoundly and mysteriously transmuted� Transported from its customary hegemonic position as a national language of a global economic hegemon, German is relocated to a diegetically marginalized position of urban dilapidation and imminent departure. In Sissako’s final scene, German becomes a frontier region, a departure lounge, almost a non-place à la Augé (1992). It becomes, in Sissako’s bizarre filmic semiotics, a ‘contact zone’, and thus provides a neat image for both of the two intertwined undertakings explored in this book: ‘contact zones’ and ‘translation’, with both of these being meant in a much broader sense than customary usage might suggest� The expansion of meaning that I operate upon concepts such as ‘contact zone’ and ‘translation’ is hinted at in the name of the street upon which Sissako focuses. Sissako’s ‘Walkürenstraße’ is not merely a label that refers to passages between places, languages, or cultures. The valkyries transported the fallen warriors from this life to the after-life—across the frontier between life, death, or non-life or the-other(s)-of-life. This is no ordinary frontier, but rather, the ultimate frontier, the border par excellence ; the moment of its transgression in fact announces the blurring or even abolition of all frontiers� Given the polyglot character of Sissako’s film, this frontier may also be the frontier between language and non-language, or the other(s)-of-language, whose status in the social sciences is not dissimilar to that of death in the life sciences� I have stressed the alternative ‘other(s)-of-life’ and ‘-of-language’ that somehow eludes the binary ‘life’/ ‘non-life’ and ‘language’/ ‘non-language’ because that binary itself may be an illusion. Many streets in erstwhile Cold War Berlin were borders: Bernauer Straße between the districts of Mitte and Wedding is doubtless the most infamous example. Indeed, the East Berlin section of Sissako’s film begins with a brief sequence in which the taxi drives alongside to still remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall (Sissako 1997: 56: 20). But the street in the last scene of Sissako’s film is not a frontier in that sense. Rather, it’s quite literally the street of the Valkyries, a street that crosses a frontier. Friedrichstraße at Checkpoint Charlie might be a better Cold War analogy for such a border-crossing street. The street of the Valkyries is a thoroughfare that translates between states, and no less importantly, connects them to one another� Sissako explores, via his filmic semiotics, the manner in which frontiers, from the microscopic to the planetary scales, are in fact, lieux de passage and lieux Berlin coming and goings 15 de brassage , ‘contact zones’ at which translations take place in such a way that the frontier enables rather than hinders communication and travel. His film thus exemplifies the way this book is not merely interested in expanding the semantic fields covered by ‘contact zones’ and ‘translation’ well beyond those of language and culture, but also seeks to turn that expansion back upon the line of demarcation that is constitutive of both terms, thus rendering it creative and generative� Sissako’s film stages the absence of German and the imminent-absence of Germany as its point of arrival. In place of that evacuated site of German and Germany, it installs a periphery and a site of transition, a ‘contact zone’. Such a conceptual operation opens both the place and the language up to translation� But Sissako carries out these conceptual undertakings via the concrete semiotic presentation of built environments and natural landscapes. In this way, he suggests that translation is not merely a matter of language and culture, but, via the mediation of geography, becomes a phenomenon that pervades the entirety of the material world. Sissako’s project thus performs, albeit in reverse order, the four-part thesis of this book: 1� Translation is first and foremost a process that is ubiquitous in the material world, where the very smallest building blocks of matter are not so much entities as contact zones, fields of force, energy and attraction. In these constitutive contact zones, translations—exchanges of information—that make the world in its ongoing dynamic transformation, are constantly taking place. 2� One subset of such ongoing flows of information is language, itself a processual translative medium that interacts with other languages in what we know as interlingual translation. 3� One such language, German, can finally be read as a subspecies of cosmic translation� The translative nature of material itself devolves to the German language to make it, in my reading, an always already translative contact zone susceptible of new understandings—and in particular, of new pedagogical transmission in the contemporary translation classroom� 4. The Global South is the cradle of the contact zone as the basal form of cultural development and provides driving impulses for the reconceptualization of translation as a quantum process� This in turn generates central pedagogical inputs into the translation classroom� Berlin coming and goings Let us return to Sissako’s strange road movie to upack these theses about ‘German as Contact Zone’ in more detail. 16 Introduction Given its conclusion, Sissako’s film might better be titled Rostov-Luanda-Berlin —but even this ludic alteration might demand some further ludic tampering, producing perhaps something like Rostov-Luanda- [ Berlin ] or, even more adventurously, Rostov-Luanda-Berlin (with Berlin placed sous rature , in the notorious expression of Derrida). For after a long quest through the war-torn rural and urban landscapes of South-Western Africa, we see almost nothing of East Berlin. Nor indeed do we see much of Baribanga himself, except for a brief glimpse as the long-lost friend leans for a moment over the balustrade of his flat’s balcony to see who is ringing the bell at the downstairs entrance (Sissako 1997: 57: 35). Barely an audible word is spoken, except the narrator’s concluding voice-over in French, supplemented by subtitles in German: Baribanga wohnt in Berlin, aber nur noch für kurze Zeit. Ein letztes Exil, das er für die Heimat verlassen wird. An diesem Oktobermorgen, habe ich ihn etwas sagen hören, in jener Sprache unserer vergangen Illusionen. Es war das Wort ‘Rückkehr’, und es klang wie eine Erfüllung. (Sissako 1997: 57: 29-47) [Baribanga is living in Berlin, but only for a little while longer. This is a last exile, one that he is about to quit to return home. On this October morning I heard him say something in this language of our bygone illusions. It was the word ‘Return’, and it had the sound of a fulfilment.] The penultimate word of the film is in Russian: ‘vozvrashcheniye’. In the German subtitles, it is translated. This translation has a double effect. On the one hand, the translation erases, in part at least, the ubiquitous Russian that nestles, quixotically, among the French, Portuguese, Arabic, and a number of national or regional African languages that are spoken during the protagonist’s travels through Northand South-Western Africa. By the same token, however, the translation also enacts the constant translative process that marks not only the interface between the film’s spoken languages, but also between the spoken languages and the visual footer carrying the printed German subtitles� Yet the final moments of the film are only very partially about linguistic translation, for the simple reason that they are largely mute� The silence is broken only by a couple of murmured words between the East-Berlin taxi driver and his passenger Dramane/ Sissako, as the latter navigates with the help of a classic Falk street map of Berlin through industrial areas to Karlshorst (Sissako 1997: 56: 20). Once again, the mutedness of the final scenes produces two effects. On the one hand, it makes space for a new gaze, and for the presence of a new visual interlocutor: the landscape. The spectator gazes across the driver’s and Dramane/ Sissako’s shoulders, through the windscreen and the side-windows at the East Berlin urban and semi-industrial landscape, replicating the same device that has been used repeatedly in the scenes of the long journey from Mauretania Berlin coming and goings 17 down the West coast of Africa to Angola and through the countryside between coastal Luanda and southerly inland Huambo and Humpata (see Adesokan 2010: 152). Several things are visually ostended here: the mediated gaze of the director, translated via the camera lens and the car windows; and the landscape itself, whether rural or urban, that ceases to be mere setting, and advances to the status of a character within the film. As Adesokan (2010: 147) notes, ‘in Sissako’s films the open desert or despoiled landscape is not only inhabited, it also draws attention itself through motion and quest’. Indeed, this landscape, at least the urban one we see in the final scene of Rostov-Luanda , is sometimes even endowed with its own language, as in the street sign or the scribbled nameplates on the doorbells of Baribanga’s block of flats. Such inscriptions of the natural or built environment once again blur the boundaries between the observing-semiotizing world of humankind and the observed world of nature which, as we shall duly see, is engaged in no less creative semiotic practices� On the other hand, the mutedness of the final scenes contribute to a strange sort of hollowing out of the ‘national’ site, if not its visual incarnation, that provides the film’s diegetic ending and point of arrival. Germany is shown here almost entirely devoid of Germans—and of German. This means that in Sissako’s film, German and Germany have an eminently paradoxical status. Germany is the (almost) culminating moment of a postmodern Global South quest narrative—yet this status is neatly undercut when the final scene announces an imminent return to Angola, thus diegetically displacing Germany as the mimetic point of arrival. At the same time, German is also present throughout as a visual translative target language in the subtitles of a film that has been co-produced with the German ZDF (Das Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen, or Channel 2). Indeed, the film was originally produced as part of a series of documentaries made for the Documenta X bienniale in Kassel in 1997. In an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sissako has narrated the various encounters with fellow African filmmakers in Zimbabwe, in Luanda, a request from the Documenta organizers, and several visits to the locations in Angola, that variously ‘enabled’ the film and led to its final creation (Appiah 2003: 147-8). German institutions and actors, in the form of the Documenta X director Brigitte Kramer, and ZDF, were essential parts of the network of ‘affordances’ that also include the Global South participants and even the African landscapes that serve as putative ‘settings’ or ‘backgrounds’ (a misnomer if ever there was one, as this book sets out to show) for the film’s quest narrative and its translative work. Yet despite this centrality, German and all that it stands for is curiously marginal in the film, working as one of the ‘absent causes’ ( Jameson 1981: 102) within the text. Sissako thus banishes Germany and German to a peripheral threshold position that I will term in this book a translative ‘contact zone’. It is 18 Introduction a place that cannot stand alone, in any sense of the word� Rather, it is one that is defined by interdependence: it is dependent, diegteically, linguistically, even semiotically, on various neighbouring elements or entities (as they, however, are also dependent upon it). Significantly, the decisive verdict on Germany—turning one’s back on the country and on the language—is delivered in Russian. Russian is a language once hegemonic in Karlshorst (where the Russian occupation forces were concentrated) but now residual in Germany except as a significant ethnic language, although it functions as a bizarrely diasporic and anachronistic lingua franca within the film’s own fictive time-space. In summary, then, Germany and the German language are both crucial, ubiquitous sites and linguistic media, yet simultaneously pushed to the edge of the verbal and visual text: Germany is pinned precariously at the end of the film, and the German language is present not as a spoken medium, but rather, clings to the bottom margin of the screen as a late scriptural addition of an almost cosmetic sort� But for artists such as Sissako, peripheries are not the end of the world: rather, they are the ‘contact zone’ par excellence. German as contact zone For, lest we understand this as a ‘demotion’ from the status of a global language, it is worth considering once again the double nature of Sissako’s centre-margin operations. Centre and periphery are categories that Sissako is constantly inverting, subverting, entangling and complicating for every entity, language, culture, or even ‘nature’, in the film. In this way, Germany and the German language appear here on the dynamic generative margins of a wonderful tapestry of cultures and languages, where translation is constantly taking place between the protagonists and the spectators� Sissako’s decentring of German and Germany within the fabric of Global South cultures might be taken as a ‘decolonizing’ gesture, except for the fact that clearly both the Soviet Union and, by extension, the German Democratic Republic functioned in this historical narrative as bearers of anti-colonial hope� Both the USSR and the GDR were powerful embodiments of and sometime facilitators in the project of forging the ‘futures past’ of socialist-supported anti-imperial liberation struggles in the then Third World (Piot 2010; Scott 2004: 210). The ‘Oktobermorgen’ of the final meeting also alludes to such socialist temporal utopias—enshrined in the title of a 1993 film by Sissako, Oktyabr � Perhaps not only Russian, but to some extent German as well, was what the film calls a ‘Sprache unserer vergangen Illusionen’ (Sissako 1997: 57: 29-47) [a German as contact zone 19 ‘language of our bygone illusions’] (for the Namibian context where this seems to have been very much the case, see Schleicher 2006). Moreover, far from diminishing the German language, even as it renders it mute, this film elevates the German of the subtitles to a translative participant in a network of bizarre meetings and constantly surprising dialogues between reciprocally communicative foreigners. In effect, Sissako’s film quite literally reframes the German language, displacing it from its current status as a secondary language of global (economic) hegemony and domestic gatekeeper in struggles for access to socio-cultural privilege� Rather, by constantly turning the borders of the language ‘inside out’, as Sissako persistently does, the film enables us to rediscover the German language and its concomitant geographies and cultures as peripheral translation zones that butt up against many other languages and cultures. These translation zones are of course linguistic in character, but they are also far more than that. As suggested by the final mute moments of double spectatorship from the taxi (the last of many in the film that have metapoetically ostended travelling, questing spectatorship, the landscape, the world of nature, things, material processes) language is a powerful interlocutor that participates in multifarious non-linguistic translative processes� The natural world may well be perceived as an ‘outsider’ from our human point of view, as the taxi-scenes imply via their orchestration of inside and out� But the final moment of the quest inverts this relationship. We see Dramane/ Sissako climbing out of the taxi and striding towards the building, ringing the doorbell and crossing the threshold into the shabby block of flats (Sissako 1997: 57: 15). Concretely, at this point the protagonist crosses over into an interior that is outside of the film’s visual range and thus located at several degrees of exteriority to the spectator’s implied position. Dramane/ Sissako also transits, at this moment, into a future that is thoroughly beyond the temporal reach of the filmic diegesis. The film thus marks, at the moment of rehearsing its own temporal-diegetic conclusion, the translative crossing into the ‘real’ or ‘outside’ world that is, after all, as much its object and goal as its own autotelic and internal poetic coherence. In the last of so many ‘inside-out’ inversions, the film situates itself within the larger world, a world that the doorway marks as a network of thresholds, transitions, transports, transfers—in sum, as a network of translations� Yet perhaps the door is only one visual metaphor for the translative threshold: more apposite, given the Global South provenience of this work of art, might be the balcony—that crumbling para-domestic structure over whose balustrade Baribanga briefly glances before waving, and turning again to the interior to welcome his just-arrived guest (Sissako 1997: 57: 35-40). In its twin and avatar the veranda (etymology: Indian English veranda , from Hindi varaṇḍā , from 20 Introduction Portuguese varanda ‘railing, balustrade’) this hanging structure is a translative space� The veranda or balcony both belong to the domestic domain but are not part of it� The veranda is a threshold structure that originates in the Global South, but, via multiple linguistic translations and architectural migrations, shuttles back and forth between north and south and between south and south. In postcolonial Africa, the veranda comes to stand for a certain type of clanbased politics of patronage and clientism whose redistributory logic is located on the threshold between the domestic space of a powerful ‘big man’ and the adjacent territory (Terray 1986). In some cases, the veranda becomes a metonym for Global South geography per se , as in Australia’s populous East Coast ‘veranda’ between the arid inland and the Pacific Ocean rim (Drew 1994). It is significant that Baribanga, the goal of the film’s quest, appears on a balcony whose dilapidated state transforms it into a displaced veranda. It is no less significant that his appearance is ephemeral, thus heralding an encounter at the door� The threshold is not merely a place of meetings—it is a time of futurity and promise. Logically, the meeting that the final scene records takes place before the film has been made, so that it functions as the exact opposite of the inaugural murder that powers the back-to-front action of the detective story (Todorov 1980: 9-19). Here, the threshold space of the veranda is the metonymic site for the mobility that generates life-giving encounters. Its terminal position in the film transpires, retrospectively, to have powered the journeys and meetings leading up to it� To that extent, the final meeting point of the film opens out, via the figure of the veranda as much as that of the door, onto what Rilke (1975: 49; 1978: 71) calls ‘das Offene’ [‘the Open’]—the limitless expanse and the open-ended time of unceasing natural transformations, a cosmic ‘contact zone’ of physical, material ‘translations’� Generalized translation Under the sign of ‘das Offene’, this book begins with a speculative wager that may be very much like the sort of quest that Dramane/ Sissako undertakes as he goes in search of a friend he almost doesn’t find—thereby producing a film which is much more, at the end of the day, than the quest for a single person� The individual search cedes to the discovery of a community and a natural landscape. What is the wager-like interrogatory quest that this book embarks upon? It runs as follows: What if we were to approach translation not only as a linguistic activity that has produced, in the last decade or two, a large body of imaginative and stimulating scholarship using translation as a (sometimes overstretched) metaphor—but rather, as a generalized process of creative dyna- Generalized translation 21 mism informing the entire fabric of life—of which linguistic translation, therefore, would be one limited exemplar? In other words, what if we were to take translation as a metaphor seriously—even over-seriously? What if were to take the ‘transport’ (in modern Greek, you catch the metaphor to get to work) of ‘translation’ across the vehicle/ tenor border, into foreign semantic fields not merely as a creative abuse of language—but as a symptomatic revelation of translative operations that have always already been going on in all the fields of natural activity, obfuscated all too often by our obsessive focus upon linguistic translation? We might discover that linguistic translation, far from being the ‘purest’ (non-metaphorical) form of translation, putatively contaminated and conceptually weakened by modish similes and conceptual derivatives, would itself be merely one participant in a gigantic network of metaphoric-metonymic transitions, transformations and metamorphoses to which one might assign the label of bíos , following the affirmative biopolitical project undertaken by Roberto Esposito (2008). Such a project has been assayed by Michel Serres’ Hermes III: La Traduction (1974) [ Hermes III: Translation ], a remarkable transdisciplinary essay that ranges across the fields of genetics, thermodynamics, politics, philosophy, painting and literature, showing how each of these areas displays operations that can be regarded as translation� Translating widely in the very hubris of its scholarly scope, Serres’ book offers a panorama of processes of translation in the broadest sense possible, of which literary-linguistic translation (and the human nature it supposedly demarcates from the natural world) is merely one realm of productivity� This book seeks to take this idea seriously, investigating translation into (and occasionally out of) German literature as an exemplar of the ways in which translation might be seen as an index of larger process of cosmic and social creativity. Indeed, from this point of view, the German language itself would be seen as one strand in a bundle of languages linked by translative processes and indicative of social creativity� The German language thus comes to be understood, within this book, as a ‘contact zone’: a sector always already polylingual in itself, and blurred around its many borders at the points where it meets other languages. The notion of the ‘contact zone’ comes into the literary humanities via Pratt (1992: 6), who ‘borrow[s] the term “contact” … from its use in linguistics, where the term contact language refers to improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade.’ In this book, I redirect it to its original socio-linguistic context, and the ‘original’ historical situation to which it refers, that of ‘exchange’. It is striking, however, even weird, that among the ‘literate arts of the contact zone’ listed by 22 Introduction Pratt (1991: 37)—‘[a]utoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression’—translation does not figure, though her ‘transculturation’ might be a rough approximation. (In a similarly bizarre fashion, Genette [1997: 405] mentions translation as one of the ‘paratexts’ that he declines to deal with.) Alternatively, one might premise that ‘translation’ is absent from Pratt’s list because it is the all-encompassing, and thus invisible term that embraces all her ‘arts of the contact zone’. Such a lacuna is filled by Apter (2005), who converts the ‘contact zone’ into a ‘translation’ zone in reference to an emergent field of studies at the intersection between translation studies and comparative literature (compare Bassnett 1993: 138-61). Translation is the dynamic nexus of such interdisciplinary undertakings. Following Apter’s example, I import the term into the very heart of German national identity, the language itself. As a ‘pluricentric’ language (Muhr, Marley, Kretzenbacher and Bissoonauth, eds 2015), one that is also plural at its centre, I regard German as a ‘contact zone’, a realm of constantly productive translations hitherto understood as irritating interferences and impurities to be suppressed rather than embraced and fostered. Pratt (1992: 6) notes that ‘[l]ike the societies of the contact zone, such languages are commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure.’ Even though the German language is usually characterized as highly structured, Pratt’s comment is immensely relevant, because ‘chaos’ can be read here not in its customary negative sense, but in the sense of non-linear material creativity known to ‘chaos theory’ (Ruelle 1993). In the latter usage, ‘chaos’ describes the unpredictable and therefore creative development of structures and systems as they interact with their environment� We need to pursue this logic of the ‘translative contact zone’ further, however, turning it back upon the notions both of the ‘contact zone’ and of ‘translation’ themselves. In recent decades, scientific discourses have come to be seen as a subset of larger social, indeed geopolitical discourses, as in Bruno Latour’s Les Microbes: Guerre et paix (1984). But the frames for the sociological study of the sciences have shifted significantly in recent decades, taking in a larger, even planetary horizon today, and it would now be more accurate to see the planetary processes of creation as the total set, with geopolitics and its attendant discourses operating on them, to be sure—but more importantly, always within them (Rees 2018). Thus, by the same token, the translative operations worked within language would not stop at the borders of language, but would continue along multiple ‘lines of flight’ and ‘desire lines’ into manifold outlying regions of the natural world. As the gaze broadens to take in these extra-literary ramifications, however, a surprising inversion may become evident. In a recurrent ‘turning inside-out’ that is central to the vitalist re-envisioning of the world (Es- Generalized translation 23 posito 2008: 157-94) it transpires that the natural world is not the ‘outside’ of the ‘real’ business of translation. On the contrary, linguistic translation, significant though it may be within human history, turns out to be a province of cosmic creation, a secondary translation of primary translations of epic proportions� The book addresses these issues by opening with the film I have just discussed, then turning to half-a-dozen examples of the translation of literary texts, before reflecting upon the very pragmatic space of the literary classroom, and finally returning to a visual example, a public-art mural in the form of a street-blackboard in Johannesburg, South Africa, to conclude its argument. The final turn to pedagogy is one that is pre-empted by Sissako’s usage of the motif of a photograph showing the erstwhile Russian class in Rostov-on-Don—a semiotic marker so important in the film that, after numerous recurrences, it provides the closing image before the credits (Sissako 1997: 57: 55). The photo of the class is evoked verbally for the first time during a telephone conversation between Dramane/ Sissako and his teacher Natalia Lvovna, when he asks her to send it to him as an aid to finding Baribanga (ibid: 5: 55). The first glimpse of the photo comes five minutes later (ibid: 9: 05) and recurs on dozens of occasions subsequently (e.g. ibid: 12: 38; 13: 9; 18: 15; etc.); it even figures in one of the shots taken over the shoulder of the driver on the trip into rural Angola (ibid: 18: 56). The photo is a visual shifter that accompanies the protagonist on his search� The classroom, connoted metonymically in this manner, constitutes a peripheral but mobile translative community (made up of Cubans, Angolans, Philipinos) anchored in the landscapes—Saharan, then Siberian, and subsequently Subsaharan—that form the visual background to the inaugural voice-over telephone call and the subsequent multiple iterations of he socio-pedagogical deixis effected by the photo� The translative classroom is a translated, transported space of translation that frames but also pervades the film, thereby inflecting its closing repositioning of the German language itself� There are in effect four intertwined ideas that underpin the argument. The four ideas are evident already in the four parts of the title of his book, and are sketched in the brief account of Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda given above. For the sake of clarity I reiterate them once again in schematic form: 1� The book reads German as a ‘contact zone’. This strand of theorization approaches the German language as a ‘pluricentric language’ and thus as an extroverted structure. It imagines German not as a singular entity but as a network of language s that is formed not from centre but rather from its peripheries, or suggests, alternatively, and more radically, that at its centre, the language is always already peripheral� The German language thus comes to be conceptualized not as a centripetal linguistic ‘Heimat’, but as a centrifugal meeting place, a contact zone whose tentacular expanse inevitably colours 24 Introduction its putatively core regions. In Sissako’s film, one of these core-peripheral regions is East Berlin—a site that makes the national language (as once was) as an ineluctable zone of transition, negotiation, and of course translation. This, however, is only the first ‘provincialization’ of the German that we shall see at work here; it is caught in the tug of a larger, more fundamental ‘provincialization’ of language itself (Kohn 2013: 38-42), which is the gist of the second guiding idea� 2� The book suggest that linguistic translation is in fact a manifestation of ‘quantum’ processes, that is, the processes by which the entirety of material reality is on the move� Reality is not static, but is mobile and processual� At the smallest scales of the material universe, minute packets or ‘quanta’ of energy engage with each other, meeting in transformative encounters which ceaselessly generate new material structures� Out of each encounter a ‘translation’ ensues which becomes the next step in the dynamic process by which matter exists in a constant process of transformation� We must imagine something like Law’s (2007) ‘material semiotics’ in which actants interact with each other as meaning-bearing participants in transformative co-encounters that constitute a network of incessant translations. Translation is not a metaphor here, because each encounter actually is a transfer of information—a semiotic exchange—that transforms the (material) information itself and in turn perpetuates a transformation of the physical world: ‘One way to think of … a causal universe is in terms of the transfer of information … Each event is something like a transistor that takes in information from events in its past, makes a simple computation and sends the result to the events in its future’ (Smolin 2000: 55). Each quantum event is an encounter in which information is exchanged and changed, thereby provoking further change and further exchange� 3� Translation (in its minor, provincial interlinguistic sense) works in the same way as quantum processes, and this for two reasons� On the one hand, because it resembles those processes morphogenetically� This may appear to fly in the face of reason, because material processes and linguistic processes would seem to be fundamentally different from another, eschewing any possibility of comparison. But such fundamental differences are merely the attributions of a ‘separatist’ logic that is the hallmark of Enlightenment thought. This mode of thinking can be seen to emerge at the moment, for instance, when the topos of ‘copia’ gives way as a figure of thought to binary thinking (Ong 1958; West-Pavlov 2006: 57-9). From that moment on, the jumble of interrelated things cedes to a world of clear demarcations between this and that, here and there� Objects begin to emerge more clearly out of the distinctions that mark them off from other objects. Half a millennia of Generalized translation 25 thought based upon the normative notion of discrete entities and concepts makes it almost impossible to think in terms of an interrelatedness of all things—a notion, however, that the massive, and increasingly terrifying evidence of climate change is slowly bringing back into the forefront of our consciousness. Isomorphic processes resemble each other, and are linked. Translation does not merely transfer a text from one domain to another, as the ‘transport’ metaphor suggests, because original and translation are not the same object� Rather, the entry of the text into another space involves an encounter between two cultures that generates a new text and thereby transforms the ambient cultural environment, contributing to its ongoing life� Thus, translation as a general linguistic operation, which the first argument located within, rather than only at the borders of the German language, is itself a subset of a broader cosmic process of material information exchange and ensuing reciprocal transformation at the adjacent borders of living entities� This broader cosmic process operates from the quantum level upwards, all the way to that of the universe itself, so that in effect it is coeval with the dynamic of life itself. Whence the second reason for the linkage between material processes and translation. They are linked concretely because they are fundamentally part of the same reality� One could cite manifestations of this idea of environmentas a base mode of connectivity across a range of disciplines and genres of thought. At one end of a spectrum of ‘scientificity’, contemporary Indigenous philosophies conceive reality as a single continuum of interactions: ‘Animacy … is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (Ingold 2011: 689). At the other end of that spectrum, contemporary science is similarly characterized by a wide variety of field theories that have imposed the networked view of physical reality (Capra and Luisi 2014; Hayles 1984). Such ideas demonstrate the pervasiveness of notions of the infinite interconnectedness of the material world as a whole. Thus, material transformations are related to each other in a ‘fractal’ manner; they are isomorphic with one another in their operations at differing scales of reality because they are linked to each other by a myriad of intervening processes; across these fractally similar processes, translation produces transformation but also displays invariance� 4. Far from being an invention of European mathematics (Mandelbrot 1983), ‘fractal’ multiscalar replication and productivity is at the heart of much indigenous design from the Global South, ranging from textiles to architecture (Eglash 1999; see also Zaslavsky 1973). As my inaugural and terminal examples, all my case studies, and the provenance of much of my theoretical 26 Introduction material suggests, the Global South plays a central role in driving the impetus of this integrative, anti-segregative project of quantum translation� De Souza Santos (2014: 223) sums up neatly by saying, ‘The modern history of unequal realtions between the global North and the global South is such that questioning and challenging the contact zone as it presents itself must be the first project of translation.’ The Global South has been, already well before the incursions of European colonization and at the very latest during the long imperial epoch, a ‘contact zone’ between cultures and their attendant epistemologies, as Pratt’s (1991, 1992) work on South America shows. The inclusive, eclectic and even promiscuous cosmic communities envisaged by non-European epistemologies and ontologies persisted in the interstices of European ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1999: 277) and provide fundamental impulses for a notion of translation that is integrated into the ceaselessly transformative dynamics of the cosmos itself� Bringing together these four central ideas, the notion of the ‘contact zone’, which I take from Pratt (1991, 1992), serves as a common denominator between these levels of dynamic, productive, and transformative interaction. Each quantum event that occurs as the dynamic building block of material reality is a ‘contact zone’ between two or more quanta of gravity. Without the interactions between quanta, there would be no world. In fact, there is no world before these interactions occur; the world emerges out of these interactions. Relation precedes material existence. Pratt’s (1992: 7) definition of the ‘contact zone’, though pitched at the human scale and context of colonial and postcolonial encounters, neatly replicates the constitutive nature of such interactions already active at a much smaller scale: ‘A “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats [such] relations … not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices.’ Every act of interlingual translation between two linguistic-cultural domains takes place in a specific local ‘contact zone’ made up of its own material contact zones. Finally, the entirety of a language can be imagined as a ‘contact zone’ of ‘contact zones’, an immense fabric of acts of dialogical interaction between speakers whose use of the language is inevitably different from one another—from the minute variations of idiolects to the opacity of dialects or major language variants to one another. A ‘contact zone’ emerges at every point on a multiscalar material reality at which an exchange of information takes place between dynamic actants, with transformative, generative results� Better than anywhere else, the epistemologies and the translative practices emanating from the Global South demonstrate an intuitive understanding of such all-embracing ontologies of transformation� Plan of the book 27 What I am proposing, via my inaugural but patently decentred reading of Rostov-Luanda that focuses upon the almost complete absence of its elided third term (Berlin), is the centrifugal displacement—the expatriation—of German and Germany itself. The film is all about language, but at the end, language becomes mute, and takes its naturally subordinate place within the material world that is the other major subject of Sissako’s filmic gaze. This shift of emphasis does not merely work to alienate and denaturalize human language—but rather, in the final analysis, to renaturalize it and to place it in networks of productive translation. Such networks of renaturalized translation are inevitably obfuscated, tamped down and controlled by the nation state and its attendant national languages in the first instance, and by extension all language that is conceptualized as the marker par excellence of the human. The postand dehumanization of language leads ineluctably towards the re-naturalization of language as translation within a larger framework of universal translation. Plan of the book This book is divided into three parts: one part devoted to ‘theory’ and two parts devoted to respective versions of ‘application’: the first in the area of literary interpretations, the second in the area of teaching methodologies. In fact, as will become evident as the reader progresses through the book, none of these parts really fulfils this idealized hypostatization of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ respectively; and even ‘practice’ falls into very different forms of ‘doing’ literary or cultural studies. All three parts are in fact hybrid undertakings, intertwined with each other. Each section thus constitutes a ‘trading zone’ between theory and experimentation (Galison 1999) that in many ways is structurally analogous to the ‘contact zones’ that are everywhere explored—and performatively opened up and populated—in the book. Thus the theoretical sections of the book make no claim to exhaustive documentation or neutral scholarship� They are in reality a polemical and essayistic exploration of the intuition that apparently separate activities such as ‘translation’ and the ‘material reality of the world’ are in fact very close to one another in their underlying dynamic. They therefore seek to translate ‘translation’ into the foreign semantic field of quantum theory. In these chapters, translation becomes ‘quantized’. This section of the book is iconoclastic rather than soberly scholarly in its tenor, seeking to infringe consecrated boundaries both in form and content. Likewise, the second part of the book, which proceeds to case studies of individual translations, aims to ask about the ways in which the German language, as a source or target language of literary translation, can be seen to become ‘quantized’ or to ‘quantize’ itself 28 Introduction within the translation process� Thus the translation of language, no less than the language of translation, also finds itself ‘translated’ into the bizarre world of quantum gravity processes. The third part of this book re-translates this translation of translation into the world of the classroom, a place of interactions and exchanges that microcosmically maps the larger social world and perhaps, as I will suggest, the natural world as well� Thus, to summarize again, in the chapters that make up part 1 of this book I lay down the lineaments of a theory of quantum translation according to which a quantized German would function as a ‘contact zone’ at the interface with other languages and cultures. In part 2 of the book I explore what this notion of quantum translation might look like once translated into a translative practice in which German is the source language (Sebald, Hölderlin) or the target language (Mujila)—or in one case, both at once (Eich/ Vladislavić). In part 3, I turn to a further ‘translation’ of ‘translation’, that of the transposition of translation into the classroom� Part 1 opens with a chapter devoted to the exemplary moment of the ‘translative turn’ in cultural studies and suggests that this moment may be scaled up to prise open the closed box of interlingual translation ‘proper’� The cultural turn in translation studies, which had hitherto been a largely technical and instrumentalist discipline, was followed by a translative turn in cultural studies� These incremental shifts away from a narrow notion of translation as an exclusively linguistic notion of semantic transfer between natural or even national languages were registered with increasing disapproval by the guardians of disciplinary purity. Chapter 1 exploits that moment of resistance as a heuristic device to interrogate the very notion of a translational border and point to possible ways of overcoming it in an even more radical manner� Following this inaugural gesture, chapters 2 and 3 orchestrate a contractive movement that suggest that human language is actually only a very minor part of the larger cosmic business of the exchange of information. Here, I examine anthropological theories by Kohn, Viveiros de Castro and Ingold. Chapter 2 addresses Kohn’s anthropological notion of ‘provincializing language’ and demonstrates the limitations, but also the necessity of a fundamental paradigm shift within the anthropological sciences� There, the anthropologist is a translator who can only with great difficulty abandon his position as the adjudicator of language as the marker of humanity. In chapter 3 I turn to the work of Viveiros de Castro and Ingold for more generous versions of the anthropological translator. Here, the translator as shaman is better equipped to open language up to a broad and inclusive community of nonhuman actants� The translator-shaman does not translate between cultures as the translator-anthropologist does, but rather, translates the multiplicity of the heart of all things, whether human or Plan of the book 29 non-human, cultural or natural� The shaman presides over local nodes of a universal process of translation. Indeed, language itself registers this universal transformation, in Tim Ingold’s notion of the verbs that describe beings in the circumpolar world, by becoming a ‘languaging’—language permanently in a state of translation because it is part of a world-in-translation� Following these preparatory moves, in chapter 4 I rehearse a contrary expansive movement that elevates translation from a restricted linguistic operation to a universal operator of information exchange. I call upon the work of Michel Serres and Juri Lotman to explore these ideas. Serres treats a wide range of intellectual practices across the natural and human sciences as practices of translation. What they all have in common is that they identify and formalize exchanges of information� Translation as the exchange of information is the underlying operation that can be found everywhere in the cosmos, and the production of invariability via variation is its leitmotif� Serres’ approach to translation is an all-embracing one that includes Lotman’s notion of translation as a basic cognitive operation� Because Serres reads all exchanges in the natural world as exchanges of information, cognition spills across the border from the human world of culture into the nonhuman world� Building upon the double, countervailing movements of chapters 2, 3 and 4, a third moment in the argument (chapter 5) uses the same double scaling of great and small to introduce a quantum theory of translation� The chapter suggests that such a theory would stress that the linguistic process of translation is part and parcel of all the processes that quantum-gravity theory deals with, from the very precisely identifiable mega-nano-dimension of the basic building blocks of gravitational quanta upwards. Proceeding from the generative nature of all cosmic processes constructed out of quantum-gravity attractive pulls, a quantum theory of translation would also emphasize the non-linear, ‘probabilistic’ character of translation. Radicalizing Quine’s ‘indeterminacy thesis’ and the work of Berman on the creativity of translation, the chapter harnesses the quantum theory of translation to show how translation produces new versions of reality in the multilingual borderlands between specific local semiospheres. Finally, in chapter 6, I turn back to German as a national language to ask what a quantum theory of translative linguistics might do to our conception of civic subjecthood informed and infused by a particular natural language� Drawing above all on Bakhtin’s writing on heteroglossia, Peirce’s on semiosis, and Adorno’s postwar work on foreign loan words in German, I interrogate the manner in which German may become ‘quantized’ by mobilizing the translative procedures always already at work in a living language. Part 2 exemplifies these ideas of by offering four concrete case studies of quantum translation at work. 30 Introduction Chapter 7 reads W. G. Sebald’s Ringe des Saturn by laying bare the ambivalence of the trope of fragmentation that dominates the text both in its content and its form. At the level of content, fragmentation indexes the destruction of the natural world in the wake of the separative paradigm of the Enlightenment. At the level of form, however, Sebald’s fragmentary and associative compositional method employs collage to suggest secret connections between apparently disparate regions and epochs of a global history of catastrophe� Sebald’s project thus embraces the translative connectivity articulated in part 1 of the book. In order to imbricate these concepts with the specific work of interlingual translation, I focus upon Michael Hulse’s translation of Sebald’s translation of Joseph Conrad and a proto-Global South context to exemplify this ambivalent translation of generativity� The three levels of translation display a complex interplay of fidelity and infidelity, with Hulse often translating the original Conrad back into his English translation of Sebald. In this way, the work of translation restores—and sometimes invents—connections under historical conditions in which the distending and disruptive force of history appears to pull elements of the natural and human world further and further apart� The non-linear routes of faithful and apparently non-faithful rendition or transformation of texts thus make up a ‘quantum’ translation history that displays resilience in the face of historical destruction� Chapter 8 examines the South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative in its German translation of the same name by Leipzig-based translator Thomas Brückner. The chapter focuses upon a famous catchphrase from the postwar radio-play writer Günter Eich—‘ Seid Sand, nicht Öl, im Getriebe der Welt ’—in German in Vladislavić’s text, and the ways it shifts its valencies as it transits from English original to German translation, where it no longer figures as an ostentatious foreign body in the text. The chapter correlates this fluctuating form of translation with the valencies of political resistance and complicity that accrue to the literary work in two transitional (translational? ) polities (preand post-1994 South Africa and preand post-reunification Germany respectively). At the same time, however, the ‘sand’ image that resides at the centre of the translative negotiations between resistance and complicity also figures the ‘enabling constraints’ that characterize both the transactions of quantum generativity and the compromises of interlingual translation� Chapter 9 interrogates Australian poet John Kinsella’s ‘transversioning’ of Hölderlin, a German Romantic poet who often worked with translations from Greek Antiquity as his basal material, and was embarked upon the ceaseless ‘translation’ of his own work in an ongoing process of self-transformation. Kinsella, an Anglo-Australian poet of Irish provenance, writes from Noongar country in South-Western Australia, but is also an itinerant academic, having spent Plan of the book 31 much time in Tübingen, the university city where Hölderlin spent the later part of his life. These stays inform Kinsella’s palimsestic ‘reversionings’ of Hölderlin filtered across Michael Hamburger’s English translations and infused with ecological issues from the Noongar country that is today’s severely degraded Western Australian wheat belt. Kinsella’s ‘reversionings’ stand in close dialogue with Hölderlin’s own poems-in-process and in particular with their subsequent translations and retranslations across a fifty-year period by Michael Hamburger. These poetic interventions are engaged in a close dialogue with their respective landscape contexts, all of them endangered by ecological destruction and the threat of ongoing wars, from the Napoleonic Wars to the current conflict in Syria and the European ‘war’ on refugees. Together, however, the constantly retranslated poems constitute a long process of incessant transformation that resonates with the environment’s deep-seated resilience and regenerativity� Chapter 10 embarks upon a close reading of the temporal models proposed by the Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s frenetic novel Tram 83 (2014). The reading suggests that Mujila provides a template for a temporal regime apposite for Global South polities in semi-institutional collapse, typical of the post-Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) and post-civil-war polities of some parts of Africa (Mujila is de facto describing post-2000 Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] whence he hails). Mujila’s project mobilizes a form of temporal translation that is highly relevant not only for the post-apocalyptic polities of the Global South, but also for the pre-apocalyptic societies of the Global North, for whom, according to some readings, the South provides a grim future roadmap. The temporal template Mujila’s prose embodies is effectively and affectively very close to that described by quantum translation. In the light of this temporal template and its translative resonances, the chapter critiques the German translation of Tram 83 for the way it systematically undercuts Mujila’s project of temporal translation� Part 3 of the book translates these concrete case studies into the even more concrete context of the translation classroom� Chapter 11 opens the third part by turning to the practical business of literary translation under a double rubric: that of translation proper, and that of teaching (including the teaching of translation). It operates a transition between literary translation and the classroom by reading Klaus Martens’ German translation of Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’, asking whether the German version succeeds in maintaining the English version’s insistence upon its participation in the Caribbean landscape it describes. The chapter shifts the focus of postcolonial poetics away from the contestatory ‘writing back’ of anti-imperial critique towards a Global South-based mode of immanent formal resonance between poetic devices and structures and the vibrant, self-genera- 32 Introduction tive continuum of the cosmos itself. Within the framework of a landscape ethos posited by numerous Caribbean theorists, the reading of Martens’ translation sketches a translative/ pedagogical ethics that sees the role of creative, interpretative translation as the continuation the dynamics of natural creativity in which the poem ideally participates� The chapter opens part 3 with the coupling of translation and teaching, both of which can be understood as subgenres of the larger span of cosmic creativity discussed in part 1� Chapter 12 returns to the classroom with a more narrowly linguistic perspective, focusing on language-teaching and -learning in the multilingual society that is today’s Germany� The chapter begins by analysing a recent provocation in the teaching of German, the pedagogical handbook Ausländisch für Deutsche , which turns the customary relationships between German and DaF ( Deutsch als Fremdsprache , i.e. German as a Foreign Language), and German and other Modern Languages inside-out, making German the peripheral rather than the core language of German school curricula; by the same token, it places German on the margins of the education system, automatically rendering it a linguistic-pedagogical ‘contact zone’ where translation is always already happening under the guise of ‘language awareness’. The chapter then turns to recent work by Anthony Pym to show that, at the micro-level of classroom interactions, translation has always been and continues be a vital part of pupils’ or students’ learning strategies—in particular in Germany. In this way, as in chapter 7, translation and teaching are placed alongside each other and shown to be not merely isomorphic to one another, as chapter 7 suggested, but in actual fact intimately entangled. In order to integrate this micro-analysis into the larger argument of the book, which posits that interlingual translation is a subset of cosmic transformation, the chapter finally looks as Rosa’s Resonanz (2016), a ‘sociology of worldly relationships’, for a model, albeit one that is only partly developed by Rosa himself, of the larger networks of translative encounters in which the classroom might be inserted� Chapter 13 views the translation classroom from another point of view, asking about its integration into the field of contemporary German political debates in a rapidly changing world. It opens with the notion of the blackboard as a fourth wall that often separates the classroom from the world outside. It begins by interrogating contemporary racism as it spikes in response to the global multi-crises of the present time (Brand and Wissen 2017: 21-42), and enquiring how racism can be combated in the classroom� Racism is analysed as a local epiphenomenon of other segregative, separative dynamics in the world� Against this broader background of rampant, almost-universal separatism, the chapter proposes a translative methodology for the classroom, one that seeks to create connections between disparate domains of knowledge so as to map Plan of the book 33 the contemporary global landscape� Translation, as a universal creative and connective process, can be put to work in the classroom in a way that unleashes larger dynamics of epistemological and political creativity via what Pratt calls ‘the pedagogical arts of the contact zone’. (An appendix to the volume explores cognate issues in the German EFL classroom.) The conclusion takes up chapter 13’s notion of the blackboard as the ‘fourth wall’ of the translation, looking at a very real, if ephemeral blackboard-wall that could be found as a street-art intervention for a short period in inner-city Johannesburg. That blackboard addresses its audiences in a number of languages—English, Zulu, Afrikaans, and ‘textese’—to ask what they dream of doing in the time ‘before they die’. Each addressee is invited, in the language of her or his choice, to fill in the blank line (‘Before I die_______’) just as they must, willy-nilly, fill the interval of the remaining days of their life. The blank or empty space invites readerly participation in the form of writing� The space between the wall and the street, between the words and the world, becomes a spatio-temporal and linguistic-existential ‘contact zone’. Participation generates transformation between the poles of concretely embodied language and language-borne humans. Writing the blank space of an ongoing and future life happens within the tensile fabric of a life-being-lived between various actants� The street in Johannesburg thus becomes a South-South translation—doubtless a very circuitous one—of the Chinese cosmologies expounded by François Jullien in his work on seventeenth-century neoconfucianism (1989, 2016). Those cosmologies posit that between paired opposites—night and day, light and dark, mountain and water, emptiness and fullness—a constant flow of energy, a translative exchange of information, takes place in such a way as to disqualify these pairs as polarized binaries because their relationship is one of dynamic transformation. The difference that pertains between them is the difference between the phases of a ceaseless process of transformation ( Jullien 1989)—the pulse of life itself, its undulating expanse. Life ‘adheres’ to itself in its persistence by ‘disadhering’ to itself in its energetic push through the stages of a restless self-transformation ( Jullien 2016: 17-39). Even the description, the writing that package this presentation—indeed, the translative (and transliterative! ) work, both cultural and linguistic, that precedes it, within a genealogy running from Wang Fuzhi to Tan Sitong to Mao Zedong to François Jullien ( Jullien 1989: 14)—are instances of the immense, vibrant ‘contact zone’ that is life as cosmic translation. Join in by reading on, never forgetting that you will be translating all the way� Plan of the book 35 PART 1: Translation in theory From translation in culture to culture as translation 37 Chapter 1: Turning Translation From the 1980s onwards, translators finally got their long-awaited turn to have a ‘turn’ (Robinson 1991; Snell-Hornby 2006), emerging from the marginality of a secondary, derivative and often elided practice to the fully-fledged status of a cultural practice and an academic discipline (Venuti 1998). After the famous ‘linguistic turn’ that inaugurated structuralism and poststructuralism, a number of other ‘sub-turns’ followed, among them the ‘translational turn’ (Bachmann-Medick 2007: 238-81). This ‘turn’ was in reality already a double affair: the cultural turn in translation studies, which had hitherto been a largely technical and instrumentalist discipline, was followed by a translative turn in cultural studies� Translation studies were released from a restricted text-linguistic base centred on questions of original and derivative status, measures of ‘fidelity’, to explore the manifold cultural processes of cross-border communication, cross-cultural negotiation and so on in a much broader sense� Subsequently translation studies emerged as a cultural paradigm in their own right� These incremental shifts away from a narrow notion of translation as an exclusively linguistic process of semantic transfer between natural or even national languages did not, however, go unresisted� Rather, such successive border infringements were registered with increasing disapproval by putative guardians of disciplinary purity. In this opening chapter I wish to use that moment of resistance as a heuristic device to interrogate the very notion of a translational border and point to possible ways of overcoming it in an even more radical manner� From translation in culture to culture as translation What took centre stage in the new version of culturalist translation studies or translational (above all postcolonial: Bassnett and Trivedi, eds 1999; Niranjana 1992) cultural studies was a version of translation drawn from anthropology. That vision of translation as a mode of anthropological hermeneutics imagined how local cultural practices need to be ‘translated’ by the outside interpreter within a whole context of meaning, generating a method that Appiah, building of course upon Geertz’s (1993: 3-30) ‘thick description’, calls ‘thick translation’ (Appiah 1993). With a slight shift of cultural and disciplinary context, colonial and postcolonial histories came to be seen as long processes—going far back of course 38 Chapter 1: Turning Translation into precolonial histories—of cross-cultural translation that were always already imbued with unequal power relations and hierarchies of access to voice, representation and the technology of transmission: what Pratt (1991: 37), already quoted above, has called ‘the literate arts of the contact zone’: ‘Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression’. From translation as a cultural practice, whose meaning spread metonymically from its ‘origin’ in standard interlingual translation as part of the process of imperial conquest (Mufti 2016: 103-7) or the more localized and embedded practices of agents such as native interpreters, the concept then congealed, via a chiastic inversion, into a metaphor, that of culture as translation (e.g. Budick and Iser, eds, 1996). This slide from translational metonymy to translation as metaphor might be seen as an example of ‘concept drift’ (Tsymbal 2004). The complexities of such ‘drift’ could however be exemplified by the protagonist of Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s L’étrange destin de Wangrin (1992), an interpreter in colonial French West Africa (Bâ himself was born in Mali, worked in Senegal and died in Côte d’Ivoire) who exploits his median position between colonizer and colonized, between North and South, to plunder the rich and give to the poor. His colonial identity, which emerges out of a crucial activity of translative negotiation between colonizers and colonized, is intertwined with a residual trickster role drawn from Fula oral narrative traditions, where the ambiguity of translation and betrayal, traduction et trahison , traduttore traditore , is constantly in play. Here culture itself comes to be seen as the translation of traditions from one epoch to another, with the colonial moment as one where the betrayal by the native of her or his own culture is a constant haunting guilt (Bewes 2011) or at the very least a complex knot to be incessantly negotiated. Various types of translation as cultural practice are intertwined here, but they are overshadowed by a sense of culture itself as a precarious translative practice threatened by the disruptive inroads of the colonizing culture. In Bâ’s (1960) own words, ‘En Afrique, quand un vieillard meurt, c’est une bibliothèque qui brûle’ [‘In Africa, when an old man dies, a library is burnt down’]. By the same token however, culture as a translative process can survive this process of erosion if its imminent disappearance is palliated by resistant, restorative forms of translation as a type of ‘counter-memory’ (Foucault 1977). Convesely, translation as a cultural process may itself play a restorative, reparative or compensatory role in such contexts (Bandia 2014; Batchelor 2009). Indeed, in many cases, the difference between the two chiastically mirrored versions of the translational turn may, as the figure of chiasmus itself suggests, be inextricably intertwined with each other. In contemporary South Africa, with its 11 official languages, translation is a constant feature of the everyday Defending and infringing the translational border 39 business of negotiating multiple overlapping and adjacent ethnic identities—in ways that are not always harmonious, and may bear the traces of or overflow into naked violence (Sanders 2007, 2016). At this point, where the entire national project of the ‘rainbow nation’ and the reality of its often racist everyday manifestations become visible, translation takes on an unsuspected prominence. For instance, the employment of ‘shibboleths’ that foreigners in the townships have often been asked to translate in order to establish their ethnic belonging (or lack thereof) as a prelude to discrimination and violence, shows how the difference between cultural practices of translation, and culture as translation becomes virtually untenable� Defending and infringing the translational border The notion of ‘translating lives’ (Besemeres and Wierzbicka, eds 2007), marked by a clearly processual suffix referring both to the everyday business of code-switching as well as autobiographical accounts thereof, remains stubbornly referential� By contrast, however, the poetic implementation of metaphoric notions of translation, as in Rushdie’s famous ‘we are translat ed men’ (1992: 16) or Steiner’s (2009) ‘translat ed people’, with its substantializing suffix, when in turn translated into the work of scholarly analysis, has raised the hackles of many scholars committed to clear disciplinary demarcations� Using ‘translation’ as a figure to explain the ‘intertextual’ genealogies of architectural spaces (Kanekar 2015), for example, is seen as simply taking this too far. Berman (1985: 42-3), who will be a central figure in later stages of this book, criticizes an ungrounded ‘dépassement de sens’ [‘going beyond the limits of meaning’] in theories of a ‘traduction généralisée’ [‘generalized translation’] that he sees abusing a ‘une métaphorisation indue’ [‘an excessive metaphorization’] that slides over into a dangerously metonymic ‘vagabondage conceptuel’ [‘conceptual drifting’]. Sallis (2002: xi, 2-3) objects to the ‘excessive drift of the sense of translation’: ‘one may, with some legitimacy … insist on limiting the drift of translation, on restricting the sense of the word such that it applies only to certain linkages between signifiers in different languages and perhaps also between signifiers in a single language.’ What is strongly evident in such condemnations is a reactionary backlash against to the translations undergone by the very term of translation� What Jakobson (1959: 233) called ‘translation proper’, a term that is reiterated again and again in theoretical texts on translation (e.g. Eco 2003: 2), becomes a punitive conceptual instrument to be wielded against improper uses of the term� The business of assessing translation ‘fidelity’ or ‘equivalence’, core preoccu- 40 Chapter 1: Turning Translation pations of older versions of comparative translation studies (e.g. Nida 1964), is turned here against the term itself, so that only interlinguistic translation is judged worthy of the name� Other translation of the term may be conceptually ‘beautiful’—even seductive, or intellectually ‘sexy’—but not strictly ‘faithful’, to pirate a well-known and overtly sexist proverb. This underlying suspicion of conceptual promiscuity is applied to translation itself, that most promiscuous of cultural practices, in a fundamentally misogynistic gesture that seeks to contain conceptual generativity� Such efforts at containment may be doomed from the outset, undermining their own undertaking because the weapons they employ are contaminated by the evil they seek to extirpate. There is a flagrant performative contradiction at work here. Pym (2010: 159) points out that ‘translation’ or ‘Übersetzen’ are already ‘metaphors’, to the extent that they are spatial rather than temporal terms� In their everyday life in the public realm, translations generally exist within a diachronic relationship to each other, gesturing back towards a precursor already out of sight; only very rarely are they placed in a synchronic relationship for the purposes of academic comparative analysis. Thus, the spatializing tenor of ‘translation’ or ‘Übersetzen’ means that these terms are in fact misleading metaphors� To that extent, ‘translation proper’ would be an instance of a metaphor denying its own metaphoricity, repressing its own irreducible contagion through translation-by-metaphor. In similar manner, Sallis’ (2002: xi, 2-3) condemnation of improper ideas of translation as a purely metaphorical operation depends upon a metaphor of transfer itself (‘drift’). And in Berman’s critiques of ‘vagabondage’ [‘drifting’, ‘wandering’] one might perhaps detect a repressed acknowledgement of the joyful freedom and creativity of translation, embedded in the ‘metaphoricity’ (i.e., the replacement of one term by another) without which even the most rudimentary theories of translational equivalence cannot function. Indeed, it would seem that translation theory, all through its history, from the most elementary beginnings to the most recent, highly sophisticated models, is hopelessly riddled with vital and enabling, perhaps even indispensable metaphors of its own nature and activity (St. André, ed. 2014). Proceeding from these fundamentally self-defeating attempts to limit the ‘transfer’ of ‘translation’, I wish to interrogate that gesture of limitation in the rest of this book. This interrogation does not involve reading ‘translation proper’ against the grain (as I have just done in a deconstructive gesture) so much as allowing its repressed dynamism to seek its own paths. According to that autopoetic logic of exploration, the curtailed creativity of translative ‘catachresis’ will come to the fore below, at the moment at which terms coined by Berman such as ‘traduction généralisée’ or ‘vagabondage conceptuel’ re-emerge as positive concepts� Defending and infringing the translational border 41 Something like this is already visible, for instance, in Duarte’s (2008: 179, 181) critique of the way ‘a metáfora de traduç-o’ [‘the metaphor of translation’] generates a creeping progress of displacement: ‘de catacrese em catacrese, a traduç-o vai sendo sistemmaticamente colocada lado a lado com aquilo que parece ser uma série de sinónimos’. In this extraordinary sentence, a succession of catachresis means that translation finds itself ‘systematically’ shoved to one side or the other (‘colocada lado a lado’) by what appears to be a succession of synonyms (‘uma série de sinónimos’: negotiation, dislocation, rearticulation, transmutation, dissemination, differentiation, transvaloration, etc). The dislocation that Duarte disqualifies as a version of translation at the end of the sentence has, however, already contaminated the sentence from the outset as he seeks for a roughly physical metaphor (‘pushing to one side’) to express the damage done by these inadequately rigorous (but clearly muscular) concepts. And while he condemns metaphors of translation, it is in fact the metonymic process of ‘shoving to one side’ (i.e. displacement) and the ‘series of synonyms’ (the metonymic chain of signifiers) that does the shoving he condemns: what he would like to preserve is the referential copula of a ‘proper’ meaning of translation (translation=translation) that is in reality characteristic of the link between tenor and vehicle in metaphor. It would seem that Duarte needs metaphor as much as he disdains it. Most interestingly, he registers—and implicitly condemns—the concept of ‘catachresis’ as productive strategy (indexed by the doubling of the term itself in ‘de catacrese em catacrese’) working along the lines of metonymy (as indexed by the ‘de … em’ and the syntactic seriality of the doubling). Catachresis means the misuse of a term to produce different conceptual effects from those originally intended in the context of prior implementation. Catachresis is thus a very accurate way of describing translation, and not, as Duarte thinks, a symptom of the corruption of the notion of translation—that is, a dangerously inaccurate abuse of a spurious descriptor� By extension, catacresis therefore neatly characterizes the ‘abusive translation’ of translation—and thus what Lewis (1985) famously calls an ‘abusive fidelity’ to a term such as ‘translation’. Such ‘abusive fidelity’ works, in such a context, as a method for ‘developing a vigilance for systemic appropriations of the social capacity to produce a differential ’ (Spivak 1990: 228). Catachresis is a form of conceptual recycling that in fact might describe, if we were to perform catachresis up on the concept of catachresis itself, the basic dynamic of life—whether social or natural— as life: a series of encounters at points of difference that produce, within a broad framework of invariability, the variations that keep life, as it were, going—that is, that keep life alive. To this notion of translation as enlivening catachresis I will return again and again in this book. 42 Chapter 1: Turning Translation Translation and cultural catachresis Having explored and anticipated a very expansive and capaciously catachrestic notion of translation, I wish to return now to the notion of ‘culture’. Rather than defending the topos of ‘culture as translation’, I think it is worth examining the notion of culture that is equated, all too liberally in the eyes of some critics, with the process of translation. Culture itself is a translation, to the extent that it represents a ‘refinement’ and ‘elaboration’ of raw nature, as in the famous ‘raw’ vs. ‘cooked’ binary that provided Lévi-Strauss (1964) with a founding semiotic bifurcation� But deconstruction and common sense shows how close culture remains to that which putatively precedes and obviously pervades it, as for instance in agri culture or other practices that harness the generativity of nature and remain in close proximity—promiscuity perhaps—to that generativity. Here, it could be claimed that I am pushing the translation metaphor even further off the beaten track of literal meaning, far into the surrounding scrub. Here is a Heideggerian Holzweg (1972) if ever there was one! On the contrary, I would suggest that the process being activated here is the intentional exploitation of the ever-present blurring of culturally embedded practices of translation and translational practices as the essence of culture. I am in a sense responding to Serres’ (2008: 271) injunction, when he claims that ‘improvisation is a source of wonder … Think of anxiety as good fortune, self-assurance as poverty. Lose your balance, leave the beaten track, chase birds out of the hedges.’ To broaden the purview of translation to encompass ‘culture’ is not to wander away from translation proper so much as to turn back towards that which underpins it. This may sound like an extension of the Heideggerian metaphor employed above, but in fact what is meant is something rather different: not a metaphysical evocation of a conveniently abstract Dasein but a totality of material processes that are resolutely physical in their functioning� To focus on that always already active process of translation, which itself unceasingly operates the blurring that the translational ‘turn’ took as its vehicle, and to radicalize it, is not to embark upon a dangerous process of drift, a dérive , but if anything, to follow a track, to answer a call. It is to accept (if I may be permitted a tentative formulation whose structure will almost immediately have to be inverted) the interpellation of the natural substrata of interlingual translation, and to follow its beckonings. In Japanese nature tourism in the Canadian Rockies, the North American wilderness must be ‘translated’ by a Japanese tour guide for Japanese tourists (Satsuka 2015), yet underpinning this is the prior ‘translation’ of wilderness into a national park, a much-documented global project (e.g. Shetler 2007; Dlamini 2012, 2016), and underpinning that, in turn, are the manifold interactions of the natural world in itself. Yet even this Translation and cultural catachresis 43 example assumes a sort of triangular hierarchy, with genuine interlingual (and intercultural) translation at the top of the pyramid, and progressively less-literal but more widespread processes below. In what follows, I will seek to invert this triangle, so that universal cosmic process of translation—understood, to take only one possible approach, as the exchange of ‘information’ (see chapter 4 below)—generate the local variety of information exchange that we label interlingual translation� Here it may be worth picking up the most cogent caveat raised against translation as culturalist metaphor: namely, that by generalizing the activity of translation to include almost every cultural process, it elides the very real intellectual, institutional, economic, and thus material work of translators themselves, re-enacting just the sort of obfuscation of translation that Venuti (1995) militated against. How to envisage ‘a wide conceptual space for “translation without translations” ’ in Pym’s (2010: 150) pithy phrasing, that does not ‘throw away or belittle the work that professional translators do’? This is a genuine point of concern, one that grounds a powerful and significant critique, but it depends upon a further line of demarcation that transpires to be highly problematic� The caveat entails a notion of the figure of the translator which is based upon a plethora of mechanisms of professional corporatization and hence exclusion, even though translators themselves may be intercultural negotiators, polylingual middlemen and cross-border-guides in much of their everyday practice (Pym 1998: 160-76). The translator’s profession is already an embattled one, where various professional guilds, associations and qualifying exams regulate admission, obviously in the interests of maintaining standards and professional integrity, but also in the interests of lobby work and the preservation of privileges and monopolies� There are many permutations and combinations of translator competence and professionalism that are becoming more and more acute for instance as increasing numbers of ‘lay’ or ‘volunteer’ translators— from actors in ‘community interpretation’ through to the polylingual children of monolingual immigrants (Ahamer 2012)—are active or employed in public institutions such as hospitals, job centres, asylum-seekers’ screening centres, courts, and so on. The fraught question as to ‘who translates’ (Robinson 2001) may be interpreted as a question of individual, internal subjective identity and translative agency; by extension, however, it may equally be posed as a question of external, collective agency� The notion of socio-economic translator agency is one that is important, not least because it raises the issue of the boundaries that are placed around agency� The caveat raised under the banner of the real work of translators thus has as its subtitle: translators translate, culture does not—and certainly culture in its nonhuman, natural forms does not either. Clearly, however, this is a highly 44 Chapter 1: Turning Translation problematic distinction� Translators translate, but non-translators are translating all the time. Certainly human non-translators translate constantly—for instance, in the language and literature classroom, a context to which we will return in part 3 of this book. But do animals translate? Presumably they are doing so constantly, just as we translate the barked or miaouwed messages of our pets on an everyday basis. Do plants translate? It would seem that they do communicate with each other, and some of their communication may be metalinguistic communication about other beings’ communication, including forms of translation (Wohlleben 2015). Do rocks or mountains translate? What are we to make of a text such as Canadian novelist Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1998: 53) that tells us, ‘it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of the rock, fifty thousand years old.’ Is this mountain using the Geiger counter to translate its heart-beat into something approximately convertible to human language? In other words, where does translation start, and where does it stop? These questions may be taken as rhetorical flourishes, hyperbolic exercises in philosophical thought-experimentation on a par with Thomas Nagel’s (1974) classic enquiry, ‘What is it like to be a bat? ’ Certainly such questions can figure here to point out the difficulty of drawing a translative frontier on the maps of communicative interactions that make up the world. However, in this book, as will become clear in due course, such questions are meant literally, and are meant to be taken seriously: ‘it’s no metaphor …’, Michaels (1998: 53) assures us. Only one aspect of my question, ‘where does translation start, and where does it stop? ’, needs to be adjusted: my series of questions assumes the normative centrality of interlingual translation as the template against which we measure other beings’ translation-work. This normative centrality is a hidden assumption that I will be questioning through the entirety of the book. Just such a normativity underpins Even-Zohar’s meditations upon the notion of ‘transfer’ as a generalized operation that replicates translative movements across a plural range of cultural systems (whence the notion of ‘polysystems’ that underpins his theory). Translations are the local manifestation of larger cultural transfers� Translative transformations also generate cultural transformations, and thus polysystems theory seeks to explain a clear ‘correlation between transfer and transformation’ (1990: 20). Responding however to the perceived threat to the actual work of translators and theoretical analyses of that work posed by the expansion of the framework of analysis, Even-Zohar (1990: 74) acknowledges that ‘[s]ome people would take this as a liquidation of translation theory.’ Rebuffing this accusation, he maintains that Translation and cultural catachresis 45 the implication is quite the opposite: through a larger context, it will become even clearer that ‘translation’ is not a marginal procedure of cultural systems� Secondly, the larger context will help us identify the really particular in translation� Thirdly, it will change our conception of the translated text in such a way that we may perhaps be liberated from certain postulated criteria. And fourthly, it may help us isolate what ‘translational procedures’ consist of. (ibid: 74) Even-Zohar is at pains to preserve the specificity of translation as an interlingual activity within larger cultural process of exchange. Yet it is the pronounced centrality of ‘culture’ in this systemic theory that allows Even-Zohar to make a difference between interlingual and intercultural transformations, and thus between textual ‘translation’ and cultural ‘transfer’� This distinction, however, is silently transported to the outer periphery of Even-Zohar’s polysystems, so that ‘nature’ is excluded from these transformative processes. In the rest of this book, by contrast, I will be aguing that nature is the locus par excellence of transformation: ‘nature’ is a moniker for the sum total of transformative processes that constitute the planet. Thus Even-Zohar eloquently urges the enlargement of frameworks of analysis for the work of translators, but his commitment to respecting the specificity of their work leads him to insert brakes to this expansive process. It is exactly for this reason that in this book I choose ‘translation’ as the all-embracing term for transformative transfers of many types, without wishing in any way whatsoever to denigrate or diminish the work of translators in their everyday practice. Far from marginalizing their work, I wish to integrate it into much larger processes, processes that by far exceed the still limited realm of ‘culture’—thereby enhancing the status of interlingual translation rather than diminishing it� Thus, in the chapters that follow, although I take human written texts and the interlingual translation processes in which they are embedded as my primary object of analysis, I nonetheless assume the derivative character of human interlingual translation� The dérive or drift that so disturbs traditional translation theorists in actual fact points, indirectly, towards the derivative nature of human interlingual translation� That derivative character does not render textual translation a secondary or second-rate activity, but simply underscores the relational and interdependent nature of all human activity. It is high time we realized that ‘interdependent’ does not mean ‘secondary’ or ‘second-rate’: this residual paranoia of Enlightenment individualism is well past its use-by date and a new understanding of interdependency is long overdue� 46 Chapter 1: Turning Translation The relationality of translation The ‘relational’ notion of translation that I am proposing here draws on a sociological model of power elaborated by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon that suggests that power as a reified quality possessed by single actors is a myth. Instead, they propose a notion of power that can only be exerted with the support of other social actors or associates who aid in its implementation, albeit while often diverting its intended goals for their own aims� Programmatically, Latour contrasts ‘a diffusion model of power in which a successful command moves under an impetus given it from a central source’ to a translation model in which such a command, if it is successful, results from the actions of a chain of agents each of whom ‘translates’ it in accordance with his/ her own projects. (Latour 1986: 264) The mobile character of translation, its fundamental operation of transport or ‘displacement’ (typically of a text, from one language to another) generates a different notion of agency: ‘displacement [of the order or command or token of power] … is the consequence of the energy given to the token by everyone in the chain who does something with it’ (ibid: 268). As Latour (ibid: 264) explains, ‘[i]n the translation model the study of society therefore moves … to a study of methods of association.’ Callon (1986: 223) makes this point even more explicit: To translate is to displace … but to translate is also express in one’s own language what others say and want, why they act in they way they do and associate with each other; it is to establish oneself as a spokesman. In other words, displacement is not simply spatial, it also effects the nature of the utterance, statement, command, or information being transmitted, because each translative relay in some way ‘traduces’ or abuses or distorts the statement being conveyed as a result of the translators’ own agendas� This is why the actors in this multi-actantial model of translation are not mere ‘transmitters’, but actively intervening—indeed interfering—translators who transform the message they convey because it is useful for their own aims: the chain is made of actors —not of patients—and since the token [or core message] is in everyone’s hands in turn, everyone shapes it according to their different projects. This is why it is called a model of translation. The token changes as it moves from hand to hand and the faithful transmission of a statement becomes a single and unusual case among many, more likely, others. (Latour 1986: 268) The relationality of translation 47 In this book, I will be drawing upon this generalized notion of translation in which a multitude of actors participate as they secure their position in the order of things by inserting themselves in a process of transmitted social dynamism� However, rather than concentrating upon the trajectory of a statement or command or token—or a text—as it travels from one transmitter/ translator to another, I would like to focus upon the multiple moments of translation: ‘Instead of the transmission of the same token—simply deflected or slowed down by friction—you get, in the second model, the continuous transformation of the token’ (Latour 1986: 268). It is this ‘continuous transformation of the token’ that interests me as a generalized process, out of which single moments of translative exchange can be isolated and examined, some of which will be instances of interlingual translation. If we take Latour at his word, and accept that every communal event in the dynamic maintenance of society is a translative act, this in turn should bring us to re-assess translation as a generic operation, as one that is central to the existence of society, and see every encounter as a transmission of social energy (Greenblatt 1987) that is inevitably a transformation. In other words, Latour uses ‘translation’ in a very general sense to sketch a model of collaborative, multi-actantial chains of information, in which the progress of the ‘token’ would not be possible except via the co-agency of the ‘translators’; these in turn transform the ‘token’ at every instance of exchange, where transformation itself devolves from the multiple interests of dispersed co-actants. Latour is not talking about translation in the interlingual sense here, but his model allows us to rethink interlingual translation as a subset of the much broader processes he is describing and/ or modelling here� Significantly, Latour (1986: 279 n18) acknowledges the similarity of his model of power to that of Foucault, with his notion of micro-power(s) and diffused ‘dispositifs’ or apparatuses of power (Foucault 1975; 1976). In this book, I’m less interested in the notion of socially refacted and diffused power than in the idea of translation that underpins it, and in the possibility, hinted at by Latour’s nod to Foucault, of a diffusion of translation that would make it the key to agency: every transformative encounter between actants beyond the nature/ society divide would be a transmissive-translative-transformative engagement� Blurring the nature society divide is a crucial move here, because it is the central moment of a true generalization of translation as a generic operation. Lest we complain that this blurring is an artificially imposed, even ideological move, it is worth paying heed to Callon (1986: 200-1), who confirms this suspicion, albeit for unexpected reasons: ‘The observer must abandon all a priori distinctions between natural and social events … These divisions are considered to be conflictual, for they are the result of analysis rather than its point of departure.’ In other words, the nature/ society divide is a division imposed upon a previous system 48 Chapter 1: Turning Translation of entangled realities of words and things, a realm of magical ‘correspondences’, what Foucault (1966: 32-59; 2002: 19-50) once called the ‘prose of the world’. This division of the world into the opposed realms of human society and nature, dating from the late 1600s (Latour 2006), lays the basis for subsequent operations upon reality rather than being embedded in its ontological fabric� To that extent the ‘great divide’ must be constantly reasserted via a multitude of performative epistemic speech acts over centuries that reinforce and maintain its aura of reality, making the non-naturalness of society a ‘natural’ phenomenon (for a parallel argument about gender see Butler 1990). These repeated speech acts are ‘conflictual’ in Callon’s turn of phrase, because they involve a repeated ‘violence done to things’ (Foucault 1971: 55). Translation understood thus is therefore the process of coopted ontological dynamism arising out of interactions between a multiplicity of actants, whether human or nonhuman, that constitutes the vibrant, mobile be-ing of the world. In sum, then, to quote Callon (1986: 224), ‘Translation is a process before it is a result … Translation is the mechanism by which social and natural world progressively take form.’ Here we glimpse the positive, almost jubilant face of what Berman (1985: 42-3), albeit in disapproving tone of voice, calls a ‘traduction généralisée’ [‘generalized translation’]—not however as an implausible extension of an unfounded metaphorization of translation, but as the recognition of the dynamic, material, even cosmic matrix out of which interlingual translation is an offshoot. Building upon the notion of ‘translation’ elaborated by Latour and Callon, the contention of the present book is that translation is an activity taking place everywhere and always, at the smallest and greatest microand macro-levels of material existence. By extension, I posit, human translation is a mere derivative subset of translation activity in general. Interlingual translation is a sub-translation of translation� The caveat raised about the material agency of translators is important not because it allows one to draw a distinction, but rather, because it draws attention to the real nature of this generalized translation. Translation is work: it is the material work done by a multiplicity of actors that allows them to exist, but far more, it is the interactive exchange of ‘information’ out of which they in fact emerge� Translation, then, is the essential substance of the underlying processuality of life itself� Translation and natural generativity are synonymous with one another� This is the primary argument that underpins the present book. In a subsequent secondary argument, the notion of the cosmic universal of translation will be folded back upon a single ‘natural’ and ‘national’ language, German, to suggest an inherent hybridity and translative nature of the language itself� The following chapters of the first part of this book stage a double movement. First, in chapters 2 and 3, I orchestrate a contractive movement that suggest that The relationality of translation 49 human language is actually only a very minor part of the larger cosmic business of the exchange of information. Here, I examine anthropological theories elaborated by Kohn, Viveiros de Castro and Ingold. Second, in chapter 4, I rehearse an expansive movement that elevates translation from a restricted linguistic operation to a universal operator of information exchange. I call upon the work of Michel Serres and Juri Lotman to explore these ideas. Building upon this double movement, a third moment in the argument (chapter 5) uses the same double scaling of great and small to introduce a theory of quantum translation� Finally, in chapter 6, I turn back to German as a national language to ask what a quantum theory of translative linguistics might do to our conception of civic subjecthood informed and infused by a particular natural language� Wood, Melbourne © Russell West-Pavlov, 2007. Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist The Aranda people of Central Australia have a vibrant and ongoing tradition of ‘sand storytelling’ in which narratives are simultaneously recounted orally and performed via drawings on the ground� The narratives are plurisemiotic: they combine the human voice, a broad palette of narrative structures, and a ‘drawing space’. The latter can be marked by the finger or by sticks or pieces of wire (which also become pointers ostending the accompanying gestures of the storyteller), but it also provides a performance arena where icons of story characters formed by sticks or leaves, or of other everyday entities such as shelters, shades, windbreaks and fire pits can be positioned (Green 2014: 1-2). The ‘sand stories’ of this Indigenous people of Australia are fascinating because their plurisemiotic idiom participates in all the registers identified by Peirce. It is simultaneously symbolic (a stick may stand for a person) but also iconic (the stick is the firwood it signifies; ibid: 16-19) and also indexical (all of the signs are closely linked, spatially, causally and associatively, to both banal everyday and ceremonial places and practices). More then this, however, the semiotic elements of the ‘sand stories’ are linked via their common physical environment, which is also their material base, that of the earth, known in Indigenous speech as ‘Country’. The earth is not merely the material space of inscription for these Indigenous storytelling traditions in a manner analogous to its existential support for traditional and modern lifestyles. ‘Country’ signifies far more than a pragmatic base for livelihood. ‘Country’ implies a sacred element derived from the fact that the land is the embodiment of the still-present Dreaming ancestors who created the earth. To that extent, the land has agency—the agency that consists in sustaining life in a never-ending process of creation� That agency in turn has implications for language� Thus the ground, once it is reframed within the perspective of ‘Country’, is not merely a surface of inscription that can be written upon by storytellers alongside the other semiotic resources at their disposal (voice, gesture, arrangement of natural objects). Far more, the land has its own language, and this means that it is always readable—even when human actants do not inscribe or narrate it. Indigenous people are skilled in reading the signs in the landscape, made by other humans, animals, the wind, water, or indeed the ancestors themselves as they are embodied in animals or natural features. As Green (2014: 2) notes, 52 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist The use of the ground for illustrative and explanatory purposes is pervasive in the environment of Central Australia where there is ample inscribable ground, and this attention to the surface of the ground arises partly from a cultural preoccupation with observing the information encoded on its surface� Traces of this attitude are evident when one of Indigenous author Kim Scott’s interlocutors, gesturing to an adjacent place, notes, ‘That story comes from over there’ (Scott 2005: 220). Another Indigenous storyteller, Bill Neidjie, says, ‘that story … e came from the sea / Came up Mali Bay, north from here’ (1989: 40). Stories are embedded in Country and arise out of its materiality. Thus the title of the collaborative work assembled by Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country (1984), is in no way metaphorical or figurative, as evinced in many of the placed-based stories by Paddy Roe included in the book. In the Indigenous Australian world, the ‘land speaks’ (Berndt and Berndt 1989) in ways that are not merely attributed to it by humans. Rather, the land’s speech is coeval with its creative agency. Humans read that language of and in the land as part of their custodial responsibility to ‘Country’, a responsibility that recognizes the primacy of the land over and above human agency, the latter being devolved and derived from the former. Humans are invested with custodial duties that include narrative as well as ecological curatorship. Speaking of traditional dance, Galarrwuy Yunupingu (qtd in Ashcroft 2001: 140) says, ‘When I perform the land is within me … So I perform whatever I do on behalf of the land’; for performance one could equally read language and narration here. The curatorial relationship to the land involves narrative responsebility as a form of translation. This conception of language places it first and foremost in the natural cosmos, and sees the creative agency of language as being coeval with the creative dynamic of the physical world itself. It is a conception that stems pre-eminently from the Global South. (It also gives rise to a peculiarly Global South-derived notion of translation that is located in particular, specific sites.) The project of this book is attentive to this ‘imperative of place’ (Kinsella and West-Pavlov 2018) as it issues immanent statements about itself as the primordial creative idiom and of semiotic vernaculars as offshoots of that idiom. A residual sense of this primordial language of the natural world as the enfolding context out of which a lesser human speech emerges can also be found in non-Indigenous contexts. Such a sensibility is manifest in Thoreau’s (2016: 104) injunction uttered from Walden Pond in rural nineteenth-century Massachusetts� Thoreau notes that while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are but themselves but dialects and provincial, Language beyond language 53 we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard� Much is published, but little printed� Thoreau’s claim is that the language of the world speaks without metaphor. Like those who combat translation-as-metaphor, metaphor is for him a dirty word� But the relationship between word and world that Thoreau understands as the purview of metaphor is exactly the inverse of those who combat lazy, undisciplined metaphors. For Thoreau it is when language is ‘properly’ ‘confined’ within an identity with itself that metaphor weakens and diminishes language. For him, in direct contrast to the guardians of translation purity, the ‘drift’ towards the world gives language back its true stature. The ‘drift’ towards the language of things is not metaphorical: Thoreau means it literally. Nor is it (literally) metaphorical in its workings: the drift functions via metonymy, that is, via contiguity� The language of things is a language of direct contacts, touchings, causalities, exchanges that are material and concrete, even as they are filled with signs and semiotic processes: ‘all things … speak’. Thoreau’s notion of a universal language of things demotes ‘books, though the most select and classic, and … particular written languages’ to the role of ‘dialects’ whose status is merely ‘provincial’. But if this may look like a diminishment of language, it is also an unparalleled and far superior enhancement of language. Thoreau’s gesture, like the ‘sand stories’ of the Aranda people, locates language within a metonymic network of worldliness that awards it a greater richness, which in turn devolves from the limitless context in which it finds itself. Language beyond language At first glance, Thoreau’s claim may seem to have little to do with translation. Translation is an operation that takes place between natural (human) languages, and, if we are to accept the culturalists’ extension of the term’s scope, between other practices of culture that have structures similar to that of language� The psychoanalyst, for instance, might be seen as a translator of the unconscious, which, as Lacan (1981: 20) famously claimed, posing as a ‘translator of Freud’, is structured like a language (see also Benjamin 1989). Thoreau is not per se interested in translation. He is, however, interested in boundaries of language and how they can be pushed to the utmost limits of the universe. If the operation of translation crosses borders between languages, and these borders themselves begin to shift—the question is, how far? —then translation may find itself venturing into realms far riskier and unknown than merely those of ‘culture’. 54 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist Anthropology is one of the sites where this may happen. Dealing with what were once known as ‘Naturvölker’, ‘nature-peoples’ in the German terminology, anthropology travels close to the borders of the human, not in the sense of the denigration of peoples deemed ‘different’ to us, but rather, in the sense of a recognition of the limitations of the very category of the human itself� An anthropology endowed with a strong sense of self-reflexivity finds itself journeying towards the outer peripheries of the human where natural entities possess personhood and speak (Descola 2005). For this reason, I shall turn in what follows to several anthropological texts. In such an undertaking, translation may thus become a central operating device in the negotiation of borders as we enter territories that were once deemed far beyond the reach of language� Translation may transpire to be a crucial instrument for dissecting and perhaps abducting that soon-to-be-extinct creature known as ‘man’. This, in turn, will have radical consequences for the ways we understand what was once known as language—in particular those zones of speech generally understood as national languages� This is why the apparently ‘premodern’ traditions of ‘sand stories’ maintained to this day by the Aranda people, and Thoreau’s claim, less dated but also quaint, are nonetheless so radical and revolutionary� This is also why such practices and claims may still be so deeply necessary to any fundamental transformation of ‘the image of Man as a rational animal endowed with language’ (Braidotti 2013: 143), which in turn provides the template for those collective speaking entities that we label nations, with their particular national languages. After the moments of Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud and Saussure, autonomous, intentional, rational man is no longer on the scene. But language remains. In the post-Enlightenment worldview, language is no longer seen as the expression of rational intentions, but rather, as symptoms of irrational desires� The subject no longer expresses himself through language; rather, language as the unconscious now speaks the subject. Dangerously, the national spirit may be what speaks through the language, thereby animating patriotic, even extreme nationalist subjects; language is one site of the violent and atavistic distinction between us and them� Nonetheless, language, though it is now the master of the human, guarantees by proxy the primacy of the human, because the human being remains a primarily linguistic creature� This proxy character may all too easily fall into the hands of dictatorial regimes: we must beware� The poststructural displacement of language offers little protection against the solipsistic and paranoid micro-languages of social media, nor against populist rhetoric� This is why the task is to displace language as well, to relocate it as one (rather humble) means of communicative exchange among others, opening communication up to a Provincializing language … or not 55 much larger community of actants—and thus of potential political allies—than merely that of humans� Notions of the hybridity of language, by which language is forcibly opened up to its own multiplicity—as, say, in Herbrechter’s (1999: 311) claim that ‘there is not one language from which one could start translating into another. Language always differs from itself; there is no self-contained (national) language which can remain in a fixed state’—are mere cosmetic adjustments to a fundamental singularity of language. Linguistic pluralism, whether among or within languages, is merely an additive reform to a notion of linguistic exceptionalism; linguistic pluralism may palliate that exceptionalism but will never really transform it� This is because the deep structure of the very notion of the natural language is from the outset predicated upon a set of premises of difference: natural language assumes the idea of its fundamental difference from its environs. Human languages may be admitted as plural, and their nature as hybrid, but language itself is singular and exceptional� Only when we admit that language itself is part of a tapestry of multifarious and infinitely variegated exchanges extending across the natural world, will it be truly possible to understand what a hybridity of language might really mean� And only then will it be truly possible to establish a notion of contemporary society where language is truly a contact zone, not merely between various human languages, but between human agency and many others. This book focuses on translation as the privileged figure of the moment of exchange, one that is both instantiated and thematized in many translations into and from the German language� Provincializing language … or not Thoreau (2016: 104) claims that ‘particular written languages … are but themselves but dialects and provincial’ in contrast to ‘the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard’. How difficult—but also how crucial—this task of radically rethinking the cosmic hybridity of language and the subsidiary character of human language may be is illustrated by a detailed examination of a recent work of anthropology, Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013). Explicitly seeking to move Anthropology beyond the Human —as Kohn’s book announces in its subtitle—his project includes the task of ‘provincializing language’ as one of its subchapters (ibid: 38-42). Calqued on both Thoreau’s injunction and Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), Kohn announces that ‘we need to “provincialize” language’ (2013: 38). He does 56 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist this within the context of Amazonian culture in the Napo Province of Ecuador. Seeking to displace the centrality of human language, Kohn (ibid: 8) stresses that [n]on-human life-forms also represent the world. This more expansive understanding of representation is hard to appreciate because our social theory—whether humanist or posthumanist, structuralist or poststructuralist—conflates representation with language� Kohn (ibid: 8) explains that ‘signs also exist well beyond the human (a fact that changes how we should think of human semiosis as well). Life is constitutively semiotic. That is, life is, through and through, the product of sign processes.’ All beings are involved in a range of semiotic processes: In Peirce’s terminology these other modalities (in broad terms) are either ‘iconic’ (involving signs that share likenesses with the things they represent) or ‘indexical’ (involving signs that are in some way affected by or otherwise correlated with those things they represent). In addition to being symbolic creatures we humans share these other semiotic modalities with the rest of nonhuman biological life. (ibid: 9) All beings, or at least all living beings (this is in itself a significant distinction Kohn makes to which I shall return in a moment) use semiotic forms such as the ‘Iconic’ and the ‘Indexical’. So far, so good. However, at his point, Kohn does an abrupt about-turn. His subsequent subchapter is entitled ‘The Feeling of Radical Separation’ (ibid: 42-9). Having just evoked an ‘open whole’ (ibid: 27-68) in which all beings are involved in semiotic work, he immediately re-introduces a differentiation between types of semiotic activity� Kohn employs the above-mentioned Peircean triad of icon, index and symbol, which is articulated according to progressive degrees of distance from the visual form of the thing itself: the icon imitates its referent visually; the index is connected to the referent via contiguity, causality or association; and the symbol is connected to its referent entirely arbitrarily by the mere force of convention� Kohn wields this triad of progressive distance between types of sign and referent to re-install a distinction—a distance—that separates the human from the non-human� Kohn explains, symbols, those kinds of signs that are based on convention (like the English word dog ), which are distinctively human representational forms, and whose properties make human language possible, actually emerge from and relate to other modalities of representation. (ibid: 9) ‘Emergence’ here is a multilayered word that needs some unpacking. On the one hand, it refers to the notion of ‘emergence’ used by cybernetics and systems theory to describe the way complexity develops. Kohn (ibid: 54) stresses that ‘[t] Provincializing language … or not 57 he symbolic is a prime example of … an emergent dynamic … in which particular configurations of constraints on possibility result in unprecedented properties at a higher level�’ On the other hand, though, it carries with it a hint of escape or liberation: emergence as increasing complexity parallels emergence from a constraining simplicity� This accounts, Kohn says, ‘for the sense of separation … that the symbolic creates’ (ibid: 54). He hastens to add that the symbolic, though ‘emergent with respect to other semiotic modalities’, that is, the iconic and the indexical, does not lose its links with the more rudimentary semiotic forms from which it arises; ‘something that is emergent is never cut off from that which it came and within which it is nested because it still depends on their more basic levels for its properties’ (ibid: 54). Emergence in this sense carries a secondary meaning of residual connectivity adhering, however minimally, to the structure left behind� This sense, however, is one that Kohn sees as entirely subsidiary� Kohn clearly imagines the freedom of the symbolic within (but also from) the iconic and the indexical in ways that are analogous to and inform the freedom of the human within (but from) the natural world. The freedom of the symbolic is directly responsible, Kohn says, ‘for the sense of separation … that the symbolic creates’ (ibid: 54). By contrast, he stresses the relationship of ‘dependency’ that binds the symbolic/ human to the iconic-indexical/ natural realm, thereby foregrounding the limiting nature of this connection rather the enabling aspect of ‘nesting’� Kohn’s choice of vocabulary patently privileges the sense of escape from irritating constraints that characterizes the humanist narrative of progressive emancipation from the limits of nature. By the same token, his choice of terms marginalizes the enabling synergy and symbiosis with nature that, we now know, humankind can ignore only at its peril. Zooming out to a larger scale, Kohn suggest that ‘[l]ife … is an emergent threshold’, that ‘[l]iving dynamics are constitutively semiotic’, and that ‘[t]he semiosis of life is iconic and indexical’ (ibid: 54). Life, thus, is part of the lower level of self-organization that emergent complexities such as the symbolic exceed� The threshold appears to be the site where the human moves beyond mere life to a superior level of complexity. This is a remarkable and bizarre notion, given the by now widely-recognized and almost common-sense body of research that sees the entirety of life as a gigantic process of emergent complexity (Capra 1983: Capra and Luisi 2014; Gleick 1988; Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Humanity is part of that complexity, not a superior form of complexity that somehow escapes mere biological complexity. In the later parts of this chapter, where I discuss the work of Viveiros de Castro and Ingold, I will suggest that life is a term without an exterior, and that language is part of the fabric of the emergent complexity of life� These theorists do not draw a frontier between 58 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist life and complexity, but take life, with its constitutive processes of emergent complexity, as the overarching term� Language is most definitely not exterior to or above the emergent complexity of the living. In the domain of language, then, the symbolic is coeval with, and both iconically and indexically informed and driven by the emergent complexity of life itself� Translation is one of the expressions of the creative innovation that arises within with fabric of linguistic life as part of that larger domain of life� By contrast, Kohn entrenches the old hierarchy of human superiority even as he appears to liberalize its ancien régime . Even within the laudable project of ‘provincializing language’ so as to democratize the global society of humans and nonhumans, and deposing language from its hierarchical position as the marker of human supremacy and admitting it as a medium common to all species, Kohn retains a pecking order. He does ‘provinzialize’ language to the extent that he admits that some forms of the non-human world employ some forms of language (namely, the iconic and indexical registers). But in effect, even if he has ceded some territory, making language a province, that province still has a capital city, ‘symbolic language’, which is firmly under the control of humans. In effect, little has changed at the fundamental structural level. Humans continue to use language to set up language as the criteria of humanity as an exclusive category� What becomes particularly visible at this juncture, however, is a circular structure of argumentation that I interrogate below. Because Kohn claims so persuasively to ‘provinzialize’ language and thus to let ‘forests think’, it is all the more important to scrutinize the recuperative work of hierarchy-building that he carries under the smoke screen of putative inclusiveness. In what follows, I rehearse two principle objections in an attempt to sketch alternative models of translation within the natural world. Objection 1.1: Self-referentiality, systemicity, sovereignty The first objection (which, for the sake of clarity, I divide into two parts) pertains to the patently self-referential, indeed solipsistic character of Kohn’s argumentation. The procedure by which this mode of self-reference—which is also a performative exclusion—operates, is illustrated by Kohn’s statement that ‘I am now in a position to account for the sense of separation … that the symbolic creates’ (ibid: 54). The symbolic creates difference that is then in turn fed back into an assertion of difference, which in turn is recorded in the symbolic, with the latter becoming a mirror in Lacan’s sense of the word, the basis for an Imaginary sense of self-as-separate from the world. The ‘symbol’, ‘I’, founds itself in calling upon its own symbolic character to ‘account’ (retrospectively, and retroactively, Objection 1.1: Self-referentiality, systemicity, sovereignty 59 as if gazing back at something that pre-existed it) for the very separation that its symbolic character has created� Kohn performs here an operation that is mgnificently tautological. He draws a broad distinction between humans and the nonhuman world, despite his nominal provincialization of language, on the basis of the symbolic function of language—the only aspect of language that is truly loosed from an attachment to things. But the autonomy of language that defines humans is in fact predicated upon that which it founds. Autonomous humans wield autonomous language which defines autonomous humans who wield autonomous language … and so on, ad infinitum � Symbolic language thus founds a tautological structure that is as closed in upon itself as the self-justifying structure of human sovereignty that Kohn defends via language—circular, self-referential, impervious to interrogation from outside its charmed circle of self-assurance� This in itself is remarkably problematic as the core operation of a closely argued scholarly work that claims to unseat the human from its throning position over the creation� A further point to make in this respect necessitates a more systematic—and systemic—analysis of Kohn’s rhetoric. What Kohn rehearses resembles a narrative performance of the mechanism of meaning-production analyzed by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. Such mechanisms depend upon the fundamental differentiations that underpin what Luhmann calls social semantics: Am Anfang steht … nicht Identität, sondern Differenz. Nur das macht es möglich, Zufällen Informationswert zu geben und damit Ordnung aufzubauen; denn Information ist nichts anderes als ein Ereignis, das eine Verknüpfung von Differenzen bewirkt—a difference that makes a difference. (Luhmann 1984: 112; English in original, quoting Bateson ) [Thus one begins not with identity but with difference. Only thus can one give accidents informational value and thereby construct order, because information is nothing more than an event that brings about a connection between differences—a difference that makes a difference. (Luhmann 1995: 75)] An inaugural act of demarcation between inside and outside, between self and other, between system and environment, which however, in itself is invisible, offers nothing more than a starting point for differential meaning-making. We need, effectively, a distinction in order to observe a distinction (Reese-Schäfer 1992: 72-3). Thus we need a second-order act of observation to operationalize the originary distinction� The latter allows us to get started, but not, as it were, to go anywhere. Luhmann notes, Es [das Subjekt] kann nur sehen, was es mit dieser Unterscheidung sehen kann. Es kann nicht sehen, was es nicht sehen kann. (Luhmann 1992: 85) 60 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist [The subject can only see what it can see with the aid of this distinction. It cannot see what it cannot see�] The second-order observation is an observation of an observation� This second-order act is simultaneously a description and an inscription, which in turn calls forth re-inscriptions—again and again. The system is not a stable state, but depends upon constant re-assertions of its constitutive borders� The system is a performative, one that self-produces in the act of declaring the substance of its own conditions of possibility� Kohn’s own formulation of the symbolic is of course itself such a statement, not only because it declares the existence of a fundamental separation in the very act of describing the conditions of that separation, but because it also stresses the difference inaugurated by the medium of the Symbolic in the medium of the Symbolic� It is hardly a coincidence by chance that what we witness here is the self-inauguration of a system that is, in the last analysis, ungrounded. The difference is not a pre-existing fact of nature. Rather, the difference created by language must be asserted via a language of difference. In bringing something into existence in act of futurity, the inaugural act conceals its inaugural status by claiming that what it has created has always existed, thereby grounding and legitimizing its claims. Yet these claims are patently false: the statement is self-legitimizing. There are further comments that need to be made regarding this structure so as to place it in a broader historical context and thus to identify the surprisingly wide-reaching implications of Kohn’s thinking. Objection 1.2: Historical precursors: Enlightenment, the colonies, the Holocaust As I have just suggested, Kohn’s rhetoric displays all the features of systemic closure as defined in Luhmann’s system theory: drawing a border, observing that border, and filtering information from outside the border so as to maintain internal coherence� But the system and its closure is not merely synchronic in character� Thus several contexts can be identified as providing the genealogy for this circular structure� The first context that can be made out is an Enlightenment context. The hegemonic existence of the circular structure of the closed system in the present is the result of a diachronic moment of caesura, at which, in Luhmannian terms, a distinction between man and nature was drawn that founded its own subsequent assertions of reality (see on this topic Jahraus 2004: 169-72). For La- Objection 1.2: Historical precursors: Enlightenment, the colonies, the Holocaust 61 tour (2006), this is the decisive distinction between us moderns and those who preceded us, the so-called pre-moderns, between those who believed in the separation of man and nature and those who believed in sprits, magic, and a world of animism. Around 1700, so to speak, we left nature behind. The temporal tips over into the spatial once again when we journey beyond the realm of European Enlightenment into the Global South, where the putative pre-modern persists: here the border is between us and them, civilized and non-civilized, Europeans and savages. This border consigns so-called ‘Naturvölker’ (primitive, literally ‘nature’ peoples) to the other side of the civilizational line of demarcation, to the realm of nature, in an act of relegation to the non-human or to ‘bare life’ that can also be executed within Europe. Thus the border between humanity and non-humanity is thoroughly entrenched, infiltrating and contaminating even the most determined attempts to extirpate it� Part of this persistence is simply the result of weight of tradition imposed by the founding act of a self-constituting European ‘declaration of independence’ between 1650 and 1800. Three centuries of reiterated speech-acts are hard to dislodge, especially when they underpin and maintain the deepest strata of continental self-identification. It has taken many decades to even begin to dismantle this border with regard to the human-animal divide: the evidence for linguistic, cognitive and social complexity among animals has been accumulating gradually since the work of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, Gerand Baerends, and more recently Frans de Waal (2016). Much of this erodes the last rampart of human exceptionalism erected by Kohn at the very moment of declaring that ‘forests think’, the symbolic dimension of language. If dolphins, for instance, have ‘signature whistles’ that appear to resemble personal names (Kriesell et al. 2014), then it becomes difficult to maintain the notion of an exclusive ownership of symbolic language by humans alone. Forests, it would appear, use language in ways whose functions exceed that of mere ‘signalling’ (Wohlleben 2015). Language, in particular in its symbolic function, is shared across the spectrum of communicative beings� It is instructive, at this juncture, to note that Peirce (1931-58, II: 228), to whom we will return shortly in greater detail, offers a classic definition of the sign that is remarkably inclusive. Peirce’s definition makes ‘addressivity’ the criteria of signification, and derives ‘personhood’ from a primarily relational signifying activity: a sign ‘is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity […] [i]t addresses somebody.’ Who signifies for or to whom is an entirely open question� In the face of the frequently reiterated caveat that such claims for language-use among nonhumans are anthropomorphizations, it would seem, oddly enough, quite appropriate to agree� The more we delve into the non-human world and discover complex mechanisms that can be equated with that of hu- 62 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist man thinking and behaviour, including language, the more these characteristics appear strange and inhuman� The discovery of complexity does not reveal that, after all, animals and trees are much more like us than we realized. On the contrary, it reveals that they are much more complex, and in the strangest of ways, effectively disallowing the anthropomorphic narcissism that accompanies much eco-activism (Nealon 2016). As Gooding (2017) notes, the kind of consciousness Wohlleben proposes is so different from ours as to be utterly alien: it is a diffuse, blind intelligence located in the sensitive, questing filaments of thousands of root-tips, or a networked language of chemical messages, fanning out through the forest floor via a “wood wide web” of symbiotic fungal mycelium. It is a sensory alertness present in every leaf� It would appear that in fact, the life-strategies of non-human beings such as octopuses resist, by virtue of their complexity, any easy assignment to any one side of the nature/ culture border, blurring it beyond any categorizing utility whatsoever (Godfrey-Smith 2017; Montgomery 2016). It is precisely the slow progress made in dismantling this border that suggests, in inverse proportion to what has been achieved hitherto, that much more in the way of symbolic and cognitive complexity is yet to be discovered. It will be so complex, however, as to render the current binary utterly senseless, and even revise the underpinning notions of the human and its opposites. What we are finding on the other side of the border does not merely mirror ourselves in an inversion of the non-human that negatively confirms our humanity; rather, it is a complexity which refuses to give us either a negative or a positive mirror image of ourselves at all. (The same thing is happening, for that matter, on the human side of the border, with the gradual discovery of the complexity of human cognition; this is a complexity within which has an equally ‘post-humanizing’ effect.). Yet the border persists, and its dogged reassertion continues to impute an absence of symbolic language on the other side of its self-generated demarcations; it does not accurately describe a genuinely existing difference. But that persistent border-drawing is under threat as more and more scientific knowledge about the strangeness of the world around us accumulates� The frontier’s synthetic work includes simultaneous self-maintenance and censorship of what lies beyond its heavily-mined death-strip. As the frontier gradually fades, however, it is to be expected that more and more symbolic work of language —in all its mysterious internal complexity—and as a consequence, the symbolic work of translation, will be discovered in the wider world beyond the human enclave� The role of the symbolic as the guarantor of human exceptionalism will be increasingly lost. And with that, we will approach the end of the Enlightenment Objection 1.2: Historical precursors: Enlightenment, the colonies, the Holocaust 63 era—an end already contained in the notion of the Anthropocene, which implies in its naming of the human transformation of our planet the imminent demise of that transformative agency� A second context must be borne in mind. This is a colonial context that appears to lead—however controversial and tendentious such claims may be (Fischer and Čupić 2015; Zimmerer, ed 2011)—to the Holocaust. Excavating that colonial context involves a conceptual detour via the long moment of European state imperialism in the non-European world. It is hardly coincidental that linguistic statements such as that one quoted above from Kohn resemble the ‘speech acts’ by which sovereign states call themselves into being. Carl Schmitt defined sovereignty not as something that was grounded, for instance in the will of the people or in some other externally legitimizing instance, but as the capacity of the state to abolish its own constitutive rules (the rule of law) in an act of autarky that reposes upon an equally autonomous and autocratic self-establishment. Nothing grounds a state’s existence except its own calling itself into being, and thus a state can equally easily suspend its own rules, as in a state of emergency. There, the state (usually but not always temporarily) suspends the constitution that it has itself established. Because a state asked no one to legitimize its own self-foundation, there is no necessity for it to ask anyone to legitimize or permits its own self-abolition—it is that self-abolition in the ‘state of emergency’ that proves its sovereign status (Agamben 1998: 28). It is not by chance that Schmitt sees the prototype of state sovereignty in the ‘lines in the sand’ drawn by colonizing powers when they marked out the division between civilized colonizers and barbaric natives. Such lines were founding distinctions that allowed the colonies to emerge as a state of lawlessness, on in which, from the outset, the law is suspended—especially as a protection of rights for those who by definition have no rights—because it is now operating outside the civilized world of the metropolis (Schmitt 1950: 67). The colony is the site where the normative force of the law works to suspend the law with regard to the natives, thus allowing the colonizers, in the words of Ugandan poet Okaka Opio Dokotum (in Benge and Bangirana, eds, 2000: 114), to ‘do the awful lawful’. It is in the colonies, then, the model of an absolutely sovereign self-abolishing rule-of-law was established. It was then subsequently re-imported to Europe, where the Holocaust saw the ultimate implementation of the absolute ‘state of emergency’—manifest most blatantly in the concentration camps embodying ‘the principle according to which “everything is possible” ’ (Agamben 1998: 170). As Césaire (1973: 12-13) and Fanon (1971: 72-3) both wrote in 1952, the Holocaust was the manifestation of the re-emergence of ‘European colonialism brought home to Europe by a country that had been deprived of its overseas empire after World War I’ (Young 1990: 8). It is no coincidence that the inau- 64 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist guration of Nationalist Socialist rule in 1933 was followed almost immediately by the declaration of a permanent state of emergency (Agamben 2005). Nor is it coincidental that the beginning of hostilities in 1939, with the invasion of Poland, went hand in hand with the inauguration of a ‘colonial’ project on the same territory (Mazower 2008; Wasser 1993; Werber 2008). The Holocaust shifted the border between the human and the inand nonhuman, and between life and non-life, in ways that recall the drawing of ‘race’based lines of demarcation in the colony. The Holocaust, with its manifold shifting boundaries (colonies and European continental centre, human vs. nonhuman, human vs. inhuman, life vs. nonlife) embodied the revelation of the sovereign power that shows its power via its capacity to shift the boundaries underpinning the polity� That which is outside the rule of law, and outside the territory of the ‘Geltungsbereich’ [‘domain of validity’] of the Constitution, becomes imported into its very centre, in Agamben’s famous definition of ‘the camp’: it is the contemporary manifestation of the basic principle of sovereignty, that reposes upon ‘an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life’; ‘When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible location, the result was the concentration camp. The camp—and not the prison—is the space that corresponds to the originary structure of the nomos ’ (Agamben 1998: 7, 20). Such inner-European manifestations of sovereignty as the capacity to abolish the self-constituting rule of law thus resonate with their colonial predecessors in ways that have profound implications, retrospectively, for anthropology� I have sketched these Enlightenment and colonial genealogies of linguistic exceptionalism, and the way they reach to the heart of European self-identity, at such length so as to demonstrate the full ramifications of Kohn’s maintenance of a hierarchy that, via his privileging of the symbolic function of language, keep the human in its place of sovereign power. My long analysis of Kohn’s extremely partial ‘provincialization’ of language is embedded in an attempt, in this book, to show how such a ‘provincialization’ might be achieved in a more thorough way. This intention is in turn part of an undertaking that seeks to generalize translation as a creative process well beyond the bounds of human linguistic activity� This is why I now turn back to translation—which, it transpires, is one of the fundamental jobs of an anthropologist such as Kohn. If the self-grounding nature of the exception, whether juridico-political, or linguistic, strips customary legitimizing narratives of their credibility, liberating both state violence and linguistic power into a domain where no ethical rules obtain, does translation perhaps provide an ethical counterweight to this state of affairs? Objection 1.2: Historical precursors: Enlightenment, the colonies, the Holocaust 65 Translation lies exactly at the antipodes of this ungrounded sovereign structure, whence its relevance for the anthropological profession. As Derrida (1985) has shown, translation is posited upon its own impossibility. If there were no linguistic difference, translation would not be necessary. But the act of translation can never overcome difference, for if it did, it would banish its own reason for existence and the rationale for its work. The difference that calls forth translation thus persists, even as translation seeks to overcome it, thus making its work of overcoming difference a Sisyphean undertaking, an impossibility that is translation’s own condition of possibility. Here the sovereign structure of the symbolic as that which creates itself as the site of a difference that it must then guard and maintain is turned inside out� That turning-inside-out produces the work of translation as a site of a difference that can never be overcome because it founds the very rationale for translation� This inverted structure is however not strictly speaking an opposition or an antagonism, as both are entangled with each other, especially as most translation as we think of it goes on within the order of the symbolic� The ungrounded structure sanctioning unbridled political and linguistic violence thus explains the role of the anthropologist as translator. In translating the difference of the native for the metropolitan reader, the anthropologist stands on the border and constantly reinscribes it at the very moment of claiming to traverse it. It is because the native is so fundamentally other that a translator’s expertise is needed to elucidate the opacity of the barbaric native other� The anthropologist’s role is to confirm, via scientific method and translative exposition, the otherness of the native other that the colonizer has already established via violence and expropriation. As ‘participant observer’, the anthropologist constantly enacts a second-order observation of an already-drawn line of demarcation. The anthropologist does not merely take for granted, but re-inscribes, in the anthropological gaze and the anthropological text, the ‘denial of coevalness’ that asserts a fundamental ‘distance between the West and the Rest’ (Fabian 1983: 35)—even when, as in the case of Kohn, she or he claims to be minimizing that distance. The anthropologist is thus a translator who, via her or his sovereign gesture, contravenes the basic conditions of possibility of translation as a constantly paradoxical, self-defeating-but-also-enabling affirmation of difference as possibility� The opposite of the anthropologist-as-translator, and thus the translator faithful to the underlying principles of the profession, is the shaman-as-translator, a figure whom we will encounter in the following chapter. This longish detour from Kohn via Luhmann, Agamben and Schmitt takes us back to Kohn so as to lay bare the profoundly colonialist and necropolitical implications in the gestures of part-tolerance that we find in this anthropological foray ‘beyond’—but not too far beyond—‘the human’. For all the radicalism of 66 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist Kohn’s work, it merely operates a marginal shifting of the fundamental distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the civilized and the barbaric, the alive and the non-alive. The internal borders of language (between symbolic language and iconic or indexical language) are rendered porous to some extent so as to allow a limited degree of migration that admits some actants into the realm of speech. But the outer boundaries of language remain fixed: ‘Entities that exhibit self-organization, such as crystals, snowflakes, or whirlpools, are not alive. Nor, despite their name, do they involve a self ’ (Kohn 2013: 55). And nor, Kohn implies, do they participate in language. It is almost as if, without at least one immoveable border, Kohn’s notion of language itself would disappear� After all, if everyone could speak, what need would we have for a concept of language? In place of this defence of language against non-language, I will be positioning, in this book, a plurality of languages whose ultimate expanse covers the entirety of creation. There is, in a sense, no outside to language; only a myriad of internal borders, constantly being translated by a myriad of translation media, some but not all of them linguistic. Here, translation does not straddle a border that it reinscribes in the very act of border-crossing, thus becoming a handmaid of the inside-outside, system-environment hierarchy. Rather, translation links the entities meeting in its mediating action, and in their meeting, brings them anew into being. The translator-as-shaman is someone who takes on this task. It is with this more positive project in mind (although it must wait until the following chapter for a fuller exposition) that I turn to my second objection to Kohn’s work. Objection 2: The entanglement of icon, index and symbol The second objection to Kohn’s incomplete ‘provinzialization of language’ and his maintenance of linguistic hierarchies pertains to the relationships between iconicity and indexicality on the one had, and symbolicity on the other hand, and the sorts of relationships that persist between them despite the distinction that Kohn sets up. Whereas my first objection to Kohn’s distinction has been largely in the mode of critique, this second objection will look in the direction of a more positive ‘entanglement’ of those elements he believes to be separate� For Kohn, the imprisonment of language at the level of indexicality or iconicity (in the case of animals or plants) is registered as a poverty or paucity of complexity. But maybe we should think this the other way around. Perhaps we should envisage the iconic or the indexical word, to the extent that they advertise their relatedness to things in the world, as the true nature of language, part Objection 2: The entanglement of icon, index and symbol 67 of things and part of their constant transformation, as the norm—not because they represent better, but because they are closer to things� By extension, it would then become possible to conceptualize the symbolic function as a generativity that doesn’t loose itself from those things, thereby erasing the difference by which humanity seeks to define its specificity and singularity. It is instructive to return to Peirce at this point to listen to his definition of semiotic generativity, which he calls ‘transuasion’, effectively a sort of semiotic translation. In order to describe semiotic generativity, Peirce (1931-58, I/ II: 51) invents another semiotic triangle, not that of icon-index-symbol, but rather, a larger, all encompassing triad of sign-object-interpretant: Genuine mediation is the character of a sign. A Sign is anything which is related to a second thing, its Object , in respect to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a third thing, its Interpretant , into relation to the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a fourth into relation to that object in the same form, ad infinitum . If the series is broken off, the sign, in so far, falls short of the perfect significant character. What Peirce calls ‘[t]ransuasion in its obsistent aspect, or Mediation ’ (ibid: 51) is the difference within the sign, a sort of resistance or obstinate difficulty which, far from blocking productivity, spurs it on to creative transformations. Resistance guarantees the productivity of textual semiosis and generates the infinite series of interpretations constituting signification (ibid: 50). What is striking about this definition is that it describes the ongoing creative encounters that are characteristic of creativity throughout the material world: What we need, if we want to do science, is a theory that tells us how the variables change with respect to one another� That is to say, how one changes when others change. The fundamental theory of the world must be constructed in this way; it does not need a time variable: it needs to tell us only how the things we see in the world vary with respect to each other� That is to say, what the relations may be between these variables. (Rovelli 2018: 103) Peirce’s definition of semiosis is thus, by default, an inclusive one that can, in accordance with his exhaustive semiotic theory, encompass far more than merely language. Correspondingly, the ‘ Sign is anything which is related to a second thing, its Object , in respect to a Quality’ (ibid: 51), thereby encompassing icon, index and symbol, all of which are equally susceptible of participating in ‘mediation’ or semiotic generativity� There is no hint of any hierarchy of distances-cum-emanicipation from the world of things here. Nor is there any sense that some modes of semiotic activity may be bogged down in the world of things� Quite to the contrary, for Peirce it is the material ‘resistance’ (or ‘obsistence’) of signification that generates complexity and creativity, not the emancipation 68 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist from such resistance. The resistant materiality at the heart of generative signification is an example of the ‘enabling constraint’ (Massumi 2015: 72-3) to which I will refer in part 2 of this book (especially chapter 11) as a crucial element in the translation process� In order to offer alternatives to Kohn’s hierarchical demarcations and fallacious emancipations of one aspect of language from others, it is helpful to mention, by way of an example, Kristeva’s (1974) notion of the Semiotic, largely neglected since her particular redefinition of the term in the 1970s. Kristeva’s Semiotic refers to a pre-linguistic continuum of sounds, colours, motions registered by the foetus in the womb. Sometimes dismissed alongside ‘écriture féminine’ (Cixous 1976) as one of the experimental conceptual productions of an essentializing 1970s French Feminism (e.g. Oliver, ed. 2000), such notions are regaining traction in recent research the child’s learning of intonation in the period before birth (Mampe et al. 2009; Wermke et al. 2016), and to its early ability to articulate the full range of human sounds before it is locked into the limited palette of vocalic patterns imposed by its native language(s). For Kristeva, the Semiotic is a fluid and unordered medium of raw signifying material which must be repressed within the order of the Symbolic, i�e� human language, which depends for its meaning-making upon a high degree of selection and reduction of signifying possibilities. (Remaining in the unstructured free play of the Semiotic, Kristeva suggests, is tantamount to psychosis). However, the Semiotic may resurge, partly structured but nonetheless given more space than in the language of everyday communication, in art—most obviously in the play of colour and form unleashed in abstract and Modernist painting or in stream-of-consciousness or other avant-garde literary techniques (see also Kristeva 1986). Kristeva’s Semiotic is tangential to Lacan’s (1982) triadic categorization of psychoanalytical language functions into Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, just as it defies easy alignment with the Peircean triad of iconic, indexical and symbolic dimensions of signification. It may, however, be cognate with Peirce’s other semiotic triangle, that which places ‘transuasion’ or ‘mediation’, the creative work of translative ‘interpretation’ at the forefront of semiotic generativity shared by many sorts of semiotic operators. Kristeva’s Semiotic offers the prospect of a creative drive underpinning and informing patently Symbolic structures that never loses contact with other material aspects of the cosmos, and eschews any definitive insertion within a hierarchy or submission to some sort of categorical boundaries� It is worth underscoring this point. For Kristeva, the entry into the Symbolic in the Lacanian sense, though necessary and unavoidable for full participation in the life of human society, represents a closing-down of a multiplicity of more tangible modes of semiotic access to reality. Language is regulated by a set of Objection 2: The entanglement of icon, index and symbol 69 rules that make meaning work in coherent ways by excluding possibilities: at any point on the syntactic chain, the speaker is obliged to choose from a ‘list’ of possible choices, to make a paradigmatic choice between alternatives. The Symbolic in the Lacanian sense is thus an impoverishment of signifying potential— which is perhaps why it cannot but be the realm of loss and nostalgic desire, as Lacan never ceases to point out. And it is surely significant that Peirce, who is also a central reference for Kristeva, is concerned about the impoverishment and curtailment of semiotic productivity, at pains as he is to point out (1931-58, I/ II: 51) that ‘[t]ransuasion in its obsistent aspect, or Mediation , will be shown to be subject to two degrees of degeneracy’ and to warn that ‘[i]f the series is broken off, the sign, in so far, falls short of the perfect significant character.’ Kohn’s celebration of the Peircean symbolic raises the generative power of language to the level of complexity production� By contrast, Kristeva’s more sober assessment of the costs of participation in socially sanctioned language may suggest that Kohn is perhaps excessively enthusiastic about the emancipatory character of the symbolic aspects of language. All the more reason, then, for rethinking the connections between those modes. It is perhaps in connectivity rather than emancipation that true creative freedom resides� Indeed, it is possible that Kohn over-emphasizes the emancipatory aspect of symbolic language precisely in order to downplay the ongoing entanglements of the three Peircean modes, for which he can only account in terms of ‘dependency’ (Kohn 2013: 54). The symbolic mode is consecrated as a mode of elevating oneself above the world, of becoming, as far as possible, un-dependent. Language goes hand in hand with the upright gait of the human being, and with the development of tools that mediate the human contact with the world, just as the gaze of the upright hunter is an increasingly ‘aerial’ and distanced one (Leroi-Gourhan 1964). Yet the process by which various modes of mobility, purchase upon the world, and use of language develop out of one another belies the apparent freedom and autonomy celebrated as the end result of human development. It appears increasingly likely that the world of objects, mediated by the interaction between hand (as ‘ur-tool’ [Tallis 2003: 22, 249]) and objects, has impacted fundamentally upon the formation of brain structure and brain mechanisms; the latter evolved in order to cope with and respond to the complexities of body-object-world interaction (Thrift 2004: 597). The world of objects is a world of actors who make humanity as much as it makes them. It is a world populated by objects as ‘affordances’ (Hodder 2012: 48-52). In other words, ‘Bodies and technologies function in a self-feeding relation where transformations in the one produce transformations in the other, which in turn feed back on both’ (Grosz 2006: 188). Recast in terms of language, the symbolic, therefore, grows out of but does not necessarily grow away from the 70 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist indexical� The question, then, is whether the indexical and the iconic do not remain determining and more importantly, enabling, empowering, informative substrates within a fluid whole. A similar argument is made, in effect, in Lévi-Strauss’ famous essay on ‘La pensée concrète’ in La Pensée sauvage (1962) [ The Savage Mind (1966)]. Lévi-Strauss used the opposition of ‘engineer’ and ‘DIY-handyman’ [‘bricoleur’] to express the full complexity, extending into the realm of the symbolic, of so-called primitive peoples. Mythic thought was not fundamentally different to Western thought, it simply kept much stronger connections to the material substrata of signification: D’ailleurs, une forme d’activité subsiste parmi nous qui, sur le plan technique, permet assez bien de concevoir ce que, sur le plan de la spéculation, put être une science que nous préférons appeler ‘première’ plutôt que primitive c’est celle communément désignée par le terme de bricolage … de nos jours, le bricoleur reste celui qui œuvre de ces mains, en utilisant des moyens détournés par comparaison avec ceux de l’homme de l’art. Or, le propre de la pensée mythique est de s’exprimer à l’aide d’un répertoire dont la composition est hétéroclite et qui, bien qu’étendu, reste toute de même limité; pourtant, il faut qu’elle s’en serve, quelle que soit la tâche qu’elle s’assigne, car elle n’a rien d’autre sous la main. Elle apparaît ainsi comme une sorte de bricolage intellectuel … Comme le bricolage sur le plan technique, la réflexion mythique peut atteindre, sur le plan intellectuel, des résultats brillants et imprévus. (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 26) [There still exists among ourselves an activity which on the technical plane gives us quite a good understanding of what a science we prefer to call ‘prior’ rather than ‘primitive’, could have been on the plane of speculation� This is what is commonly called ‘bricolage’ in French … in our own time the ‘bricoleur’ is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman. The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if it is extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’ … Like ‘bricolage’ on the technical plane, mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane. (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 16-17)] Lévi-Strauss is at pains to stress the sophistication and ‘emergent complexity’ of these modes of thought, rescuing them from the customary denigration that used to assign such thought to the dust-bin of history. If we have any doubts that such an ‘imagination matérielle’ (Bachelard 1942: 2) [‘material imagination’] or ‘material thinking’ (Carter 2004) may also subsist in all cultures, let us heed Freud’s detection of similar mechanisms in dream language: Objection 2: The entanglement of icon, index and symbol 71 Die Sprachkünste der Kinder, die zu gewissen Zeiten die Worte tatsächlich wie Objekte behandeln, auch neue Sprachen und artifizielle Wortfügungen erfinden, sind für den Traum wie für Psychoneurosen hier die gemeinsame Quelle. (Freud 1999, II/ III: 309) [The linguistic tricks performed by children, who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects and moreover invent new languages and artificial syntactic forms, are the common sources of these things in dreams and psychoneuroses alike. (Freud 1975, IV: 303)] Lévi-Strauss’s mid-twentieth-century polemic was situated at a civilized-primitive border. It can function as an analogy for a current skirmish located on a human-nonhuman border, in which Kohn is fighting a rear-guard action. What is remarkable about Lévi-Strauss’s argumentation is that he makes a strong case for the inherent sociality of mythic thought and its profound embedding in addressivity (compare Connor 1996: 10): l’ingénieur cherche toujours à s’ouvrir un passage et à se situer au-delà , tandis que le bricoleur, de gré ou de force, demeure en deça , ce qui est une autre façon de dire que le première opère au moyen de concepts, le second au moyen de signes. Sur l’axe de l’opposition entre nature et culture, les ensembles dont ils se servent sont perceptiblement décalés. En effet, une des façons au moins dont le signe s’oppose au concept tient à ce que le second se veut intégralement transparent à la réalité, tandis que le premier accepte, et même exige, qu’une certaine épaisseur d’humanité soit incorporée à cette réalité. Selon l’expression vigoureuse et difficilement traduisible de Peirce: ‘It addresses somebody’. (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 30) [the engineer is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization while the ‘bricoleur’ by inclination or by necessity remains within them. This is another way of saying that the engineer works by means of concepts and the ‘bricoleur’ by means of signs� The sets which each employs are at different distances from the poles on the axis of opposition between nature and culture� One way indeed in which signs can be opposed to concepts is that whereas concepts aim to be wholly transparent with respect to reality, signs allow and even requite the interposing of a certain amount of human culture into reality� Signs, in Peirce’s vigorous phrase, ‘address somebody’. (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 19-20)] Lévi-Strauss rehearses a trope of the inherent sociability and cosmic embeddedness, in other words, of the irreducible impetus of immanence that underpins mythic thought� The debate is still being conducted on the side of the human here, but it is worth bearing in mind that this is against the background of a fundamental denial of common humanity which was still widely current at the time Lévi-Strauss was writing (compare Lévi-Strauss 1952). (We may have difficulty 72 Chapter 2: Provincializing language I: The translator as Anthropologist imagining the very possibility of such explicit debates today, but the inhumanity of our European polities and their policies, carefully removed out of sight to the watery killing fields of the Mediterranean, has barely changed.) What Conrad (2010: 79) expressed as the colonizer’s slowly dawning ‘suspicion of their [the natives] not being inhuman … the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar,’ was as fraught a boundary-transgression as the difference between the human and the non-human is today. Lévi-Strauss stresses the social interrelatedness of something that had often been excluded, up until the moment of his polemic, from the realm of human sociability. What his argument emphasizes is a fundamental entanglement, couched in terms of addressivity, of the once denigrated semiotic undertaking of myth. The analogy with the polemic that Kohn is conducting and which I am combatting is not difficult to detect. Let me conclude this chapter with a potentially scandalous proposition. It may well be that the symbolic is a subordinated sector of the indexical, rather than being emancipated from it into some sort of socio-linguistic upward mobility. Perhaps, at the end of the day, the indexical mode of language, defined by continguity, causality and association, is in fact the pre-eminent mode of language, its epitome. It is possible that the symbolic is always already imbued with the all-pervasive influence of the indexical, which it claims, fallaciously, to throw off or escape from. This would mean that human language is actually much closer to the language of other sentient and non-sentient beings that usually assumed. It would imply that the modes of connection are much more significant than the points of distinction. Kohn claims a proximity that segues into distance; by contrast, I would claim that what he constructs is a putative distance that in fact conceals proximity (see West-Pavlov 2018a), or even better, an ineluctable ‘enabling entanglement’ at the heart of language (Tsing 2015: vii; see also Hodder 2012). From this perspective, one could plausibly claim that everything uses language; and the seams and contact zones of different genres of language are zones of translation, in which the translative activity of language itself would be doubly manifest, as translation beccomes translated� Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman Much recent postcolonial translation theory has focussed upon the appropriative, predatory nature of colonial translation operations. Colonial translation renders the colonized culture and, by extension, colonial subjects ‘transparent’. Colonial translations ‘represent’ and thereby ‘comprehend’, ‘contain’ and by extension dominate the subaltern subject (Mufti 2016: 103-6; Niranjana 1992: 185-6). Such interpretations of translation place it within an economy of epistemic capture that is confirmed by another set of metaphors conceptualizing translation as predatory extraction—in other words, as the real economic motive of colonization that mere ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1999: 277) serves to underpin and legitimize. The extractive metaphorics are displayed openly in the figures of translation deployed by George Steiner (1975: 297-8). In a now-famous, perhaps even infamous passage, he describes translation as an invasive, ‘penetrative’ operation: After trust comes aggression. The second move of the translator is incursive and extractive … The translator invades, extracts, and brings home … Certain texts or genres have been exhausted by translation … others have been negated by transfiguration, by an act of appropriative penetration and transfer in excess of the original, more ordered, more aesthetically pleasing� The general dynamic of extraction of raw materials followed by exportation and overseas refinement characterized colonial conquest from the very outset (Marx 1976: 915; Galeano 1997), and continues on today in what is known as the Global South ‘resources curse’ (Auty 1993; Humphreys, Sachs and Stiglitz, eds 2007; Wenzel 2006). It also functions at the level of culture when the ‘raw material’ of testimonies by ‘native informants’ or other cultural artefacts are exported to Europe where they are refined into Eurocentric theories of the non-European Other (anthropology, postcolonial literary studies, postcolonial theory, etc.) (Ahmad 1992: 45). Translation is a crucial component in this neo-colonial economy of cultural extraction and expropriation� In response to such colonial practices and late-colonial metaphors of predatory, expropriative translation, a countervailing paradigm of resistant translation emerges in the Global South. Like much postcolonial writing (Tymoczko 1999), this contestatory translative method figures as a way of ‘writing back’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989). Bassnett and Trivedi (1999: 4) summarize: 74 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman in this post-colonial period … it is unsurprising to find radical concepts of translation emerging from India, from Latin America, from Canada, from Ireland—in short, from former colonies around the world that challenge established European norms about what translation is and what it signifies. Radical concepts of translation in the postcolonial tradition have included Bandia’s (2014) ‘translation as reparation’ in which the translation of African oral traditions into Europhone languages constituted an attempt to rectify the destructive inroads of European cultural imperialism and ‘epistemic violence’; or the ‘rough translation’ proposed by (Niranjana 1992: 185) as a counterweight to the fallacious, even coercive ‘transparency’ created by domesticating European translations of non-European works. This tension between imperialist and resistant, between colonialist and ‘postcolonial’ (often avant la lettre , see Hall 1996) modes of translation is summarized by Vincente Rafael (1988: 213): For the Spaniards, translation was always a matter of reducing the native language and culture to accessible objects for and subjects of divine and imperial intervention� For the Tagalogs [of the Philippines], translation was a process less of internalizing colonial-Christian conventions than of evading their totalizing grip by repeatedly marking the differences between their language and interests and those of the Spaniards. The topos that most strikingly embodies—quite literally, in this case! —the mode of resistant, ‘postcolonial’ counter-translation (Ramakrishna 2014) was that of cannibalism. Re-appropriating the marker of savagery that Europe had long implemented to distinguish itself out from its Others, theorists such as de Campos mobilized the topos of ‘cannibalism’ as a boldly self-assertive denominator of cultural confidence. ‘Cannibalism’ was read against the hegemonic (Western) grain to denote a mode of appropriating an Other that one respects and whose power one wishes to engorge. Following this aggressive counter-assimilation, ‘translation’ in the broadest sense was imagined as reversing the vector of appropriation, boldly seizing the cultural goods of Euro-America and retooling them for indigenous needs. Translation, here, falls under the rubric of Haraldo de Campos’ (1981: 11-12; 1986: 44) notion of a ‘devoraç-o crítica do legado cultural universel’ [‘critical devoration of the universal cultural heritage’]. De Campos notes maliciously, ‘Todo passado que nos é “outro” merece ser negado. Vale dizer: merece ser comido, devorado’ [‘Any past which is an “other” for us deserves to be negated� We could say that it deserves to be eaten, devoured’]� But despite the cultural and political exuberance of such paradigms, they run the risk of merely reversing the vector of power and thereby of mirroring the colonial translation paradigm without fundamentally changing its contours. I posit that it is more interesting to re-examine the very notion of cannibalism it- Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman 75 self. Cannibalism—assimilation of the Other into the Self—is understood by theories with a strong link to the Global South not as an act of atavistic barbarism, but as a way of mimetically capturing the world in the moment of engorging it (Taussig 1993). Mimesis in this sense is not a replication of the object but a way of becoming the object. Identificatory appropriation, rather than distanced replication, occurs in the act of eating as the barrier between the subject and the object disappears. Cannibalism thus offers a fundamentally different model of translation to colonial notions of translation. European translation was mobilized to appropriate cultural goods belonging to the Other, but by the same token to demonstrate the unbridgeable cultural chasm between the primitive Other and the translating, civilizing, European Self. Translation as eating, by contrast, generates a different set of topoi. Eating brings Self and Other closer to one another in an act of assimilative fusion. Colonial translation was also assimilative, but it assimilated cultural goods, while casting aside their human (native) makers, except as secondary helpmates (as in the typically anonymous ‘native informant’). Cultural good where appropriated in order to exclude the cultural Other� By contrast, in the tropes of translation as eating, the cultural topography of distance gives way to the translative topography of proximity, perhaps even promiscuity� One ingests the Other to attain, via corporeal similarity, indeed intimacy, the powers of the Other. It is if, to make a false-friend-based code-switching pun, one becomes the Other, in dem man den Anderen bekommt [receiving the Other as one might receive the host]. Cannibal translation, in this rendition, erodes the differences between self and other, spirit and flesh, word and non-word, and even, if its logic is followed far enough, between the human and the nonhuman� Heavily overladen by the semantics of colonization and cultural imperialism, cannibalism remains a taboo word within our repertoire of cultural operations� Yet it might provide a neat shorthand for the ubiquitous contact zone of mutually transformative interaction that this book sees as a universal mode of generativity. Cannibalism does not reinscribe cultural difference while merely reversing the cultural hierarchy, as it might seem at first glance. Rather, cannibalism stresses similarity, continuity, the continuum of life and its exuberant call to other life. A ‘metaphysics of predation’ (Lévi-Strauss qtd in Viveiros de Castro 2014: 144), it will transpire below, generates a shift of perspective in which selfhood is defined by intentionality, which in turn can only be formulated in terms of an ingestive, transformative interaction. But that ingestion takes places under the sign of life, and is driven by the pull of one life towards another and by their constant reciprocal transformation. It is driven by what Coetzee has called ‘appetancy’ (Coetzee 2003: 192). Cannibalism does not occur under the regime of death and defeat, even though one may eat one’s enemies after vanquishing 76 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman them; rather, it occurs under a regime of life and its perpetuation via transformative multiplicity. Cannibal translation happens between specific elements on a contiguous continuum of the multiplicity of life and marks the transformative interstices at which those elements meet� The cannibal translator is a shaman, one who presides over and participates in such rites of transformation� Under the sign of cannibalism, I turn now, in order to give more substance to the alternative that I am posing to Kohn’s very hesitant and tentative shifting of the provincial boundaries of human language, to another reach of anthropological thought. In what follows, I meditate upon two theories that might be of help in seeking ways of thinking about language that are more open to its natural exterior: the symmetrical anthropology conceptualized by Eduardo Vivieros de Castro and the extroverted animism proposed by Tim Ingold. Translation at the heart of things themselves Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014) sees translation as something that does not happen between cultures, but rather, within a unitary continuum of culture� That continuum of culture includes, however, contrary to what common sense might dictate, what we would normally understand as nature and culture. Even more at odds with common sense, the difference that is customarily located at the border between culture and nature, between words and things, between speakers and non-speakers, that translation might be thought to overcome, is resituated in Viveiros de Castro’s thought within things themselves —not, though, as a hard distinction, but as a transformative and generative border between what was and what is to come. This is an extremely condensed version of Viveiros de Castro’s thought, so it needs some explanatory unpacking. Viveiros de Castro begins his symmetrical anthropology by rejecting the anthropological paradigm of different cultures against a background of singular nature, replacing it instead by a paradigm of a single culture looking at different natures. ‘[V]irtually all the peoples of the New World,’ he notes (2014: 55), ‘share a conception of the world as composes as a multiplicity of points of view. Every existent is a centre of intentionality apprehending other existents according to their respective characteristics and powers’ (ibid: 55). What unites these different species is that they all perceive themselves as persons: ‘animals and spirits regard themselves (their own species) as human; they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their houses or villages, and apprehend their behavior and characteristics through a cultural form’ (ibid: 57). Vivieros de Castro summarizes, ‘Personhood and perspectiveness—the capacity to occupy a point of view—’ [and, one might add, the faculty of language, if Translation at the heart of things themselves 77 signification, following Peirce and Lévi-Strauss, is principally a matter of international addressivity] ‘is a question of degree, context and position rather than a property distinct to a specific species’ (ibid: 57-8). In the paradigm explored in chapter 2 above, that of the European ethnological gaze, the anthropologist is a translator between cultures, recasting the obscure customs and worldview of cultures close to nature in the language of those further away from it. (Indeed, as Kohn’s case appeared to show in the previous chapter, the closer these anthropologies come to peoples close to nature, the more such anthropologies appear to need distance from nature itself.) The same referent at the level of nature is represented by different terms at the level of culture, between which it is the anthropologist-translator’s task to mediate. (This translative mediation creates a useful buffer-zone that in turn keeps nature at bay.) In Viveiros de Castro’s alternative paradigm, common terms shared not only by different cultures even by different species refer to objects that are in themselves fundamentally multiple� What happens to this translational operation in the world when, for instance, a jaguar is a person no less than the hunter, but the objects of their desire may change (when a hunter sees blood, a jaguar sees beer) (ibid: 57)? Both the hunter and the jaguar are intentional persons, predators, gazers, and both communicate: ‘all beings see (“represent”) the world in the same way ; what changes is what they see ’ (ibid: 71). (Under these conditions, the notion of cannibalism, as a specific cognate of predation, no longer operates as a marker distinguishing civilization and savagery, culture and less-than-culture, because at the end of the day, we are all predators, and thus we are all, more or less, cannibals, eating co-persons.) The act of translation then, is not primarily between cultures, because in fact, all cultures, whether those of the anthropologist, Amazonian hunter, or the jaguar, are fundamentally similar. All three actants belong to the category of persons, and all three, as persons, have a predilection for beer� The beer they have a taste for it itself, however, is multiple: ‘all beings see (“represent”) the world in the same way ; what changes is what they see ’ (ibid: 71). What they see thus demands constant translation—or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that it is constantly in a process of translation . Every object is this a ‘contact zone’ with its own ongoing translative character: What exists in multinature are not such self-identical entities differently perceived but immediately relational multiplicities of the type blood/ beer� There exists, if you will, only the limit between blood and beer, the border by which these two ‘affinal’ substances communicate and diverge. (ibid: 73) 78 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman Translation itself is thus a border-straddling operation, partly inhabiting the thing itself and partly inhabiting the representation of things by different intentional perceiving persons. ‘Therefore,’ remarks Viveiros de Castro, the aim of perspectivist translation—translation being one of shamanism’s principal tasks, as we know …—is not that of finding a ‘synonym’ (a co-referential representation) in our human conceptual language for the representations that other species of subject use to speak about one and the same thing. Rather, the aim is to avoid losing sight of the difference concealed within equivocal ‘homonyms’ between our language and that of other species, since we and they are never talking about the same things. (Viveiros de Castro 2004b: 7) The synonym, where two words mean the same thing, cedes to the homonym, where a merely accidental, even peripheral coincidence of sound conceals radical differences of meaning. The shamanic translator, attuned to the vibrant liveliness that may be concealed within things, and only accessible to someone capable of making out their multiple, transformative identities within different ‘multinatures’, deals with metonymies, not with metaphors. Viveiros de Castro operates here a subtle but significant shift from the realm of identity between words (i.e., the domain of metaphor) to the realm of metonymy: what is concealed ‘within’ the word, or ‘behind’ it is not a cohesive identity, it is rather an irreducible multiplicity and heterogeneity which belongs in the realm of metonymy (the word conceals a referent which abuts upon another referent which abuts upon another referent, and so on …). Things are multiple in themselves because they belong to different natural universes ( not different cultures), because they have different natures, and this is the core of their translation within nature, or of nature as translation� Translation is not a metaphorical process of substitution in a ‘multicultural’ world, but is instead a process of metonymic neighbourliness within a ‘multinatural’ cosmos� There are several important points to be made about Viveiros de Castro’s ‘animist perspectivism’� First, what we are confronted with here is a much more capacious community of speakers. Viveiros de Castro (2004a: 466) remarks, Western popular evolutionism, for instance, is thoroughly anthropocentric but not particularly anthropomorphic. On the other hand, animism may be characterized as anthropomorphic but definitely not as anthropocentric: if sundry other beings besides humans are ‘human’, then we humans are not a special lot (so much for ‘primitive narcissism’). Translation at the heart of things themselves 79 Within this broad but extremely heterogeneous commons, translation is no longer about the business of overcoming almost insurmountable semantic gaps for the simple reason that all the speakers, whether human or animal or vegetable, whether Amerindian or European, speak what is basically a differentiated but interrelated language. They are linked by what Francis Nyamnjoh (2017) has called ‘conviviality’. This world is never absolutely open. In such theories of animism, there are of course actants who are excluded from the community of persons and speakers. The Achuar people with whom Philippe Descola (2005: 25) worked do not acknowledge the personhood, the sociability and the intersubjectivity of most insects, fish, grasses or mosses, pebbles or rivers. But these pariahs may be an integral part of the social body in a neighbouring community, thus reflecting a sort of division of labour in different ethnic zones: curatorship of non-human persons is distributed according to a pattern of overlaps that ensures that in the larger view of hings, no one gets left out (ibid: 27-8). Such exclusions are thus local variations on a basic notion of a world populated by ‘figures of the continuous’ ( figures du continu ) (ibid: 19-57). The world seen here is not structured by mega-binaries such as nature vs� culture, human vs� non-human, but rather by a plethora of smaller differentiations that work less to cement distinctions than to generate creativity: ‘Against the Great Dividers, a minor anthropology would make small multiplicities proliferate—not the narcissism of small differences but the anti-narcissism of continuous variation’ (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 44). Second, in this theory, translation shifts from a process of semantic transformation at the level of the terms to a process of ontological transformation at the level of the referents� This is not fundamentally a question of linguistics, but one of material ontology. Viveiros de Castro observes that ‘[w]hen everything is human, the human becomes a wholly other thing’ (2014: 63). The same could be said of language� Things are in themselves not singular because they are inert, but multiple because they are dynamic� The referent may have a seemingly singular label, but the label refers to a thing less than a process—an idea we will encounter again below in Ingold’s notion of animism. This, as we shall see, installs a form of dynamism, in effect, a translational process, into the word itself. If there is such a thing as translation in this theory—this is the work of the shaman—it is only partly at the level of interlingual exchange, and only partly something done by humans. It is largely an activity carried on by the referents themselves in the very multiplicity of their natures� Things are translating all the time, because they are dynamic, and because they are changing—in short, because they are alive. Viveiros de Castro’s notion of translation thus comes very close to what I call in this book a ‘quantum’ theory of translation, to which I turn in chapter 5 below. This ‘animist’, ‘object-oriented’ (Harman 2018) theory 80 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman of translation is not completely separated from interlinguistic translation� Rather, translation in the interlinguistic contact zone is lodged, in the first instance, like all entities in a ‘multinature’, as an intra linguistic contact zone at the interior of languages. Intralingual translation then devolves its translative dynamism to interlingual translation. This internal difference within the language should be understood not primarily as a shifting of meaning that destabilizes meaning, as in the difference that Derrida (1972a: 3-29) detects between one contextualized instantiation of a word and another, and the traces of past and future contextual meanings that every word bears in itself. Rather, this internal difference is far more the manifestation of the inherent creativity of language—not just of the humans who use language, or of the social or historical contexts that change the valency of a give word� A language is an overflowing storehouse of linguistic potential that never ceases to generate new language. It is language that generates thought, and writing that generates ideas—as I am discovering, constantly, as I type these sentences and compose this chapter, unceasingly amazed at the way the writing process itself gives rise to hitherto unformulated turns of phrase and hitherto unthought thoughts. In other words, the generativity of nature itself, which also infuses language as part of the natural world, spills over into localized, ‘provincial’ languages and contaminates their interfaces with other languages. Interlingual translation is not the core of translation activity, as the purists would have it� On the contrary, it is the jubilant periphery, or one of the frayed edges of the particoloured fabric of the cosmos where it begins to transform into something else, where a larger creativity is manifesting itself in one specific modality. The creativity of translation, which Berman (1995; 2009) instantiates in his study of the repeated re-translation of John Donne into French, is a manifestation of this exuberant creativity of language itself, which in turn is a spill-over from the creativity of the cosmos� Interlude: Provincializing language means provincialization as process Summing up the difference between the anthropologist’s and the Amerindian shaman’s translative work, Viveiros de Castro (2004b: 7) notes that Amerindian ontologies are inherently comparative: they presuppose a comparison between the ways different kinds of bodies ‘naturally’ experience the world as an affectual multiplicity. They are, thus, a kind of inverted anthropology, for the latter proceeds by way of an explicit comparison between the ways different types of men- Interlude: Provincializing language means provincialization as process 81 tality ‘culturally’ represent the world, seen as the unitary origin or virtual focus of its different conceptual versions. The ‘comparative’ in this quotation is the marker of translation. But this comparison is inflected by, indeed predicated upon another attribute, that of affect. The work of metaphorical translation that the anthropologist undertakes assumes metaphorical substitution of one term for another. That work of substitution is necessary because the terms are fundamentally incompatible� They are, as it were, separated by the underlying ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983: 31) that structures the anthropological gaze across the cultural gap. By contrast, the shaman’s translative work depends upon identifying the various identities, and by synecdochic extension, the multiverses, that nestle and overlap in a single object or entity. Here the work of translation is not one of bringing together terms that are far distant from one another—a distance that the anthropologist in fact cements in the act of ‘explaining’� Rather, the shaman teases apart terms that are ineluctably entangled with one another, crowded into the confined space of the entity but by the same token, adjacent to each other in relations of ‘convivial’ neighbourliness. What defines the translative work of the shaman is the negotiations of contiguity that she or he must undertake. Contiguity is the structuring principle of what has come, in another of the cultural turns of recent decades, to be termed ‘affect’ (Clough and Halley, eds 2007). Affect is the power to effect change, to make something happen, to bring about transformation, that one entity exerts upon another. Affect is the name of agency measured not as an attribute of the self but as the effect that results from an interaction with one’s neighbour. Affect is thus the transformative character of relationships between entities (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 313-5; 1987: 256- 8). Affect is therefore inherently material, even though its effects may extend into the domain of the conceptual or the theoretical� Such apparently ideational realms of action find themselves, in the orbit of notions of affect, drawn back into the scope of materiality (where indeed, they already always were: there is no cognition without the material infrastructure of neural architecture, nerve fibres with their constitutive axons and connective synapses, and the corresponding alternation between electronic and chemical transmission of impulses). Affect is a deceptive term, easily misunderstood as pertaining to emotion. Emotion, however, is merely the named, packaged, reified and individualized equivalent of affect that is conceptualized in the early eighteenth century alongside reconceptualizations of individual subjectivity as they emerge from newly developing theories of the nervous system (e.g. Fletcher 1995: 290-93). Emotion thus caps and contains affect, reducing it to an internalized and personalized sense of ‘feeling’ that is incrementally disconnected, or only indirectly connect- 82 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman ed, to the emotions of others; even in the Romantic period feeling remains connected to the material environment only in a highly mediated manner, working to stress that creative individual’s separateness, rather than to disperse his (rarely her) subjectivity in that environment. Affect must thus be conceptualized as a connective medium that links multiple entities to each other in material relations of reciprocally devolved agency� These material relations are simultaneously semiotic modes of communication that may bypass more narrowly intellectualized versions of cognition and may allow bodies to communicate with each other in more im-mediate modes that those, for instance, of speech or writing. (A theory of affect would nonetheless also draw both of these mediate modes of communication into its orbit, demanding that we address their neglected affective dimensions.) Affect is by definition a border-crossing medium of sensuous communication that functions via material contiguity� To the extent that it is a border-crossing medium, it ignores the customary barriers between human and non-human actants. Affect travels, as it easily acknowledged, between humans and animals. Our pets pick up our moods and we pick up theirs. But it also travels between humans and the vegetable and mineral worlds. It travels between entities that are generally held to be intangible, such as ideas, to the extent that ideas have a material existence within a material infrastructure and in a material environment. Affect is thus inherently translative. It connects, it makes things happen, and these happenings are transformative. In its promiscuity and its productivity, ‘affect’ is thus inherently ‘multiple’. This is what Viveiros de Castro (2004b: 7) means by ‘affectual multiplicity’ that defines the way ‘different kinds of bodies “naturally” experience the world’� At this juncture, a renewed comparison with Kohn may be illuminating. As demonstrated above, Kohn’s deployment of the difference between the symbolic function of language and the iconic/ indexical functions works to rein in the potentially uncontrollable results of an unlimited expansion of the community of actants such as we find within the Amerindian world. Kohn’s claims for this relocated but not abolished border between higherand lower-order beings, as also showed above, are constructed in such a way as to make them self-authorizing statements� They operate according to the protocols of systemic autopoesis, self-constructing by creating, from within, a closed system that demands an ongoing process of maintenance (see chapter 2 above). Kohn as anthropologist widens somewhat the community of beings that belong to culture, but nature as a mute, inert background remains stable. Translation, in this view of autopoetic processual being that is, would be the creation of metaphoric equivalences between closed systems (or ethnic groups) within the world of culture. Provincialization and porosity, translation and verbing 83 Viveiros de Castro takes this structure and—in a trope that we have already seen recurring on several occasions—turns it inside-out. Communication between entities is always already happening via what we call affect. Affect is inherently connective. Entities are inherently multiple, because they belong to multiple universes. Translation is not something that comes in the wake of the entity’s existence, a communication necessitated by their systemic closure, and thus logically triggered by what is outside that closure� Rather, and it is here that the turning-inside-out is evident, translation is coeval with their coming to being� They are always already translating within themselves, and the translator-shaman’s work is to identify and harness this already extant process of translation� The translator is thus part of a system of open systems that are translating themselves from inside-out, as it were, dispersing their translativity in the world. Some of that translativity is devolved to the shaman, who takes it up as his own task. It is clear, that this point, that the autopoetic processuality of the systemic closure of the human and the role of symbolic function of language as performed by Kohn’s notion of human exceptionalism is countered, in Viveiros de Castro’s idea of symmetrical, animist perspectivism, by a similarly inverted notion of processuality. This processuality does not work to maintain the system’s closure, to ‘except’ or ‘excerpt’ it from its environment� On the contrary, openness and porosity is the condition of its self-maintenance, and thus processuality is merely the temporal exquivalent of systemic, or spatial openness (although in fact, the spatial and the temporal aspects of systemic openness cannot be kept apart; their distinction here is merely a heuristic device). In what follows, in order to elucidate the processual nature of this systemic openness, I turn to the work of Tim Ingold and the role of language in the cosmic porosity of animist beliefs� Provincialization and porosity, translation and verbing Ingold (2011: 175) focuses on the (for us) curious fact that in some Artic circle societies, animal names are verbs rather than nouns. He gives a plethora of examples: “ ‘perches in the lower part of spruce trees” tells us something about how the boreal owl lives� The names describes a pattern of activity that may then resolve itself into the form of an owl’ (ibid: 170). This appears to be a part of a broader linguistic phenomenon not uncommon in Circumpolar societies. As Cruikshank (2005: 3-4) notes, 84 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman English is a language rich in nouns back lacking verb forms that distinguish animate from inanimate subjects. Both Athapaskan and Tlingit languages have comparatively fewer nouns but are verb rich and hence often define landscape in terms of its actions … Both languages [Tlingit and Southern Tutchone] emphasize activity and motion, making no distinction between animate and inanimate. In Athapaskan languages, you know something is animate if the verb signals that it has the power to act on other things or to move, and actions are often attributed to entities, such as glaciers, that English speakers would define as inanimate. In order to give English speakers a sense of how these verb-nouns might sound, Ingold uses a substantivizing continuous participle: where English would use the noun ‘owl’, ‘the Koyukon name does not really refer to the owl as an object, but to what we might call the activity of “owling” ’ (ibid: 170). The use of the ‘ing’-form conveys the sense of existence as process. It gestures towards the verb as an index of animation, of ‘animacy’� Where there is life, there is a verb� And where there is life, verbs create stories: ‘every bird that flies is like every telling of the story: the character endures in its living enactments as the story endures in its retellings’ (ibid: 171). But Ingold’s use of the simile (‘like’) is ingenuous, because what he in fact means is a performative copula. If the animal’s life is described by a verb, to use that verb is not merely to describe but also to participate in that lively processuality. For the societies that Ingold studies, animals (to take only this example, leaving trees, glaciers, or mountains to one side), described by a verb-name, are stories (ibid: 169, 170, 171). The conflation of animal, verb, life and story may appear curious, even bizarre, but its true interest lies in the way it transforms narrators as well as narrative, and by extension, narrative language itself. Ingold (ibid: 175) notes that, because the name is coeval with a process which is coeval with life, ‘[t] o speak of an animal among the Koyukon … is to enter into the process of its life.’ Furthermore, narration is also closely connected with interpellation and calling: animals know their names and respond to them (ibid: 173). Language is both processual and infused with addressivity� To describe is to address in a relation of contiguous intimacy. Thus, ‘[i]f humans respond to the calls of animals the same way that animals respond to their vocal invocation by humans, then there can be no absolute difference between animal vocalisation and human name calling’ (ibid: 174). Consequently, the world consists of an interrelated tapestry of human and non-human stories and addressivity (ibid: 173). Not only stories and names are related to each other, the narratives forms and textures in which these stories and names are couched also become an all-pervasive, contaminatory influence. Language in turn becomes caught up in this porous processuality. Ingold (2011: 175) concludes, falling back upon his use of contin- Provincialization and porosity, translation and verbing 85 uous forms, that ‘speaking [the animal’s] name is part of the process whereby language itself is brought to life: the animal can be animaling in a language that is languaging.’ At risk of redundcy, but in order to stress the importance of this idea, Ingold (ibid: 175) details this process: ‘In languaging language—one not semantically locked into a categorical frame but creating itself endlessly in the inventive telling of its speakers—animals do not exist, either as subjects, or objects; rather, they occur.’ Ingold opens up a possibility which allows us not merely to admit animals to the symbolic rather than keeping them imprisoned in the world of iconicity or indexality, but rather, to transform language itself. This happens—or better, is recognized as always already happening—when we become cognisant not only of language’s power to transform the world, but more radically, of its mode of being as a process of transformation in itself� Language, in the concepts that Ingold relays from Circumpolar societies, thus becomes part of the meshwork of life. It does not display its creativity merely by attaining higher functions that are freed from the constraints of iconicity and indexicality (i.e. locked into systems of concrete referentiality) so as to become autotelic and thus poetic, i.e. creative (in a realm to which only humans can aspire). That vision of language would merely assert its superiority by moving away from things, away from materiality towards ideality (this was why it was so important to stress the materiality of the sign in an early phase of structuralism [Goux 1968], though this rapidly degenerated into a distancing of sign and signifier in poststructuralism, culminating by extension in an enhanced notion of distance from worldly referentiality [During 2012: 74]). Rather, in the Circumpolar concepts of language described by Ingold, we are confroned with a concept of language that entails entanglement (Hodder 2012) and proximity (West-Pavlov 2018a). The verb is a connector: it makes no sense to leave a verb in isolation� The verb does not move in the separated world of the autotelic, autonomous symbolic as Kohn imagines it� The verb is an operator of dynamic enlivenment, which means relational continguity and promiscuity, and thus of productive generativity� We would do well at this juncture to recall Simondon’s (1964: 260) dictum, referring to the biological phenomenon of the membrane, to the effect that ‘Le vivant vit à la limite de lui-même, sur sa limite’ [‘The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (qtd in Deleuze 1990: 103)]. Taking into account that within the worldviews Ingold documents, language is pervaded by life’s own processuality, we could retool Simondon’s dictum to say that ‘Languaging languages at the limit of itself, on its limit’. In contrast to the ‘internal distanciation’ ( distanciation interne ) that Althusser (1995: 564) imagined as a sort of non-transcendental critical distance within ideology itself, we might want to 86 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman imagine here a sort of ‘internal proximate productivity’ within the fabric of the material world where the ‘emergent complexity’ of matter happens at the interface between entities. (The doubling of critique and creativity that I rehearse here is a topos to which I will return in chapter 4 below.) To this extent, the verb is the site of the ‘emergent complexity’ that Kohn assigns to the symbolic function of language, but this ‘emergent complexity’ happens within and by virtue of the fabric of being, not by escaping from it. Language would be part of that process, not a detached descriptor or ‘representation’, and it would thus be characterized by its own ‘internal proximate productivity’. In other words, language would be embarked upon an immanent process of translation from the outset� For Ingold, life is not an attribute, something that might be possessed by an entity, held within its boundaries, or at worst, ‘attributed’ to it in the ‘anthropomorphizing’ projections of primitive peoples and misguidedly romantic eco-philosophers� This would submit life to the economy of ‘inversion’, a ‘logic’ according to which ‘the field of involvement in the world, of a thing or a person, is converted into an interior schema of which its manifest appearance and behaviour are but outward expressions’ (Ingold 2011: 68). ‘Inversion’ is a process by which processes properly situated in the commons are internalized and lodged as goods within the inner space of an entity� The attribute becomes a ‘tribute’, something extracted by force from a subjugated commons and captured in a colonial encampment. If an attribute is something that, etymologically, is ‘allotted’, it is thus contained in the individual’s ‘allottment’: most typically for the Enlightenment individual, his fenced-in private domicile. By contrast, for Ingold life is all around us, distributed and dispersed. But, precisely because of this ubiquity, it cannot be thought of as an attribute. It must be thought of as a relational process. Life is not something that one has, nor that everyone has, but rather, the processual mode of existing together by which things are. Life, in other words, happens. It happens, in its hypothetically most minimal form when two entities interact� But these entities are themselves constituted of processes, which in turn are constituted of sub-processes, and so on, and these entities are embedded in much larger networks of processual relations, so that the constitutive notion of the boundary or border that defines both attribute and entity must be abandoned. Life has no boundary or outside or opposite (most certainly not that of death). There is no oppositional relationship à la Saussure that defines life. As Ingold (ibid: 4) notes, Provincialization and porosity, translation and verbing 87 It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect to a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure� If there is a difference that is somehow constitutive of life, it is not a static, spatialized one located on its borders, at the sites where life meets the nonliving, or at the moment when life comes to an end. Rather, this constitutive difference is one that is dynamic and generative within itself. This difference is the point of encounter between a given process and other processes that attract, deflect, transform it, thus triggering the next stage of the unending process� The border is between life and life, between its constitutive processes� Simondon again: life lives at is own limits. Each of these borders is a moment of ‘translation’, as one process encounters another and undergoes a transformative metamorphosis� These notions in turn have implications for agency. Agency is not a property of internalized identity and stability, but is conferred and devolved onto the actants by their inter-actants, or interlocutors, by the connections that take place within the interaction� Rejecting the accusation of anthropomorphism frequently levelled at notions of animism, Ingold suggests that ‘The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not a result of the infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation’ (Ingold 2011: 68). One could make a similar argument for language and for linguistic agency, and especially the creative agency that putatively accompanies the command of the symbolic function of language. The task is not to raise nonhuman entities into the realm of language, but in fact to recognize the already-always location of all beings within a meshwork of creativity, whether linguistic or lively, that is ontologically prior to their differentiation: As Liz Grosz (2011: 19) has suggested, ‘Language is not the uniquely human accomplishment that post-Enlightenment thought has assumed.’ Summarizing the work of Darwin, she notes the prevalence of language as ‘a mode of sexual allure, as a form of enhancement and intensification’ ‘which man shares with many species’ (ibid: 18). It is ‘already a tendency, residing within the voice and other organs capable of resonating sound, to articulate, to express, to vibrate, and thus in some way to affect bodies’ (ibid: 19). To the extent that language is a creative, connective, generative business from the outset, languaging would emerge as a process similarly ontologically prior to the differentiation between iconic, indexical or symbolic uses of language� The creativity of language at its apparently most autonomous would in fact be a creativity of one sector of the world as it unfurls in creative contact with other sectors at one of its extreme outer edges—a linguistic-ontological meshwork of becoming. Language, in 88 Chapter 3: Provincializing language II: The translator as shaman this sense, becomes neither a descriptor of inherent agencies, nor an inherent agency in itself, but rather, a site of of shared, participatory, collaborative agencies. Agency is always already devolved and derivative, and linguistic agency remains, even in the symbolic, devolved and derivative. Every language is thus a contact zone. And every entity is a translator, translating itself via its own constitutive difference between what it is and what it may become—in concert with others� Provincialization and porosity, translation and verbing 89 Chapter 4: Translation as information In the previous chapter, we noted the dominance of colonial practices of translation that reduced the cultures of the colonized to a transparent object of epistemic violence that went hand in hand with imperial, conquistador violence, underpinning its assumptions and legitimizing its practices. The ‘translatability’ of colonial culture was premised upon the discardability of the form (and the bearers) of the colonized culture, which could be consigned to the rubbish-bin of ‘history’ at the very moment of the content of that culture being drawn into the ambit of ‘history as progress’ (Niranjana 1992: 164). The culture that was translated was elided under the translation itself, which became assimilated, by the same token, into a European tradition of the curatorship of ‘classical’ antiquity. Ironically, European curators could profile themselves as the better custodians of native cultural works, in a discursive configuration that survives until today in debates about the repatriation of Indigenous cultural artefacts and bodily remains. Indeed, the translated work in its ‘processed’ form was often conceived of as being aesthetically superior to the original ‘raw’ material (Steiner 1975: 298). Just as the colonized cultures were considered to have been drawn into the slipstream of historical progress (e.g. Hegel 1956: 99; 1961: 163), so too the business of translation absorbed them into a double continuity of translatio imperii et studii � It is possible, however, that in the process, translation as a transformative activity also becomes elided alongside the culture that is translated and transformed. Any form of acknowledgement of the importance of translation as a ‘contact zone’ would have translated into an acknowledgement of cultural debt to the colonized culture, and of co-agency shared with it. In the early British Indian colonial period the sense of debt towards and reliance upon indigenous knowledge was immense, provoking ‘anxieties about what was at least initially a near-blind reliance on the practitioners and specialists of what appeared to the emergent Orientalists to be an ocean of indigenous learning’ (Mufti 2016: 104). The debt that Europe owes to the colonized world for its modern self-constitution, whether economic or cultural, has long been supressed� This holds for epistemic debt and its concomitant conduit, translation, as well. At the moment that ‘the author’ as a cultural function emerges (Foucault 1994, I, 789-821; 1988c), other figures of non-originary literary production, among them translators, fall into the disrepute of docile, obedient, subservience: ‘Whereas authorship is generally defined as originality, self-expression in a unique text, translation is 90 Chapter 4: Translation as information derivative, neither self-expression nor unique: it imitates another text’ (Venuti 1998: 31). Venuti (ibid: 31) locates this moment of increasing ‘concealement’ (in the English translative tradition) by tying it to the name of Dryden (d. 1700). At the same epoch, the colonial cementing of European civilization as a form of inherited imperial authority (i.e. partaking in a devolved civilization originariness that elides its own secondariness) also gained full credibility. Traces of this dismissive attitude towards the translated cultures also coloured European attitudes towards the act of translation itself, which became marginalized at this epoch as a secondary and derivative form of cultural work—precisely because translation hinted metonymically at an elided debt to indigenous cultures and their wealth of knowledge. Translation as a crucial part of the imperial project was thus elided behind the denigration of the translated texts themselves. In this way, just as the discipline of literary studies in the English-speaking world emerged in the colonies (Viswanathan 1990), it is conceivable that the denigration of translation that still reigns today in the world of letters (Venuti 1995; 1998) may also have its origins in the colonial world. This is a negative origin, but if we are to have any truck with origins at all, it is perhaps not bad to back that one! —especially, as I will show in a moment, as this particular origin might make us revise the very notion of the origin(al) that underpins much work on translation� If this surmise has any substance, one might presume that the opposite assumption, that of the primacy and ubiquity of translation, also has its roots in the colonized world—but with the significant caveat that those roots are implanted on the other side of the ‘translational divide’� Positing a hitherto ignored ‘origin’ in the Global South for a non-derogatory attitude towards translation is worth a try� The implications of that hypothesis can teased out with reference to a statement by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, originally published in 1971: On the one hand, the world is presented to us as a collection of similarities; on the other, as a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely original because language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation—first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase. (Paz 1992: 154) Paz’s comments, if read as explicitly issuing from the cultural zone of the Global South, inherently contradict a number of assumptions underpinning colonial translation and its contemporary avatars� The first thing to note is that Paz assumes an entanglement of similarity and difference (compare Bhatti and Kimmich, eds 2017). Similarity, rather than Chapter 4: Translation as information 91 difference, connects the world to itself, even though, as he admits, ‘while translation overcomes the differences between one language and another, it also reveals them more fully’ (ibid: 154). Thus, though he pays doubtless heavily ironic lip-service to the ‘greatest schism, scarcely less profound than that between nature and culture, [that] separates primitives from the civilized’ (ibid: 154), the force of his comments actually militates against such binary divisions. For Paz in fact finds a plethora of smaller differences between ‘a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations’ (ibid: 154). In fact, what Paz identifies is a network of differences that are in some way more similar to one another than they are different. Similarity persists among difference and despite difference because the entities separated by difference are also connected by the translative process itself. It is less difference than the translative-connection that separates-connects entities. This infinitesimal and constantly processual difference-in-similarity and similarity-in-difference belies any gestures towards grand oppositions between nature and culture or civilization and primitivism—even when Paz jocularly appears to subscribe to such ideas. In the substance of his statement, Paz is contradicting the very underlying assumptions of colonial translation, which are founded upon notions of inherent hierarchical cultural differences. The role of colonial translation is to bridge the cultural chasm but under no circumstances to close it. Paz, by contrast, very emphatically does close the chasm and disperses difference among the translations themselves. Paz’s response to colonial translation is not to engage in a resistant, contestatory, or even ‘cannibalistic’ struggle with the opponent that pits alternative postcolonial translations against those of the erstwhile colonial master� Rather, he reforges the very notion of translation itself so as to turn it against the underlying assumptions driving colonial translation. How exactly does his strategy work? The key to this operation lies in a second notable aspect of Paz’s statement: he multiplies translations. Anticipating upon Niranjana’s (1992: 60, 141, 142) repeated insistence upon the intertextuality of translation, Paz imagines all translations as being ‘translations of translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text’ (Paz 1992: 154). Even the ‘original’ is a translation. This deals a death blow to colonial translation, which wields the notion of the ‘original’ in order to resolve the constitutive paradox in which it finds itself caught. On the one hand, the colonial project must at some level acknowledge the value of the colonial culture in order to legitimize its own interest in it. On the other hand, colonial translation cannot afford such an acknowledgement. As a result, it deflects the full force of this necessity of acknowledgement by belittling the other culture: it regards the source text as a ‘raw’ material, a rudimentary or elementary text, thereby 92 Chapter 4: Translation as information making of it an ‘original’ that, mindful of its own pitiful subaltern condition, begs to be translated and refined—drawn into the slipstream of world-historical progress—by the target culture. The original engages in the sort of subaltern ‘mimicry’ infamously analysed by Bhabha (1994: 85-92). The ‘original’ of colonial translation is a sort of ‘anti-original’ or ‘negative’ original that aspires, by virtue of translative mimicry, to the status of ‘ “not quite/ not white” on the margins of metropolitan desire’ (ibid: 92). By contrast, Paz puts this perverse logic out of action by depriving the target culture of its rhetoric of originality. By asking the colonizer to confront an intertextual genealogy, he demands that the translator engage with a legacy that is always already one of relationality, thereby implying that the translator is also caught in a relationship with that legacy: this is exactly what colonial translation, with its conviction of cultural superiority, wishes to disavow� Only with regard to its own mythology of translatio imperii et studii can the colonial culture accommodate an historical legacy of intertextuality; with regard to the colonized culture this genealogy must be dismissed. Paz, by virtue of the very geopolitical site from which he speaks, restores this repressed legacy. But there is more to say about genealogy of translations that Paz imagines behind every translation. He notes: Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely original because language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation—first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase. (1992: 154) This is a remarkable statement. Paz leads us backwards from one translation to its precursor, which is also a translation, and back again to … what? In order to answer this question, he shifts gears (or scales or dimensions) to speak of language as a similar recursive process of back-translations that leads us back to the nonverbal world, and then forward again, via the sign, and phrase, logically to the literary work. If there is to be an ‘origin’ of translations of translations, it lies in the nonverbal world. Yet this does not simply return us to a traditional version of mimesis or an ‘Abbild’-theory of linguistic representation whose referent is the thing reflected in language. It is highly unlikely that Paz thinks that language merely mirrors the world as a given. If language translates back to the world and forwards to phrases and then texts, and finally on to subsequent translations, it is more likely that what translation translates or mimics is the ‘translativity’ of the natural world itself� The ‘translations of translations of translations’ that Paz imagines can be projected back into the ‘nonverbal world’ so that a form of nonverbal translation can be conceptualized as making up the world, both preceding subse- Chapter 4: Translation as information 93 quent human linguistic translation, but also surrounding and underpinning it� Bassnett and Trivedi (1999: 3) comment that this gives rise to ‘a radical view of translation, which sees it not as a marginal activity but as a primary one’ but in fact Paz’s ideas may imply a notion of translation that is even more radical than what they envisage. A notion of the ubiquity and primacy of translation as a cultural constant is radical only to a certain point; a notion of translation that would precede the very bifurcation between nature and culture would be much more radical� Such an ultra-radical notion of primary translation emerges from the Global South in particular because it is characterized by many more residual zones inhabited by ‘figures du continu’ [‘figures of the continuous’] (Descola 2005: 19-57) and ruled by ‘une théorie du monde résolument non-dualiste’ [‘a resolutely non-dualist theory of the world’] (ibid: 26). It is just such an ultra-radical notion of translation that I wish to sketch out in this chapter. In the previous two chapters, I have made several forays into anthropology in pursuit of a possible ‘provincialization of language’ that would, by the same token, ‘provincialize’ interlinguistic translation and open it up to a much broader version of itself beyond the charmed circle of human language� In this chapter, I rehearse precisely the opposite move, ‘universalizing’ rather than ‘provincializing’ a notion of translation that understands translation as a universal form of information exchange� My starting point is a claim made by the Soviet semiotician and founder of the Tartu school of semiotics Jurij Lotman (1990: 127, 143), who asserts that ‘[t] ranslation is the primary mechanism of consciousness’, and, in another version of this idea, that ‘the elementary act of thinking is translation.’ This is exactly the sort of expansion of the concept of translation that got translation theorists ‘proper’ up in arms. The proximity of semiotics to a generalized theory of communication that also crosses over the borders of human written communication into domains generally under the purview of the natural sciences (Eco 1976) means however that claims such as Lotman’s cannot be immediately dismissed. On the contrary, they can even be radicalized within the realm of what we have come to know as Science Studies (Biagioli, ed. 1999). From this point of view, the natural sciences are a system of practices and discourses that are connected to other social practices and can be subjected to scrutiny by discourse analysis or sociological interpretation� This is the stance that is rehearsed in Michel Serres’ 1974 book Hermès III: La Traduction � Serres’ approach to the sciences sees them as practices of translation: translations of the natural world which itself consists of translation, that is to say, of exchanges of information� Serres’ approach to translation encompasses Lotman’s notion of translation as a basic cognitive operation. But because Serres reads all exchanges in the natural world as exchanges of information, 94 Chapter 4: Translation as information cognition spills across the border between the human world of culture into the nonhuman world. In this chapter, I will begin by enumerating the various steps in Serres’ highly political universal theory of translation-as-information exchange, before returning to Lotman to recalibrate his translational semiotics, in the light of Serres’ work, in a more radical fashion. My reading of Serres and Lotman prepares the ground for Chapter 5, where I seek to lay out the basic principles of a quantum theory of translation� Translation, information, life Serres (1974: 9) opens his theory of informational translation by making an absolute claim that initially includes translation—presumably translation ‘proper’ cherished by the purists—as a only the very specific area of textual transformation: Nous ne connaissons les choses que par les systèmes de transformation des ensembles qui les comprennent. Au minimum, ces systèmes sont quatre. La déduction, dans l’aire logico-mathématique. L’induction, dans le champ expérimental. La production, dans les domaines de pratique. La traduction, dans l’espace des textes. [We know things only via the systems of transformation of the ensembles that include them/ make them accessible. At the very least, there are four such systems: Deduction, in the realm of logic and mathematics. Induction, in the field of experimentation. Production, in the areas of practice� Translation, in the space of texts�] [All translations from Serres 1974 are mine, as, paradoxically, only one chapter from this text on translation (ibid: 233-42) has to date been translated into English: Serres 1982: 54-62] There are several propositions being made here that need to be teased out� The first is about human knowledge. Serres suggests that translation is a basic condition of knowledge, because the only access we have to the natural world is by virtue of the transformations it undergoes� This in part a statement about visibility, which depends upon difference: not a hard, binary difference as in Saussurean linguistics, but the difference that is embodied in transformation. Only when something moves, as it were, does it become visible, by virtue of a mobile distinction. It is also a statement about the way those transformations themselves must be transformed in order to reach us. As Lotman (1990: 269) points out, ‘Modern science from nuclear physics to linguistics sees the scientist as inside the world being described and as a part of that world� But the object and the observer are as a rule described in different languages, and consequently the problem of translation is a universal scientific task.’ In other words, the Translation, information, life 95 process of generating scientific information, even at the level of the scientific apparatus itself, mediates between the languages in which the observed object is described and the language via which, implicitly, the observer understands heror himself� This is a crucial point, because it brings us immediately to the issue of perception, which arises here in two forms: the perception that is inherent in transformation itself , and the perception that arises when that transformation becomes visible to human observers� This is, in fact, the second aspect of Serres’ statement that demands attention. Serres’ point is not about knowledge of the world, as in some sort of poststructuralist, semiotic and constructivist platitude that insist that there is no knowledge that is not mediated knowledge. This is self-evident and has by now become a truism with little radical epistemological punch, because it still implies that the world, though mediated, is a stable object in itself� Rather, Serres suggests, understanding is itself a process of transformation, as is the world it understands. Both knowledge and the world that is known are transformative processes. (The distinction I make here between knowledge of the world and the world itself is one that I table here as a heuristic device, for I will almost immediately erase it.) Serres claims that we only know things in the world via ‘les systèmes de transformation des ensembles qui les comprennent’ [‘the systems of transformation of the ensembles that include them/ make them accessible.’]. The final verb is polysemic in French, including ‘comprehension’ or understanding and ‘inclusion’� This means that understanding, which as we have just heard, is predicated upon transformation (and not merely mediation), is not merely exterior to the systems understood, but is also interior to them, as they understand the things within their systemic ambit� Reading transformation-understanding backwards at this point we can thus also read it inwards into the very heart of the system of transformation, which understands its own components via an ‘embedded’ form of transformationunderstanding� This embedded structure has been described by Mandelbrot’s (1983) fractal geometry. Fractal structures patterns that ‘are invariant under certain transformations of scale … A fractal invariant under ordinary geometric similarity is called self-similar’ (ibid: 18). The structure of ‘knowledge via transformation’ is the ‘self-similar’ pattern that replicates down through the various scalar levels of reality as it is communicated via structures of transformation. In other words, understanding-transformation, or transformation-understanding, which we might summarize under the term of ‘translation’, is present not just in our observation of the natural world, but in the natural world itself. At every level, understanding-transformation, or transformation-understanding (that is, ‘translation’) occurs as the basic medium through which both understanding 96 Chapter 4: Translation as information and transformation are communicated and transmitted. In other words, translation is inherent to the very structure of the world as an immense network of dynamic exchanges of material information� This is a complex, even revolutionary notion, to which I will return at several junctures in the course of this chapter. After parsing the four respective systems of ‘déduction’, ‘induction’, ‘production’ and ‘tradition’, Serres (1974: 9) continues, ‘Il n’est pas complètement obscur qu’ils répètent le même mot. Qu’il n’y ait de philosophie que de la Duction—au préfixe, variable et nécessaire, près—on peut passer sa vie à tenter d’éclairer cet état de choses’ (ibid: 9) [‘It’s not difficult to see that they repeat the same world. The fact that there is no philosophy of duction—not even with its necessary and variable prefixes—is something that one could spend one’s life trying to explain.’] ‘Duction’ is a neologism that Serres creates to name a philosophy that does not exist, which in turn explains the concomitant difficulty of pinning down the term’s meaning! What ‘duction’ might possibly connote, however, is suggested by several etymologies. First, Serres links the word to ‘déduit’, an archaic French usage meaning pleasure or sexual intercourse (etymologically, ‘to extrude, divert’), that is, to the vagaries of natural generativity and productivity: ‘Et le cycle entire recommence’ (ibid: 9) [‘And the entire cycle begins again’]. In other words, Serres’ exploration of the meanings of translation is on a par with the productive, generative participation in life itself. A second possible meaning is suggested by English etymology. The English word ‘ductility’ refers to a material’s ability to deform—or transform—under stress without breaking. This etymology, inferred from a neighbouring language in a gesture of playful lateral translation, relates to the specific quality denoted by Serres’ neologism� Thus Serres’ notion of ‘duction’ brings together notions of generativity via continuity in transformation. A philosophy of ‘duction’ might thus be the system of concepts that describes that ways in which ‘[la] différence n’est, en fait, que la variation’ (ibid: 11) [‘difference is, in fact, nothing other than variation’], as Serres adds a couples of pages later� Again, several points need to be teased out here. The first point is that transformation-within-continuity, or continuity-withintransformation is the basic idea of the theory of translation that Serres posits as the norm of all processes of life, including but by far exceeding the domain of linguistic and textual transformation� What Serres is suggesting here is very close to Butler’s (1990) theory of discursive performativity. Butler draws upon Austin’s (1962) speech act theory, coupled to Derrida’s notion of context-bound ‘iterability’ and Foucault’s notion of the ubiquity of power. Melding these notions, she shows how constantly repeated discursive acts constitute subjectivity in an illusion of stability; that apparent stability nonetheless remains a process Translation, information, life 97 whose repeated singular instantiations, because they are the guarantee of the persistence of a structure, in turn provide leverage points for change: performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject� This iterability implies that ‘performance’ is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. (Butler 1990: 95) Butler’s theory refuses any clear distinction between transformation and continuity: it is the ceaseless chain of discursive acts, where each utterance differs slightly from each other utterance, that buttresses the continuity of selfhood and the maintenance of power; and the continuity of multiple discursive acts is precisely that interface that provides purchase for incremental changes in the semantics of speech acts. As Giddens (1979: 69) suggests, The concept of structuration involves the duality of structure, which relates to the fundamentally recursive character of social life, and expresses the mutual dependance of structure and agency … the structured properties of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of those social systems� The theory of structuration, thus formulated, rejects any difference of synchrony and diachrony or statics and dynamics. The identification of structure with restraint is also rejected: structure is both enabling and restraining� Without patterns of speech acts, there would be no possibility of change; and without the webs of power there would be no site for transformative agency, as Foucault (1976) suggests. It is important that two apparently opposed and incompatible concepts, those of transformation and continuity, are intertwined here, as my chiastic inversion (transformation-within-continuity or continuity-within-transformation) seeks to demonstrate� This is not mere rhetoric, in the tradition of, say, deconstruction, from Nietzsche to Derrida, which would point out how the two concepts are reciprocally dependent upon one another for their contrastive, differentially constructed meaning: Man darf nämlich zweifeln, erstens, ob es Gegensätze überhaupt gibt, und zweitens, ob jene volkstümliche Wertschätzungen und Wert-Gegensätze, auf welche die Metaphysiker ihr Sigel gedrückt haben, nicht vielleicht nur Vordergrunds-Schätzungen sind, nur vorläufige Perspektiven … Es wäre sogar möglich, daß was den Wert jener 98 Chapter 4: Translation as information guten und verehrten Dinge ausmacht, gerade darin bestünde, mit jenen schlimmen, scheinbaren entgegensetzten Dingen auf verfängliche Weise verwandt, verknüpft, verhäkelt, vielleicht gar wesensgleich zu sein. (Nietzsche 1994, III: 10-11) But we can doubt, first, whether opposites even exist and, second, whether the popular valuations and value oppositions that have earned the metaphysicians’ seal of approval might only be foreground appraisals … Perhaps they are merely provisional perspectives … It could even be possible that whatever gives value to those good and honourable things has an incriminating link, bond, or tie to the very things that look like their evil opposites; perhaps they are even essentially the same. (Nietzsche 2002: 6) Rather, in contrast to such merely conceptual entanglement, the intertwining of continuity and difference is a basic principle of organic life, which sees the maintenance of life as predicated upon constant renewal, that is, material transformation, even at points at which a total rupture appears to have taken place (as in the ‘death’ of an entity). All life continues via the emergent process of chaotic, in other words non-linear, transformations� These guarantee continuity-in-transformation just as they guarantee transformation-in-continuity� The second point is that this blurring of apparent oppositions cannot be contained at any point. If we return to Serres’ fractal presentation of transformation as something that straddles the things that are contained within a system of transformation and, conversely, their re-presentation outside the system, then we are obliged to lift the barrier between the categories of transformation and transmission, that is, between the categories of material and information� (I hinted at this above in suggesting that a distinction between understanding-transformation as the mode of knowledge of the world, and as the world’s mode of being, was a purely heuristic device; the point is so crucial that I will return to it on several occasions below.) This is exactly what Serres has in mind when later on in the text he posits the genetic code as a life-transmitting script that poses information (negentropy) as the opposite of entropy (1974: 51, 71). The genetic code does not merely replicate life, it also replicates life by storing and emitting the information that generates life. The title of the relevant chapter (ibid: 43-72) puts ‘Vie, information, deuxième principe’ [‘Life, information, second principle of thermodynamics’] in a relation of apposition: life is continued, in defiance of entropy (the dispersal and loss of energy), in other words, in support of the processes of emergence and complexity, by the negentropic transmission of information. If we bear in mind the fact that the DNA information is present in the form of basic acids and proteins, then there is no fundamental difference between information and the building blocks of organic life itself. Nor is there any difference between information transmission and the ongoing process of life itself� Translation, information, life 99 Indeed, just such a blurring is present in Serres’ own text at this juncture. The fact that there is, to date, no such thing as a philosophy of Duction astonishes the speaker of Serres’ text, who—I quote again—ironically adds, ‘on peut passer sa vie à tenter d’éclairer cet état de choses’ (ibid: 9) [this ‘is something that one could spend one’s life trying to explain�’]� To spend one’s life explaining why there is no such philosophy—which would amount to creating such a philosophy—would be a way of ‘doing’ duction in the process of ‘doing’ life, filling up these gaps in information via ‘explanation’, which would in effect be a mode of participating in this ‘state of things’� The fact that this ‘state’ is not a state, but of a continual process is already suggested by Serres’ tentative ‘tenter’ [‘to attempt’]. Even Serres’ question is an illocutionary statement that folds back upon itself, making the book he is writing and that we are reading a mode of intervention into the process of information-life� This illocutionary notion of life-as-information is reinforced in an even more sophisticated manner thirty years later in Seres’ essay on Virginia Woolf ’s novel To the Lighthouse (Serres 2008). There, in a semi-autobiographical mode that foregrounds writing (and by extension reading) as an intervention in information-life, he describes how ‘wrote [his] article in order to try to draw a connection between perception and negentropy—in other words, to find information in the act of perceiving’, adding that is ‘still under the spell of this now-distant shock’ (ibid: 122). The jump from information to perception is significant, because it dynamizes the notion of information to stress the act of reception (and by extension that of transmission) of information. Information becomes processual and dialogical� This notion may need some unpacking, because we are accustomed to thinking of perception as a unidirectional cognitive process, at the very most as a unidirectional bodily process� Perception is generally understood as the set of mechanisms whereby incoming information (visual, auditory, more rarely tactile or olfactory) is received and cognitively processed. This understanding of perception needs to be expanded if we are to make sense of Serres’ notion of perception� To start with, we need to include under the category of perception what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘microperception’: a subliminal process of constant, ongoing ‘microshocks’ in the words of Massumi (2015: 53), that have much in common with the constant triangulation of the Peircean signs and its interpretant. These ‘microshocks’ are ‘the kind that populate every moment of our lives’: For example, a change of focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze towards it. In every shift of attention, there is an interruption, a momentary cut 100 Chapter 4: Translation as information in the mode of onward deployment of life� The cut can pass imperceptibly, with only its effects entering conscious awareness as they unroll. (ibid: 53) Massumi continues by explaining that [i]t’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects. According to this notion of shock, there is always a commotion under way, a ‘something doing’, as James would say� There is always something doing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in process. For something to continue, it has to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption. (ibid: 53) The constant stimulus of ‘microshocks’ or ‘interruptive signs’ (ibid: 54) from other beings, organisms, the environment, nutrition, etc�, is the communicative process that makes up the intimate ongoing business of life as an interactive activity right down to the submolecular level—perhaps even far below that, at the level of quantum gravity packets and their constant push-and-pull interactions. That is why much of this process of interaction goes unnoticed: like much cognitive work carried out by the body, it happens at too small a scale and too fast to be registered by the sluggish tenth-of-a-second threshold of perception that hampers consciousness (Canales 2009). Perception is constantly happening well below the threshold of conscious cognition and decision-making, and this is often vital for survival: ‘consciousness takes a fairly long time to build, and any experience of it being instantaneous must be a back-dated illusion’ (McCrone 1999: 131); by the time the 0.8 of a second, in some cases 1.5 seconds, for the decision to act (e.g. to react to pain) to be worked-up into a conscious state, an vital action (e.g. pulling one’s hand away from a hot surface) has long been executed. As consequence of this short-circuiting of intention and consciousness, perception is displaced away from the autonomous, rational human subject, towards, for instance, the organism itself—or indeed, towards organisms themselves. It follows, furthermore, that perception may be something that many entities, human, intrahuman or nonhuman, are doing all the time, in ways that may have relatively little to do with human intentionality� Beginning with the range of modes of perception that are evident within the domain of the human, we are obliged to consider perception as a dispersed, distributed process that is inherent in the dynamic mode of being-in-interaction which is common to all entities, even the most (apparently) inanimate. If we concede that any entity can participate in perception, then the categories of subject and object become somewhat contingent� Obviously, this perceptive interaction is reciprocal: both parties are both emitting and receiving such ‘interruptive signs’. By the same token, it follows that the act of perception is never simply one of one-way incoming reception: even reception is an act that Translation, information, life 101 triggers a return signal� To perceive is always already to engage in a two-way interaction that transforms both partners at the very moment it is taking place. For Bloch (1985), for instance, subject and object are not opposites, but are linked to each other in a common process of entangled ‘not-yet-ness’ or ‘becoming’. It is impossible to place any constraints—whether spatial or temporal—on this ubiquitous process of fluid being-as-becoming. The erosion of subject/ object boundaries inevitably breaks down the traditional separation between distanced, objective academic discourse and the objects of its reflections. Realizing this, Serres pulls the reader into a participative, interaction exploration of these modes of perception� Staging this dialogical aspect of (intellectual) perception in performative, illocutionary mode, he declaims, ‘Do you believe I am mistaken, do you think I exaggerate? Listen: perception—see Fechner’s law—perception, I maintain, is negentropy—see Brillouin’s law—it is information and therefore order in disorder � Perception reverses the entropy of the world. Better yet, it improves the world’ (2008: 128). Indeed, the illocutive here is also perlocutive, because perception, as the reception of information that transforms the perceiver and thereby releases new information, changes the world� Perception is an active process that is always already intentional, interventionist, and interactive (Bohm and Peat 2011: 53-96). Perception, for Serres, is the dynamic of life, always and everywhere. He repeats the point: ‘To perceive beings fills them with being. Simply by their perceptions, human beings—living things—in this case, women [Woolf ’s Mrs Ramsay and Lily], fabricate negentropy, produce information, and thereby oppose the irreversible degradation of things’ (2008: 124). From level to level, the ripples of information cross the borders that are customarily thought to contain them, so that information is life, and the transmission/ reception of information, that is, information exchange, perpetuates life by perpetuating transformations� The exchange of information as that which underpins, indeed is coeval with life itself thus becomes a general principle that Serres gives the name of translation� The unavoidable consequences of such ideas, worked out in their full implications in the 2008 Woolf article, can already be found in Serres’ 1974 volume. Although Serres initially names translation as one of his four domains of transformation-knowledge, the step-by-step elevation of information and its exchange to the processual essence of life’s ongoing existence leads him, ultimately, to propose translation as the all-encompassing term that describes information-exchange as the dynamic of life: Il est possible que la science soit l’ensemble de messages optimalement invariants par toute stratégie de traduction. Lorsque ce maximum n’est pas atteint, il s’agirait des autres aires culturelles. Systèmes déductifs, inductifs … demeurent les plus sta- 102 Chapter 4: Translation as information bles par le transport en général; sous ce seuil, les systèmes productifs, reproductifs … varient, chacun selon sa différence. Leur différence n’est, en fait, que la variation. (Serres 1974: 11) [It’s possible that science constitutes the entirety of messages that are optimally invariant by virtue of all strategies of translation� Below this maximum threshold, we have to talk about other specific cultural zones. Deductive or inductive systems remain the most stable via general transport; below this threshold, productive and reproductive systems vary, each according to its difference. Their difference is, in fact, nothing other than variation�] Serres gathers up all messages in their invariance, that is, in their ongoing performative work of sustaining life, and gives them the common label of translation—‘D’où l’intérêt d’examiner l’opération de traduire. Non pas de a définir dans l’abstrait, mais de la faire fonctionner au plus large et dans les champs les plus divers’ (ibid: 11) [‘Whence the interest of examining the operation of translation: not by defining it in abstract terms, but by putting it to work in the broadest sense and in the widest possible range of fields’]. Within that universal category of translation, or under that optimal upper threshold there are various subdomains that display different quantities of fluctuation. (Even individual organisms can displays fluctuations between invariance and variability, all the way to the threshold of the ultimate phase transition, organic collapse.) Within a spectrum between invariance and variability however, multiple processes of translation ensure negentropy, or the ongoing auto-poetic processes of life. All of their differences are in fact part of a continuum, and thus mere variations on a single universal process that is coeval with life itself� What of death in all this? Below the very lowest threshold of translation, we enter the zone where entropy gains the upper hand, and where information becomes too scarce or ragged to suffice for the ongoing sustenance of the structures of life. Indeed, information exchange itself can become perverted. This is the point where, famously, ‘to translate’ segues into ‘to traduce’ or ‘to betray’, as in the old adage traduttore traditore : ‘Aux limites de la trahison, tel qui émet une parole politique finit par annoncer un kérygme de religion, et tel groupe au pouvoir parvient à détourner les messages optimalement stables, la science, pour les faire produire la mort: la thanatocratie’ (Serres 1974: 11) [‘At the outer limits of betrayal, he who utters a political message ends up announcing a doctrine of religious fundamentalism, and this or that group in power manage to distort the optimally stable messages, those of science, to make it produce death: this is thanatocracy’]� With just such betrayals of science in mind, Serres devotes a whole chapter to the nuclear arms race and the attendant threat of a global nuclear holocaust: ‘Trahison: la thanatocratie’ (ibid: 73-104) [‘Teacherous Translation, information, life 103 translation: Thanatocracy’]. This threat has not disappeared. It is not longer posed by a stand-off between the two Cold War powers, but rather, by a host of smaller nuclear nations within a much more unstable and perhaps even more dangerous geopolitical configuration. Add to this another form of planetary beytral on the part of modern science and technical progress: the irreversible and multifaceted threat to global existence posed by climate change, whose effects are now seen as including melting ice-caps (Wadhams 2017), leading to rising sea-levels and land-loss, melting glaciers and the consequent alternation between droughts and flooding, as well as increasingly violent and erratic storms, increased seismic activity as a result of the increasing weight of sea-water upon the earth’s crust ( Jones 2017), provoking in turn more frequent tsunamis, and other hitherto unsuspected consequences such as more frequent forest fires on a massive scale (Davis 2017). Thus when Serres introduces the task of tracking ‘les transformations du message. Tel loi de l’histoire des états de la matière, tel traitement de la forme et de la couleur dit la révolution industrielle. Versions différentielles’ (1974: 11) [‘the transformation of the message—such as the laws of history of the state of matter, the treatment of form and colour that is the industrial revolution: differential versions of the same’], the ‘betrayal’ of the ethics of invariance within translation that is bodied forth in climate change is already pre-empted by his interest in the ‘translations’ at the heart of the industrial revolution� Serres’ translation history, if one can call it that, sees an accumulation and intensification of regimes of death that goes hand in hand with the modern age’s apparent mastery of nature and concomitant power to extend life� Serres thus imagines ‘translation’ and ‘treacherous translation’ as information-based categories that correlate with ‘negentropy’ and ‘entropy’ respectively� These interests are already present 1974 book’s the chapter on ‘Vie, information, deuxième principe’ [‘Life, information, second principle of thermodynamics’] (ibid: 43-72), but they are formalized in a more consequent manner in the later article (Serres 2008), where perception is posited as the manifestly active manifestation of information flow. Because perception is an active process, Serres suggests, it constitutes a means of participating in negentropy, and thus a way of combatting, however minimal this contribution may be, the destructive forces of human-driven entropy. This is an important notion because it politicizes the issue of scientific translation, and asserts the cosmic relevance of the whole topic. Translation is something we have to work at and work with. Not to do so is to risk contributing to destruction. This idea is borne out in Serres’ own work. To the extent that his interest in translation is performative, an incessant veering off the course of disciplinary linearity, an undisciplined swerving from one topic to another characterizes his intellectual production. Emblematic of this intellectual ‘veering-off-course’ 104 Chapter 4: Translation as information is Serres’ (1977) study on Lucretius’ foundational treatise where the idea of the ‘clinamen’ or swerve is first to be found. To this extent, he illustrates, in the very subjects of his writing, one of the basic ideas of the quantum theory that I will discuss in the next chapter. That basic tenet goes as follows: knowledge is not gained at a distance from the objects to be studied� Rather, the very act of scientific observation involves proximity and involvement. The presence of the observer and the technical form of the instrument of observation determine the results that will be obtained. Scientific knowledge is ‘performative’ to the extent that it does not describe objects, but participates, actively, in an ‘intra-action’, an embodied, immanent, proximate ‘doing-ly’ engagement with them (Barad 2007)—a translation in the sense of ‘negentropy’. Serres, true to this principle, studies translation across the disciplines, as a case-study in universal translation, by doing cross-disciplinary translation. This limits the scope of his work, from one point of view, as it cannot make claims to be distanced from the object of its investigations. From another point of view, Serres compensates for this putative ‘weakness’ by multiplying the case studies across the five volumes of the Hermès series, and stand-alone studies of Leibniz, Jules Verne, Lucretius, ‘the parasite’, the autodidactic, and so on� Serres never ceases to translate� The semiosphere as translation worlds At this juncture, we are now equipped to return to the thinker we encountered at the opening of this chapter, the Soviet semiotician Jurij Lotman. He evokes a ‘semiosphere’ whose dimensions and functions offer a rough analogy to the epistemic zones of translation sketched out by Michel Serres. Lotman suggests that ‘the elementary act of thinking is translation’ and that ‘[t]ranslation is the primary mechanism of consciousness’ (Lotman 1990: 143, 127) because ‘the structure of the semiosphere is asymmetrical’ (ibid: 127). Following the most basic logic of thermodynamics, Lotman imagines the world as made up of zones of unequal density, temperature, or pressure, so that energy is constantly being transferred from one zone to another. ‘Asymmetry finds expression in the currents of internal translations with which the whole density of the semiosphere is permeated’ (ibid: 127). This is the basic physical law that governs his notion of semiotic exchange. It is this underlying logic that allows him to generalize translation as a universal operator, even though positing this operation also presupposes enough translatability to read the respective language zones as language zones. Lotman makes an analogy (a sort of a translation) between semiosphere and biosphere� The analogy, however, is a performative, as it is embedded in a translation between biology and semiology� Once established in The semiosphere as translation worlds 105 the semiosphere, however, it can be taken from there and projected back upon the biosphere where translation is also the dominant operation� Lotman goes on to say that a minimally functioning semiotic structure consists of not one artificially isolated language or text in that language, but of a parallel pair of mutually untranslatable languages which are, however, connected by a ‘pulley’, which is translation. A dual structure like this is the minimal nucleus for generating new messages and it is also the minimal unit of a semiotic object such as culture. (ibid: 2) What flows via translation between the two poles of sematic difference is information: Translation is the primary mechanism of consciousness� To express something in another language is a way of understanding it. And since in the majority of cases the different languages of the semiosphere are semiotically asymmetrical, i.e. they do not have mutual semantic correspondences, then the whole semiosphere can be regarded as a generator of information. (ibid: 127) To reiterate what Serres’ work suggested: information can take many forms beyond the semantic-linguistic: it can take the form of mathematics, physical indices such as heat, electrical impulses within the nervous system, or even the exchange of nutrients and chemical substances� Lotman acknowledges this when he notes that the semiosphere, besides the structurally organized language, is crowded with partial languages, languages which can serve only certain cultural functions, as well as language-like, half-formed systems which can be bearers of semiosis if they are included in the semiotic context. Compare the latter with a stone or a strangely twisted treestump which can function as work of art if it is treated as one. An object will take the function ascribed to it. (ibid: 128) The somewhat derogatory notion of ‘partial languages’ indicates the priority that Lotman gives to human language and its variants. An object can be included in the semiosphere in an act of translation� Thus the tree stump becomes the object of poetry. It is assumed that translation only happens in the semiosphere. The savage ‘half-formed’ systems of nature are endowed with civilization in a mechanism of ‘inclusion’ that recalls the colonial translation discussed at the opening of this chapter� What lingers on the borders of the unsayable, however, is that the semiosphere and the biosphere are also engaged in a two-way process of translation, of which Lotman can only register one part. Indeed, Lotman is performatively registering the opacity of other zones that, precisely, is the trigger and impetus towards translation (compare Derrida 1985). 106 Chapter 4: Translation as information Thus, while marking his clear allegiance to the world of human language, he unwittingly performs the asymmetry that drives the translational impulse: the desire to see information cross the gap between cultural self and non-cultural other. Indeed, he continues, we can go further and say that the elementary mechanism of translating is dialogue� Dialogue presupposes asymmetry, and asymmetry is to be seen first, in the differences between the semiotic structures (languages) which the participants in the dialogue use; and second, in the alternating directions of message-flow. (Lotman 1990: 143) At the very moment of setting up a hierarchy between cultural and non-cultural zones of translation, which uses translation as a key-concept drawn from the realm of the zone of culture, Lotman provides the tools for the deconstruction of that hierarchy, by suggesting that messages can be passed in two directions� Such an idea resonates with Serres’ notion of perception, which is an active mode of information-reception that already implies a reverse outward informational vector in the very act of registering the incoming information� Such multi-vectorial flows of information complicate Lotman’s models in ways that can be variously construed� The first way of regarding this multi-vectorial asymmetry is to follow Lotman’s own work on national semiotic systems. The English-language translation and publication of Lotman’s work came with some delay, making it more or less contemporary to Wallerstein’s World-System Theory (1974, 1980, 1989), with which it has much in common. Lotman (1990: 143-7) also thinks of national systems as blocks of linguistic homogeneity that meet along asymmetrical cultural borderlands where the less globally dominant culture imports, via translation, from the globally hegemonic culture. There may thus be fluctuations between sending and receiving periods, and shifts of power. Moretti (2004: 152- 5) posits an analogous model of literary development, based upon the mixture of central Euro-American forms and local peripheral non-European themes. However, a receiving period may then trigger creative innovations that in turn impact again on the stronger culture� One example of his would be the long period of ‘imitation’ of European models in the Latin American zone, that then provoked a ‘boom period’ in which generic innovations such as magical realism were exported all over the globe (e.g. Warnes 2009)—principally via the conduit of Parisian translations (Anderson 2004). The ‘afterlives’ of texts in translation may contribute retrospectively to their renewed assessment within their original context of emergence, thereby endowing them with a new importance in the present. Benjamin (1991, IV-1: 10-11; 1999: 72) goes so far as to suggest that it is in fact translation that makes the original visible as such. The semiosphere as translation worlds 107 Other scholars who have built upon World-Systems Theory are considerably less sanguine about the fluidity in asymmetrical systemic relationships: Even-Zohar (1990: 62) insists that ‘[t]here is no symmetry in literary interference. A target literature is, more often than not, interfered with by a source literature which completely ignores it.’ Lotman, it would seem, has not forgotten such possibilities, as he notes that ‘if dialogue without semiotic difference is pointless, when the difference is absolute and mutually exclusive dialogue becomes impossible. So asymmetry assumes a degree of invariancy’ (1990: 143). The ‘invariancy’ that Lotman mentions here resembles very strongly Serres’ (1974: 11) conception of science as ‘l’ensemble de messages optimalement invariants par toute stratégie de traduction’ [‘the entirety of messages that are optimally invariant by virtue of all strategies of translation’]� Below that threshold, translation may not take place, as acknowledged in recent work by Emily Apter, where she revises her earlier concept of ‘the translation zone’ (2005) to take into account the global spread of violent betrayals, perversions or refusals of translative dialogue in the decades since 9/ 11 (2013). What these developments register is the grim ubiquity of an all-pervasive planetary phenomenon that Timothy Morton (2017) calls ‘severance’—the refusal of interaction and translativity except under the sign of the most brutal violence and oppression� In similar vein, Achille Mbembe (2016: 8) detects a global phenomenon of a ‘une force de séparation … une force de scission et de réelle isolation, tournée exclusivement sur elle-même, qui cherche à s’excepter du reste du monde tout en prétendant en assurer le gouvernement ultime … la course vers la séparation et la déliaison ’ [‘a force of separation … a force of scission and real isolation, turned exclusively towards itself, that seeks to withdraw itself from the rest of the world while claiming to guarantee its absolute governance—a race towards separation and dis-connection ’]� A second way of construing Lotman’s multi-vectorial asymmetries is to regard them as non-hierarchical zones of affect and shifting intensity tugged at by the pull of attraction that spills over a structure’s ‘basin’ of centripetal stability. This optic is patently embedded in a different semantic field from the geo-political and economic framework upon which systems-theoretical notions of translation depend. Here, the frame of reference is that of chaos and catastrophe theory (Gleick 1988; Thom 1975) that clearly draws upon the micro-level of organic processes of transformation, but it may equally work with macro-objects such as weather patterns and seismic processes. Entities are subject to an attractional pull from other entities that thereby become for them ‘intensities’� At the moment when the attractional pull becomes strong enough to change the structure of the entity, opening it to an interaction with the other entity, a ‘tipping point’ in reached, beyond which an irreversible process of structural 108 Chapter 4: Translation as information transformation is set in motion� That transformation is multi-vectorial: both the entity that undergoes the attractive pull and the subsequent transformation, and the entity that exerts that pull, are transformed in the process of mutual interaction� The new structures that arise out of the interaction in turn exert influences upon other entities nearby, thus triggering a cascading, and ultimately unpredictable (‘non-linear’) process of change-generating change. In the realm of linguistic culture, a cultural zone can be open to the transformative influence of the translated culture as it enters the zone of domestic sameness. Antoine Berman’s classic L’Épreuve de l’étranger (1984) examines the way the entirety of nineteenth-century German culture was alert to the positively transformative force of the alien cultures via the medium of translation� Such transformative influences in the interaction of asymmetrical cultural zones can be curbed of course by domesticating practices of translation, or kept in conceptual check by ‘scopos’ or functionalist approaches to cultural imports (Nord 1993; 1997; Reiß and Vermeer 1984). These approaches make translation a ‘purposeful’ activity that helpfully registers shifts in translational intention between the source and the target zones. However, like vindictive customs officers, they tamp down possible further transformative aspects of translation within that process by imposing a second controlling intention upon the point of arrival. Functionalist approaches open up a degree of transformative potential within the translative process, but, in paranoid fashion, immediately clamp down upon the liberatory energies that have been released by imposing regulations inherent in the target culture. It is hardly by chance that the form of liberation envisaged here is of a free-entreprise neoliberal variety that welcomes the circulation of goods and docile labour but not of strange customs, foreign culinary habits, or seditious political impulses that might develop along ‘non-linear’ paths� Far more promising in this respect is the posthumously published work of Antoine Berman (1995) that interrogates the tendency of translations to generate new translations� Berman does not believe that this impetus is necessarily driven by the conviction that earlier translations were ‘bad’ or ‘inadequate’ (though such evaluations may often be not illegitimate). Rather, a more powerful impulse arises from the fact that a literary work always contains an excess of semantic potential that no single translation can possibly exhaust, and more profoundly, from the fact that the translative relationship itself is inherently productive and generative� The semantic surplus that spills out of the complex configuration constituted by the ‘original’ work (or source text), the interaction between work and translator, and the translation and its readers or subsequent translators, is itself a zone of irrepressible creativity and sematic productivity. The semiosphere as translation worlds 109 In that zone, ‘basins of attraction’ are constantly being breached and new structures emerging, to provoke further transformations in their turn. My two construals of Lotman’s asymmetrical multi-vectorial systemics of translation have bifurcated in the separate directions of language and materiality. There is one significant passage, however, where he brings these two domains back together in a manner reminiscent of Serres’ transdisciplinary approach. Lotman says, in a passage already quoted above, that [m]odern science from nuclear physics to linguistics sees the scientist as inside the world being described and as a part of that world� But the object and the observer are as a rule described in different languages, and consequently the problem of translation is a universal scientific task. (1990: 269) He then goes on to quote Heisenberg: ‘Quantum mechanics have placed even more serious demands upon us … The very words applied to the description of the atomic level then turn out to be problematic� The meaning of old words has lost precision ’ (qtd in ibid: 270). At first glance, it might seem that Lotman merely wishes to push into the foreground a form of translation within the apparently neutral domain of scientific description. But Heisenberg’s statement contains more potential to destabilize the nature of scientific translation than might be indicated by his quasi-Modernist statement about the changing semantics of scientific terminology. The observer, as we have known since the inception of quantum physics, is not separate from the experiment, but rather, is somehow involved in it� The very instruments used to measure the experiment actually influence it, so that the results described by the observer are distorted by the observer’s ‘objective’ observation. The observer is part of the experiment, linked to the object under observation via the experimental instruments� The observer is presumably, then, also linked to the object in a similar manner by the language being used to describe the phenomena observed. Language, though regarded by most scientists when they formulate their results as a neutral mode of transmission, is no less inflected by the experimental situation. It is not a neutral translator in the minimalist sense, but must be recognized as a generator of meanings. The non-neutrality of language in fact awards it a possible role as a co-actant in the knowledge production process (Stengers 1997). Language itself is as much a part of the quantum phenomena as the observer, and thus emerges as a co-producer of knowledge. This, then, may be the meaning of Heisenberg’s suggestion that ‘ The meaning of old words has lost precision ’ (qtd in Lotman 1990: 270). The loss of precision arises from the fact that language is no longer objective, and therefore lacks the distance necessary to measure phenomena precisely� Thus the problem of 110 Chapter 4: Translation as information scientific language is not merely that the scientific method itself now recognizes that it cannot precisely describe, locate or measure sub-atomic objects such as particles. More significantly, it has recognized that words themselves, erstwhile reflectors of observed facts, must now be re-evaluated as a fundamental aspect of that new scientific conundrum. Words are as much material actants within the bizarre quantum world, doing similarly weird things, as the particles or fields to which quantum theory usually pays attention. This revelation of the limitations of common-sense assumptions about empirical reality and its obedience to the classical laws of physics, and by extension to the classical laws of (linguistic) representation appears at first glance to cause an epistemological shipwreck. However, the long-term gain is far more promising. The fundamental law of interrelationship that governs quantum physics—nothing exists except within a relationship of interaction, which will always already be creative and generative according to the rules of non-linearity—includes the mechanics of linguistic description. Linguistic description in turn becomes a generative mode of translation� Thus quantum mechanics assumes non-linear, and therefore probabilistic results, rather than precise data that Heisenberg discounts together with precise language� The productive and indeed ‘symbiotic’ nature of the experimental space eschews discretely located results; rather, a cluster of possible outcomes form a ‘cloud’. The translative ‘contact zone’ of quantum physics may thus be imagined as a new space of productivity in the semiosphere that is not hampered by the limitations of its linguistic range—but rather, on the contrary is enriched and empowered by the recognition of such limitations� Minibus-taxi, Pretoria © Russell West-Pavlov, 2019� Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation One of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s answers to the questions of ‘epistemic violence’ and the possibility (or impossibility) of subaltern speech, questions that she raises throughout her oeuvre, has been translation� Of particular importance has been her translation practice, most notably concentrated on stories by the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi (Devi 1995; 1997; Spivak 1987: 179-96, 222-40; 2001). Such translative work however has not only included strategies for repairing epistemic violence (compare for instance Bandia 2014) or for giving a voice to the voiceless. It has also involved an unflinching gaze upon the limitations of reparative language and cognate translation strategies. Commenting on some of this translation work from Bengali, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993: 180) observes, Language is not everything. It is only a vital clue to where the self loses its boundaries. The ways in which rhetoric or figuration disrupt logic themselves point at the possibility of random contingency, beside language, around language� Spivak’s comments may take us in two directions. On the one hand, they suggest a sense of the contingency within language— its tendency to veer away from the literal and the disciplined towards a spreading-out of meaning: ‘Such a diss emination cannot be under our control’ (ibid: 180). Spivak has been interested in this contingency within language since her influential translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967; 1976). But it is possible that some of this dissemination may not merely of critical political use, eroding the complacent convictions of ideology, but may, conversely, work positively, opening language itself up to other voices. This is precisely that task that Spivak (1993) sees for translation and a pedagogy of translation, in which non-Western womens’ texts ‘must be made to speak English’, even though in the ‘act of wholesale translation in English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest’ (ibid: 182). Such considerations go to the heart of the postcolonial politics of translation in its usual form� But they are trammelled by the fairly familiar purview of postcolonial activism and its fateful entanglement with the colonial mentality, and with a lingering humanist agenda that has clearly reached the limits of usefulness in the light of a planetary crisis largely caused by anthropocentrism� 114 Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation On the other hand, her comments also give a sense of the contingency of language� That notion of the contingency of language, a sense that ‘[l]anguage is not everything’, goes hand in hand with a recognition that its environment (‘beside language, around language’) may be of even greater significance as a site of non-linear, non-linguistic ‘ diss emination’ of meaning (ibid: 180), or of information as the generative (but all too often coopted) force of life—the central theme of ‘Breast-giver’, one of the earliest stories by Devi that Spivak translated (Spivak 1987: 179-96). Spivak’s comments about translation, embedded in a translation practice within the Global South, render explicit many of the assumptions that have been teased out in the chapters above� They may also serve as an apposite introduction to the sketch of a quantum theory of translation that I undertake in this chapter. Spivak’s experiments in translation between English and Bengali are negotiations of cultural difference but they are also engagements with a form of generativity that is not entirely cultural, but is also somehow ‘beside language’. From they outset, they somehow spill out into the ‘outside’ that is language (Foucault 1994, I: 518-39), and then into the ‘outside’ of language. Spivak denies control of the self over language, but then admits that ‘in translation, where meaning hops into the spacy emptiness between two named historical languages, we get perilously close to it’ (Spivak 1993: 180). The ‘perilously close’ is finely calibrated to take the measure of an ambivalent affect: it admits the desire for control as well as the noxious effects of such control (especially through the assimilation of marginal voices into hegemonic, (neo)imperial English), but insinuates simultaneously a salutary margin of loss of control. That margin takes place at the site of ‘the disruptive rhetoricity that breaks the surface in not necessarily connected ways’, where ‘we feel the selvedges of the language-textile give way, fray into frayages or facilitations’ (ibid: 180) Spivak plays here on the French term for the path-making of habitual neuronal patterns of Freudian thought (German: Bahnung ; English: facilitation ; French: frayage [Laplanche and Pontalis 1998: 172]) and on the opposite sense of fraying of meaning, its dispersal at moments of resistance rather than facility� She uses her own oxymoronic translative pun (a polyglot homonymic antonym) to explore the material dynamics of continuity and variance in the work of translation. Translation is an act of linguistic control, but it is also an act of resistant, productive material encounter outside of language in ways that shift the centrality of self and language to a focus on the dynamism of material itself: ‘I surrender to the text when I translate’ (Spivak 1993: 180). Hence another pun in the text: ‘selvedges’ (ibid: 180), a neo-Joycean comixtue that acknowledge the way ‘selfish’ segues into the ‘edges’ of the ‘self ’ in the encounter of the text, a moment of loss that is also, however, a ‘salvage’, a rescue or recuperation that happens at the moment of Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation 115 and thanks to the loss of self. What emerges is an attraction, and an interactive dynamism that Spivak calls ‘love’: ‘the task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and her imagined or actual audience at bay’ (ibid: 180). What emerges out of that love, is something that leads out beyond human agency and thus ‘help us open ourselves’, as Spivak says, quoting the Guyanan novelist Wilson Harris (from his Smuts lectures in Cambridge in 1990): ‘the native imagination puts together the ingredients for quantum immediacy out of unpredictable resources’ (Spivak 1993: 196). It is the unpredictable resources of a quantum translative dynamic in the immediacy of the material world itself that I explore in this chapter. In the previous chapters I rehearsed two polemical moves: in chapters 2 and 3 I looked at theories that ‘provincialized language’ and by extension, linguistic translation, to allow other sorts of translation to come into focus; in chapter 4 I then reversed the vector of scaling to extend a generalized theory of translation to all aspects of cosmic existence. This zooming-in and zooming-out oscillation provides the condition of possibility for the task now at hand: sketching how a provincialized linguistic translation that is part of a generalized cosmic translation might look. At the end of the last chapter, Lotman’s comments about translations within experimental processes in physics brought us to the issue of quantum physics where translation is crucial to the ongoing rethinking of physics, but also to the ongoing rethinking of the nature of reality itself. I suggested that the ‘untranslatable’ nature of quantum processes, which eludes the stability that linguistic translation requires in order to re-present something, was merely the negative face of an extraordinary non-linear creativity at the heart of reality itself. All descriptions of quantum reality are ‘probabilistic’, to the extent that their predictive powers lag behind the sheer range of possible ‘non-linear’ outcomes and paths that quantum interaction can produce. A theory of translation attentive to that creativity would have to be as ‘probabilistic’ as the quantum reality it maps� We left behind ‘fidelity’ theories of translation a long time ago (Mounin 1963), but they continue to cast a long shadow over translation in its most pragmatic everyday aspects� The correctness of a given translation is an irreducible question that every translator confronts with every word that must be couched in another vernacular or another idiom. At the end of the day, it may be a problem that admits of no solution, and indeed may provide the impossible condition of possibility of translation itself� The impossibility of translation is the very force that renders translation necessary. No translation is necessary where understanding is perfect; where perfect translation can take place, there is no translation (Derrida 1985). The impossibility of translation, the imperative of fidelity 116 Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation and its constant infringement, thus opens up the possibility of translation variation. Creativity therefore arises out of the unbridgeable gap between original and translation, the necessary infidelity that dogs fidelity, and the cognitive structures that correspond to that gap (Kußmaul 2000). That interval must of necessity harbour multiplicity; if it did not, if in other words there were to be an immediately accessible correct translation for any word or phrase, then there would be no need for translation at all� The interval is the crucible of translative generativity� Just as a single translation option would close down that interval, so too a limit upon the number of conceivable translation options is theoretically impossible. Even if there were to be only a certain range of words in the target language to translate a word in the source language, the word in the source language would evince minute differences of meaning in successive contexts, as would the respective translation options in the target language, thus opening up semantic infinity on both sides of this very rudimentary interlingual divide. As a consequence, the infinite range of translation possibilities opens up infinite panoramas of material creativity, just as does the intertwined notion of ‘untranslatability’ (Cassin, ed. 2004). The task of this chapter is to explore the nature of such materially anchored possibilities for infinite translatability, by laying down, in a very tentative manner, the basic principles of a quantum theory of translation� Quantum (gravity) theory At risk of getting caught up in a series of performative contradictions, but for the heuristic sake of expositional clarity, I will begin by setting out a very brief point by point summary of some of the underlying notions of quantum (gravity) theory� This method involves a performative contradiction because it assumes that a set of principles can precede concrete exemplification, which also assumes an equally linear converse logic, namely, that ideas may describes the realities from which they are extracted� Quantum theory suggests exactly the opposite to both of these interlinked ideas. Quantum theory posits that nothing exists apart from its embodiment in an event that is exclusively relational. In other words, the illustration produces the principle, but only for as long as the illustration exists as a narrative encounter. For the sake of clarity, however, I will run the risk of a performative contradiction, if only to rejink and reinflect these principles in the successive concrete examples that follow� Quantum (gravity) theory is characterized by a number of basic ideas: (1) sub-atomic entities may have the characteristics of both particles and waves, that is, apparently mutually exclusive properties; both forms of existence are Quantum (gravity) theory 117 ‘complementary’ to each other, that is, mutually exclusive in terms of their occurrence within the same experimental context, but not within a larger multifolded reality (Plotnistky 1994); (2) observation is no longer objective but involves an entanglement of observer, instrument and phenomenon; this contextual entanglement influences whether, for instance, an entity can be seen as a particle or a wave (Barad 2007); (3) entities only exist in and through their relationships with other entities and can no longer be conceptualized in discrete terms (Capra and Luisi 2014: 3-15; Ghosh 2016: 56-8; Ingold 2011: 67-9); (4) these relationships are generative and unpredictable, obeying the laws of chaotic non-linear emergence (Gleick 1988; Thom 1975); any attempt to account for them will have to renounce precise models of prediction and settle for ‘probabilistic’ predictive methodologies, as in the current shift away from base-2-dominated systems of computing towards the infinitely more powerful complementarity-based realm of quantum computing (Rieffel and Polack 2014); (5) finally, the most challenging ideas are located at the rapidly-developing interface of quantum theory (which stresses granularity, discontinuity, finitude and relationality) and general relativity (which stresses the entanglement of time and space and the infinity of curved, wave-like space), in the emergent ‘hybrid’ field of quantum gravity theory; this theory posits that time and space are both outfoldings of the nano-scale emergence of the physical universe from dynamic relationships between elemental packets (or ‘quanta’) of gravity (Rovelli and Vidotto 2015; Rovelli 2016; Smolin 2000). There is a fundamental problem of the translatability of a scientific theory of the nature of the universe to the limited domain of linguistic translation� However, because quantum theory (and by extension the quantum gravity theory that I shall be including under its umbrella) works from the smallest to the greatest scales of reality, from the basic building blocks of material to the dimensions of the universe, language as a material process is inevitably caught up in its meshes� Because the two scalar extremes that quantum gravity theory encompasses in actual fact behave in analogical ways to each other (while the ‘median’ zone of human perception appears to follow a very different set of classical Newtonian laws of reality) it can be posited that in fact the rules of quantum gravitational reality are applicable to every aspect of reality, even though we have learnt, since around 1700, not to see them at work. Massumi (2002: 37) notes that [t]he use of the concept of the quantum outside quantum mechanics, even as applied to human psychology, is not a metaphor. For each level, it is necessary to find an operative concept for the objective indeterminacy that echoes what on subatomic level goes by the name of quantum� This involves analysing every formation as par- 118 Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation ticipating in what David Bohm calls an implicate order cutting across all levels and doubled on each� Massumi suggests that ‘Affect is as good a general term as any for the interface between the implicate and the explicate order’ (ibid: 37). I commented on the role of ‘affect’ at some length in chapter 3 above when explaining the work of the translator-as-shaman. The translator-shaman engages with (‘translates’) the multiplicity at the heart of things, allowing the interactive relationship to enable but also transform both parties. In other words, ‘affect’—the engagement between two entities that begins with an attraction or contact, makes something happen, thereby evincing their ‘agency’, and culminates in a transformation of both which in turn provokes further transformative encounters—could be seen as a synonym for the connective-transformative ‘implicate order’ (Bohm and Hiley 1993: 350-89) that I will be naming ‘translation’. Translation, literally, translates translation everywhere� The implicate order cutting across these apparently disparate levels in this book is thus ‘translation’ itself, as a substantive and as a process that generates processes. I am not trying to deploy ‘translation’ here as some sort of a ‘ultimate signifier’ founding a grand narrative. Rather, I am using ‘translation’ because it actually is the operation that can be found at all levels of reality and across various domains of material transformation� By implementing ‘translation’ as the element that provides the ‘implicate order’ I am not arrogating for ‘translation’ a status that makes interlingual transformations the template for everything else in the material world. On the contrary, I am suggesting that ‘translation’ is the fundamental operation that quantum theory finds at every level and in every domain of the universe, one of them being the work of interlingual translation. Accordingly, all aspects of the ‘median’ zone, including interlingual translation, can be rephrased in terms of quantum gravity theory� In order to exemplify this ‘translatability,’ let us turn to some cognate theories. The work of Deleuze and Guattari, though often couched in somewhat lurid terms, is in fact a theory of unceasing connections, deconnections and reconnections that is structurally analogous to quantum theory: Ça fonctionne partout, tantôt sans arrêt, tantôt discontinu. Ça respire, ça chauffe, ça mange. Ça chie, ça baisse … Partout ce sont des machines, pas du tout métaphoriquement: des machines de machines, avec leurs couplages, leurs connexions� Une machine-organe est branchée sur une machine-source: L’une émet un flux, que l’autre coupe … C’est ainsi qu’on est tous bricoleurs; chacun ses petites machines. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 7) [It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks … Everywhere it is machines—real Quantum (gravity) theory 119 ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts … Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 1)] The somewhat bewildering accumulation of the Freudian-sounding ‘ça’ [‘it’] (the ‘Es’ or ‘Id’ of the unconscious) in fact denotes the ubiquity of these processes of ‘machine’-like connections as the basic fabric of the dynamic of life, whether social, psychic, material—or, of course, linguistic. The ‘cuts’ they oppose to connections—much like the ‘interruptive signs’ spoken of by Massumi (2015: 54)—are the equivalent of the incipient connections that are generated anew by the transformative combinations that arise out of a previous attraction� Lest these ‘cuts’ make their theory one of discrete ‘states’ (a notion they oppose vigorously, seeing ‘toute chose dans des rapports de devenir , au lieu d’opérer des répartitions binaires entre “états” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 436) [‘all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between “states” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 352)]), their theory stresses the immanence of these processes to one another: Car en vérité—l’éclatante et noire vérité qui gît dans le délire—il n’y a pas de sphères ou de circuits relativement indépendants: la production est immédiatement consommation et enregistrement, l’enregistrement et la consommation déterminent directement la production, mais la déterminent au sein de la production même. Si bien que tout est production: productions de productions, d’actions et de passions; productions d’enregistrements, de distributions et de repérages. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 8) [For the real truth of the matter—the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium—is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process (enregistrement*), without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference� (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 4)] Elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize these transformations in terms of ‘territory’, that is, as the spatial configuration that is produced (not pre-existant) out of the ‘markings’ laid down or the ‘information’ generated by a crystallizing connection between entities. Thus, 120 Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation Le territoire est en fait un acte, qui affecte les milieux et les rythmes, qui les ‘territorialise’. Le territoire est le produit de la territorialisation des milieux et des rythmes’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 386) [The territory is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that ‘territorializes’ them. The territory is a production of the territorialization of milieus and rhythms. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 314)] The moment when a territory is reformed by a new set of attractions is one of ‘deterritorialization’ that is characterized by a moment of transformative mobility or fluidity: a moment of ‘flight’: Lignes de fuite ou de déterritorialisation, devenir-loup, devenir-inhumain des intensités déterritorialisées, c’est cela la multiplicité. Devenir loup, devenir trou, c’est se déterritorialiser, d’après des lignes distinctes enchevêtrées … Des physiciens dissent: les trous ne sont pas des absences de particules, mais des particules allant plus vite que la lumière. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 45) [Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming-human, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines … Physicists say that holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 32)] Deleuze and Guattari generalize this theory of production to cross all possible boundaries between species of material existence: il n’y a pas davantage de distinction homme-nature … homme et nature ne sont pas comme deux termes l’un en face de l’autre … mais une seule et même réalité essentielle de producteur et du produit. La production comme processus déborde toutes les catégories idéales et forme un cycle qui se rapporte au désire en tant que principe immanent’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 10-11) we make no distinction between man and nature … man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other … rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product. Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle� (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 4-5)] Deleuze and Guattari thus map a dynamic material landscape in which emergent attractions, spill-overs, contamination-connections, and productive meetings already at work within the original substance of the entities involved in any given encounter are transformed new, so that novel entities emerge, transforming other entities in their turn� Quantum (gravity) theory 121 Such a dynamic is also imagined by Kathleen Stewart in her depiction of the ways ideas—as much quantum entities as anything else—are transformed in such quantic processes. In a quantum environment and a quantum vernacular, such ideas don’t lend themselves to a perfect, three-tiered parallelism between analytic subject, concept, and world� They are, instead, a problem or question emergent in disparate scenes and incommensurate forms and registers; a tangle of potential connections. Literally moving things—things that are in motion and that are defined by their capacity to affect and be affected—they have to be mapped through different, coexisting forms of composition, habituation, and event� They can be ‘seen’, obtusely, in circuits and failed relays, in jumpy moves and the layered textures of a scene� They surge or become submerged� They point to the jump of something coming together for a minute and to the spreading lines of resonance and connection that become possible and might snap into sense in some sharp or vague way. (Stewart 2007: 4) All well and good, one might be tempted to say at this juncture—but what does this have to do with the central topics of this book, translation and the German language? Let us exemplify this theory of quantum gravity again by casting a gaze back to Kohn’s putative ‘provincialization of language’. Kohn sees human meaning-making in the symbolic register as qualitatively different from non-human meaning-making or semiosis in the iconic or indexical registers. It is the capacity for meaning-making in the symbolic to build upon arbitrary linkages between sign and referent that allows its productivity to unfold and develop, to colonize new areas of meaning independent of the limitations of the original context� This would be the core of translative activity: context can be expanded infinitely, in cultural-geographic terms, by the exploration of more and more distended and arbitrary linkages between sign systems. Admittedly, Kohn stresses that meaning-making in the symbolic arises out of and is dependent upon its cognates in the iconic and indexical realms. Nonetheless, he returns again and again to the distinctiveness of human meaning-making. In this way, he reintroduces the human exceptionalism that is banished upfront from his programme by the back door. In other words, to recapitulate the gist of chapter 3, trees and animals don’t translate� The virtue of a quantum theory of translation, however, is that it would install the productivity of all modes of translation at the very smallest level of material creativity, via the unpredictable, cloud-like probabilities of interaction between packets of gravitational quanta, allowing it to ‘filter up’ the hierarchy of scales, step by step, until it reaches the level of the cosmos� The notion of the ‘clinamen’ or swerve that Lucretius (1951: 66-8) identifies as the maverick veering 122 Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation that sends atoms off-course, thereby bringing them together in unexpected and productive ways and generating the new, would be a figure of speech to describe this productivity intrinsically present in matter� These swerves of matter in its most intimate fabric are analogous, in their form and function, with the manner in which semiosis cuts itself loose from an immediate iconic or indexical mooring and floats free into the realm of arbitrary referentiality that is keyed into successive contexts rather than anchored in the concrete frame of similarity or contiguity. The difference, however, is that the creative work of ‘veering’ that Kohn finds only in the symbolic language of humans is to be found, in the theory of quantum gravity, everywhere, and from the most minute levels of reality upwards� Kohn’s swerving-away is exclusive, while quantum gravity theory’s swerving-towards is inclusive� Indeed, there are certain aspects of this approach to reality that are slowly becoming common sense� The reality of climate change is gradually seeping into that mass of assumptions that make up what we call ‘reality’, and with it, against the compartmentalizing, separative paradigm of modernity, the realization of interconnectedness. Since the Enlightenment, what has held sway in Eurocentric thought is a rigorous distinction between subject and object, between knower and known, between humans and nature. That paradigm is now crumbling. A so-called objectivist paradigm of ‘learning involves acquiring knowledge of things through the separation of knower and known and often, furthermore, by breaking the known down into its parts in order to know it’ (Bird-David 1999: S77). This paradigm produced ‘a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities’, a mentality ‘trained to break problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself ’, thus generating ‘a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable’ (Ghosh 2016: 56). This mindset is gradually being eroded by the winds and waves of climate change� There is a general consensus now, at least at the level of cognitive understandings of global warming, that everything on the planet is interconnected, and that all actions have consequences� The idea itself is hardly new: a century ago, Nietzsche (1994, II: 414) had already proclaimed that ‘Alle Dinge sind verkettet, verfädelt, verliebt’ [‘everything [is] enchained together, entwinted, everything in love’ (1969: 331)]. What has not yet become part of common sense are the more radical consequences of this notion of ubiquitous relationality� Nonetheless, against a radically ‘discrete’ mode of thought, ‘a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (“externalities”) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand’ (Ghosh 2016: 56), a countervailing notion of positive ‘exteriority’ is slowly raising its head� This notion asserts that any entity is entirely constituted by its relations, and not by any internal substance, so that in effect, entities do not exist as such, but only at the intersection of Quantum translation theory 123 ‘external’ relationships. (The ideas ‘external’ and ‘internal’ that I am using here would have to be abandoned under this notion of reality, but I continue to implement them ‘under erasure’ as they are so completely part of our cognitive landscape that doing away with them is as yet still unthinkable). Finally, because it is clear that relationships are always the product of an encounter, and thus must be understood as events, entities themselves would logically have to be understood as relational, evenemential processes� We are a long way from such a notion becoming common sense� That is, however, the basic assumption of quantum gravitational theory, and the underlying principle of a quantum theory of translation� Quantum translation theory A quantum theory of translation would be two things. First, it could be read as a quantum theory of translation� Such a theory would stress that the linguistic process of translation is one component in an immense expanse of processes that quantum-gravity theory deals with, from the very precisely identifiable mega-nano-dimension of the basic building blocks of gravitational quanta upwards� These gravitational quanta are in constant transformative interaction with each other, thereby producing the fabric of time and space. Every interaction at the level of gravitaltional quanta would be a translation: a meeting of two fields (source and target), driven by those gravitational forces of attraction and repulsion that produces something new (the translation). Everything in the universe emerges out of these basic interactions at an infinitesimally minute level of material existence, extending out to the largest scale of the expansion of the universe� These interactions are driven by an elemental gravitational ‘relational pull’ that draws entities towards each other in relationships of what J. M. Coetzee calls ‘appetancy’ (and one might also label ‘affect’): Desire runs both ways: A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe� Or if desire is too rude a word, then what of appetency � Appetancy and chance: enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark of beyond. (Coetzee 2003: 192) What Coetzee labels ‘chance’ is nothing other than the unpredictable subsequent pull (‘strange attraction’ in the jargon of chaos theory) that soon alters any given A-B relationship, transforming it in its turn, and so on. Translation is just one manifestation of this universal and irreducible process of complex 124 Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation processes of emergence. One is tempted to speak of ‘translation proper’ (the universal cosmic process, not that the strictly regimented lingusitic practices meant by the opponents of metaphor) devolving some of its immense energy into ‘translation minor (sub-set interlingual)’. Second, a quantum theory of translation could be read as a quantum theory of translation � This would be a theory of translation that would stress its non-linear, ‘probabilistic’ character, its tendency to produce new versions of reality in the multilingual borderlands between specific local semiospheres (Lotman 1990: 142). A useful place to begin in exploring the notion of quantum translation from this angle is Quine’s (2013: 23-73) ‘indeterminacy thesis’, which admits the possibility of divergent and even contradictory or incompatible translations that are nonetheless conceivably possible as logical outcomes of one and the same translation problem. Quine effectively theorizes the notion of translative generativity, taking the idea to the extreme limit of its possible consequences. What arises at this limit is the prospect of a translative creativity which might be said to work in the ‘probabalistic’ manner embraced by quantum theory. Quine’s ‘indeterminacy’ thesis looks very much like a quantum theory of physics: particles cannot be located except at the moments where their existence emerges in interaction with other particles, and the sites of those moment of emergence cannot be predicted; at the very most, a probable zone of emergence can be marked out. Thus predictions are probabilistic, in accord with the intrinsically non-linear character of a theory of relational and thus emergent particle physics: shifting the nature of ontology from essences to relationships, from inwardness to interstices, means that that ontology itself shifts towards becoming� Whereas essences and interiorities constitute closed categories, interstices and surfaces, by definition, offer us open categories, so that their geometry translates a bounded range of options into a spatially open-ended site of possible results� Quine’s indeterminacy thesis translates what is essentially a notion of physical emergence into a linguistic notion of nonlinear creativity� To that extent, this translative ‘indeterminacy’ displays all the characteristics of the non-linear generativity of physical reality itself� In the context of translations of African philosophy, Hallen and Sodipo (1997: 37) have teased out the implications of Quine’s ‘indeterminacy’ thesis of translation: If the indeterminacy thesis in its most radical and literal form were true … the loss of objectivity (from translation) [would be] compensated for by a generous influx of creativity … ‘Translations’ are not what the aliens are saying in their language. They may not be what the translator would normally say in his language� They are original Quantum translation theory 125 statements, original hypotheses that may juxtapose categories traditionally kept distinct and thereby lead to the discovery of new truth� In other words, the translative encounter between two cultures produces a juxtaposition which does not replicate or merely reproduce an entity from the original language in in another idiom or vernacular� Rather, it generates something entirely new via the juxtaposition of otherwise foreign entities, thereby in turn recalibrating the field on both sides of the ‘contact zone’. The thesis of indeterminacy in translation thus rehearses the ongoing process of deterritorializations and reterritorializations that is in fact the staple of all cultural and cross-cultural interaction, but only because those interactions are in turn part of the larger field of material becoming, from the grittiest and grainiest recesses of the physical world, via the median zone of human culture, up to the planetary and indeed the cosmic scales� A quantum theory of translation might be exemplified, at a median level, by Antoine Berman’s theory of creative translation critique. His starting point is the simple evidence that translations never come alone: they appear to call forth further translations, again and again� The process of translation criticism is inevitably involved in such processes, because the critique of a translation is often the trigger for a new translation of the work. But for Berman, critique is not merely a negative spur to re-translation. Far more, seen as a positive force, it goes hand in hand with the semiotic richness and the processes of emergent complexity that is already inherent in the original and is perpetuated in the translation itself. Berman focuses upon cases where ‘l’analyse à traité d’une traduction qui appelle impérativement une retraduction … Dans ce cas, l’analyse doit se faire critique positive, “productive” ’ (1995: 96) [‘the analysis has dealt with a translation that imperatively calls forth a retranslation … In this case, the analysis must become a positive criticism, a “productive” criticism’ (2009: 78; translation modified)]. The multiplicity of translations that may emerge from one original is not simply a negative question of translation quality (or mediocrity), but arises out of a ‘positive’, ‘creative’ nature to which the ‘positive’, ‘creative’ nature of translation criticism implicitly responds� There are a number of reasons why Berman’s notion of ‘positive’, ‘creative’ translation criticism and ‘positive’, ‘creative’ translation practice exemplifies quantum translation theory. First, the process being described here includes a number of actants, an original text with its author in tow, a translation with its translator on board, and finally a review with a reviewer/ critic in its wake—not to mention the projected re-translation, which may be the work, in part at least, of the same translator or another. Following Berman’s deliberate elision of human agency in the sentence, I am ostentatiously foregrounding the multiplicity of non-human actors 126 Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation at work here, because this disperses the tendency to situate translative agency within the translator, whereas in fact that agency is devolved from the respective texts that precede the translator’s work. The ‘devolution’ that occurs in such cases is important, because beyond all notions of ‘influence’ (which is almost always thought in human terms, and is monolinear) what we glimpse here is a complex network of actants reciprocally enabling and modifying each others’ agency� Within quantum theory, the spurious position of the human actant as a supposedly objective observer outside the experimental framework is laid bare as a fallacy, and the experimental subject finds itself part of the experiment. By the same token, other participants in the experiment gain an agency that previously was assumed to be coeval with objectivity� The human experimentor shares agency with others upon whom its knowledge is dependent (Stengers 1997: 10, 44, 54). Creativity is always co-creativity, and translation is always co-translation� Second, this idea can be pushed a little further to the point where each of these entities disappears as a discrete factor� Quantum theory claims that things do not have substance except via the relationships that produce them� This idea generates a temporal consequence: things come into existence only ephemerally as the result of an interaction and they exist only as long as the interaction takes place. This means that quantum theory thinks of things less as entities than as events. The mother of all events is the quanta itself, a pure oscillation of energy; in quantum gravity theory, the most basic building block of the universe is, so to speak, a bundle of attraction which exists only in its activity of attract-ing/ repuls-ing. It is striking, in this context, that Berman refuses to think of translation in terms of a singular object, but (even without mentioning the original) conceives as the translation itself as a ternary process: translation-critique-translation. Nothing, here, has existence in itself, but only as the brief result of an interaction. If we were to make the anti-ontological processuality of quantum translation theory absolutely explicit, we would have to create a multi-nodal process that would look like this: analysis-process—treatment—translationprocess—calling-forth—retranslation-process. There is, in this vision of translation and retranslation, nothing outside of the processuality of transformation� In this way, and this is the third point, the processuality of translation chains produces, in a complicated concatenation of ‘lines of flight’, ‘productivity itself ’. Berman (1995: 96) says explicitly, ‘l’analyse doit se faire critique positive, “productive” ’ [‘the analysis must become a positive criticism, a “productive” criticism’ (2009: 78)]. In this turn of phrase, the ‘se faire’ is a reflexive without a human subject (the analysis itself is at work here). The English translator renders this subjectless verb via the processual ‘must become’� The ‘analysis’ is literally a ‘breaking-up’, a ‘dissolution’ into constitutive elements. ‘Analysis’ Quantum translation theory 127 also signifies, etymologically, a release. Thus Berman’s ‘translation analysis’ evokes a process by which energy is released, parts are allowed to recombine in new permutations, whence arises a redoubling of generativity—itself expressed performatively in the apposition of ‘positive’ and ‘productive’� The process is generative, and not merely of ‘translations’, but of ‘translation’ or ‘transformation’ itself� To that extent, the process becomes autopoetic, self-generative at a meta-level in which the very framework of translatability is shifted. It is particularly notable that Berman’s almost-synonyms ‘positive’/ ‘productive’ are not identical, nor even similar: their apposition is one of dissimilar attraction which defines the basic ‘assymetry’ of translative relationships as defined by Lotman. Between the two, a synergy emerges upon the basis of non-identity� Berman’s ‘calls forth’ (‘appeller’) evokes a notion of linguistic ‘appetancy’ that is based not upon lack (whence, perhaps, Coetzee’s [2003: 192] shying away from the notion of ‘desire’) but rather upon difference as a purely positive attribute. This synergy is based upon pure excess, and it generates excess� Fourth, then, this quantum theory of translation would imply a particular notion of temporality that can by no means be assimilated to the notion of translation loss. In sketching his vision of a co-agential translation criticism, Berman approvingly quotes Schlegel (in French translation) imagining ‘une critique qui ne serait pas tant le commentaire d’une littérature déjà existante, achevée et fanée, que l’organe d’une littérature encore à achever, à former et même à commencer’ (Schlegel qtd in Berman 1995: 96) [‘a criticism that would be not so much the commentary of an already existing, finished and withered literature, as the organon of a literature still to be achieved, to be formed, even to be begun’ (Schlegel qtd in Berman 2009: 78)] (Schlegel’s German reads: ‘Eine Kritik, die nicht sowohl der Kommentar einer schon vorhandenen, vollendeten, verblühten, sondern vielmehr das Organon einer noch zu vollendenden, zu bildenden, ja anzufangenden Literatur wäre’ [Schlegel 1975: 82]). Once again the agency at work here is multiple and interlayered, generating a temporality which is multi-vectorial� Berman’s Schlegel sees criticism less as a retrospective, origin-obsessed scrutiny of a past purity subject to entropic corrosion, as the forward-looking creation of a literature yet to come. Significantly, there is no either/ or binary at work here, but rather, an and/ or mesh that is quantized via the nuances of a less/ more relationship. It is as if, in a performative instantiation of the very forward-leaning impulse it describes, retrospectiveness is in the process of being left behind for futurity, within the concrete sequentiality of the sentence itself. Schlegel’s phrasing makes real, as a work of micro-literature, the ‘ entanglement ’ of temporalities that Mbembe (2001: 14, 16) imagines as an ‘ interlocking of presents, pasts and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts and futures, each age bearing, altering and maintaining the 128 Chapter 5: Towards a quantum theory of translation previous ones.’ Let us not forget that Berman quotes Schlegel in French translation, so that French-Schlegel’s concatenation of ‘existante’, ‘achevée’, ‘fanée’, ‘encore à achever, à former et même à commencer’ [‘already existing’, ‘finished’, ‘withered’, ‘still to be achieved, to be formed, even to be begun’] overlays and intertwines with German-Schlegel’s ‘vorhandenen’, ‘vollendeten’, ‘verblühten’, ‘noch zu vollendenden, zu bildenden, ja anzufangenden’ (Schlegel 1975: 82). Temporal terms generate new temporal terms, thereby producing a multilingual overlay of multi-temporalities that cannot easily be reduced to a single common denominator by means of temporal back-translation. Rather, what we see is a multi-vectorial generativity, where the movement from Schlegel to Berman, when reversed, does not bring us back to the same past set of terms, but to one that has been irreversibly transformed by the act of translation itself� All this translative transformation does not happen ‘in’ time. Rather, from the point of view of quantum theory, this happening is time itself� The generative happening, consisting of relational gravitational events, is the dynamic that makes time in its apparently ‘forward’ movement. The apparent ‘progress’ of linear time is merely a streamlined, and thus impoverished version of the gigantic entanglement of multiple relationships of constant transformation that is the material world in its ongoing be-ing (West-Pavlov 2013). ‘Forward’ time is not linear, but rather, complex, that is, so immensely productive that it is irrepressibly unpredictable, not despite but because of its sheer excess of generative power (Smolin 2013). Its ‘forward’ movement is not ‘forward’ merely in the sense that it cannot go backwards (the arrow of time was the one element of classic physics that survived unscathed the revolution of Relativity, though it may not outlive Quantum Gravity [Rovelli 2018]). Rather, more radically, time moves ‘forward’ in the sense of increasingly complexity� The ‘forward’ movement of time is thus absolutely non-linear and creative� Rather than the temporal vector of heat loss that defines time-as-entropy (Rovelli 2016: 60), we must acknowledge that, despite local manifestations of entropy, there is no ultimate dispersal of energy in the universe. Every apparent moment of material dissipation is merely a phase transition to another state. Even the universe itself, it would seem, is not part of a massive and very long longue durée dissipation of heat originating from a ‘big bang’ as it expands outwards, but is embarked upon an oscillating ‘big bounce’ between cosmic extremes of compression and expansion (Rovelli 2016: 179-82). Time, then, does not measure a linear vector of gradual decay, but rather, is an all-embracing immanent descriptor for an immense meshwork of unendingly generative processes of intertwined and ongoing complexity. Here lies the pragmatic use of quantum theory: it describes the dynamic reality of a material universe in which we, as political actors, are always already co-embedded, and offers a counterpoise to the entropic forces Quantum translation theory 129 of the epoch we inhabit (these two forms of belonging themselves make up a quantum non-duality). Such a quantum time is immanent to space and is thus coeval with the generativity of the material world� Focussing on quantum time allows us to re-think translation in ways that that supplement its spatial aspect with its less obvious temporal facets: Benjamin (1991, IV-1: 10-11; 1999: 72) famously used the notion of ‘Fortleben’ or ‘afterlives’ to reconceptualise translation as a retroactive process� But a temporal notion of translation goes back as far as the Sanskrit word for this activity, and its cognates in many modern Indian languages, which translate as ‘saying after or again, repeating by way of explanation, explanatory repetition or reiteration with corroboration or illustration, explanatory reference to anything already said’ (Monier-Williams 1997: 38). Translation is a ‘saying later’. It is this generativity that we have been describing as a sort of ‘macro-translation’, to which ‘micro-translation’ (that is, interlingual translation) is related in a fractal manner� The relationship of fractal resemblance is not visual, as in the many diagrams that are familiar from the more spectacular public face of fractal theory (Mandelbrot 1983), but rather causal: what ‘micro-translation’ does is causally (albeit in a non-linear manner) part of what ‘macro-translation’ does. It is synedochic in a fashion that is not simply spatial but dynamic; the two are inked in a causal relationship of intertwined productivity� Quantum time, with its microand macro-translation processes, is absolutely relational, and co-creative with all the living and seemingly-non-living entities which make up its fabric. Quantum time and its translative processes thus offer a way of understanding our place in a world that provides a framework for the truly creative action—a sort of universal translation—so necessary in this gloomy twenty-first century. Quantizing language 131 Chapter 6: Quantizing German If we are to take the transformative-translative nature of reality in its material fabric, which we have folded back upon linguistic translation, what effects does this have upon the languages from or into which we translate? What would it mean to ‘quantize’ German as a language that is always already translating itself ? In this final step in my theoretical itinerary away from a ‘translation proper’, via a ‘vagabondage conceptuel’ (Berman 1985: 42-3) or ‘conceptual drifting’, I wish to come back to the concrete issue of the language that currently forms my most immediate linguistic biotope and one of the literary domains where I teach. Let us return, then, to the main characteristics of quantum theory as listed in the previous chapter so as to see what implications this might have for a quantum theory of language� Quantum theory—to summarize once again—posits that the coexistence of complementary but mutually exclusive states of being is related to the results produced by certain experimental and observational economies, which in turn impact upon the role of the experimental observer, who is no longer outside the experiment; the entire structure of subject-object relationships becomes destabilized by an underlying principle of relationality which precedes entities’ existence and determines their nature; there is no longer any discrete mode of existence of any entity, apart from its existence within relationships of attraction and affect; this means that all relationships are relationships of affective causality, that is to say, all relationships are transformative; the nature of material causality is non-linear and unpredictable� What would these ideas mean when applied to language itself, and to a language in particular, the German language? Quantizing language I turn first to three possible implications of these ideas for language in general: the basal relationality of language; the dispersal of the generative agency of language, which would imply accepting its ‘posthuman’ character and its irreducible materiality; and the geo-topography of a quantized language that would consist of a plethora of ‘contact zones’. The first implication is that the most basic term of language in general would be a relational term, and as such, it would be inherently generative� Such rela- 132 Chapter 6: Quantizing German tional terms would not be differential terms, as is the case for Saussure’s phonemic differences or sign/ signifier differences. Such binary structures are locked into differentiality and thus, paradoxically, a narcissistic mode of mirroring that vitiates their becoming truly creative principles� Rather than binary terms, then, we must look for more ostentatiously pluralist models of semiosis. Two examples might be mentioned here� The first obvious candidate would be the dialogical model of speech proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). Bakhtin and/ or Vološinov imagined every single word would be a polylingual entity, one that is apparently, but only apparently, binary in its structure: ‘ Word is a two-sided act . It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As a word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee … A word is a territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor’ (Vološinov [Bakhtin] (1973: 86). The word is always already the transformed ‘product’ of a co-agential act of translation as two sematic systems meet each other. It is translational in itself, and thus an ongoing producer from the moment the ‘product’ is taken up anew by a new set of dialogical speakers. The binary character of the dialogical word is deceptive, because each word will be taken up in new contexts and given additional valencies of meanings in new contexts. Bakhtin and/ or Vološinov see the word as the fundamental building block of all communication. Its inherent polyvalence, dialogicity and thus translativity can thus be generalized to larger textual blocks such as the novel, and from there to language as a whole: ‘at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom’ (Bakhtin 1981: 291). A second possible candidate would be Peirce’s triadic semiotics, already mentioned in chapter 2 above� Reaching publication roughly at the same period as Bakhtin’s work (and that of his collaborators or alibis), though couched in more technical terms and within a less explicitly humanist perspective, Peirce’s semiotics, with its ternary or triadic terms, bears renewed examination in this context. At the risk of repetition, let us recapitulate Peirce’s elaboration of a topology of semiosis which has three terms at least, if not more: ‘A Sign is anything which is related to a second thing, its Object , in respect to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a third thing, its Interpretant , into relation to the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a fourth into relation to that object in the same form, ad infinitum ’ (Peirce 1931-58: I/ II, 51). Peirce’s semiotic process is productive: two entities meet in a transformative encounter, and a third, new entity emerges, which in turn generates subsequent transformative encounters� Peirce coined the term ‘transuasion’ to designate the potentially interminable semiotic process inherent in the sign itself: ‘Transuasion in its obsistent aspect, or Mediation , is the character of a sign … If the series is broken off, the sign, in so Quantizing language 133 far, falls short of the perfect significant character’ (Peirce 1931-58: ibid). Peirce conceives of ‘transuasion’ as the difference within the triadic-plus sign, a sort of resistance or obstinate difficulty that does not work simply as a deadlocked binary but on the contrary, generates creative transformations� This resistance, which might be located in the stubborn materiality of language, guarantees the productivity of textual semiosis and generates the infinite series of interpretations constituting signification. Once again, this process is the productive, dynamic face of a translativity that can be generalized to language as a whole. The second implication of the quantizing of language has to do with a dispersal of generativity� The generativity of language would not be merely connected to its possession by humanity (Bakhtin’s dialogical partners, for instance), but on the contrary, would repose in the more democratic principle of the materiality of language. Discourse studies have dispersed identity into the identity-producing mechanism of collective language, but this form of language remains within the possession of speakers at the level of ‘parole’, even when it is language that speaks the subject at the level of ‘langue’. By contrast, recent work on language in the world (e.g. Manning 2009) focuses upon the material qualities of language, especially spoken language (volume, rhythm, tonality, timbre, range, etc.) to stress its ‘affective’ dimensions and effects. In this way, language as materiality and its physical, material impact are pushed into the foreground in ways that reduce the importance of intentionality and ideational signification. This model is promising, but to the extent that it stresses the corporeality of language, one of the chief sites of ‘affect’ theory and its explorations, it tends nonetheless to adhere to the human, thus containing and constraining the agency that it seeks to attribute to language as an autonomous process. Furthermore, this ‘affect’ theory of language is largely restricted to the world of speech, and tends to neglect the larger domains of language as a productive principle, and of thought and written language. In confronting these limitations so as to envisage a quantum notion of language in broader terms, there are two interconnected issues that need to be examined� On the one hand, the question of ‘posthuman’ language must be addressed� Chomsky’s generative grammar reposes upon a principle of human creativity, and is therefore deeply embedded in a politics of radical humanitarian democracy. Yet it appears to privilege the human faculty for language as something that distinguishes humans from the natural world, all the while producing political imperatives that exceed such boundaries (Lears 2017). Let us return yet again to Peirce, with his (1931-58, I/ II: 51) claim that triadic semiosis is inherently generative, with the ‘interpretant’ constituting the third term that breaks open the closed, mirroring binary that we might find for instance in Saussurean semiotics. This openness concurs with the similar inclusivity of his suggestion (1931- 134 Chapter 6: Quantizing German 58, II, 228) that a sign ‘is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity … [i]t addresses somebody’. Both these ideas were discussed in chapter 2 above, but it is now time to explore their implications a little further. How might they impact on the notion of ‘posthuman’ language? If the productivity inherent in the semiotic triad is seen as a material process, the question as to the nature of the interpretant must be posed: is the third term merely a human actor that injects life and dynamism into the inertia and inanimate matter of language? In other words, is the ‘conative’ dimension of linguistic productivity (the speaking-to that enables speech) merely something that takes place within the realm of the human, or does language itself ‘speakto’, just as Heidegger (1959: 12) would have it with his idea that ‘die Sprache spricht’? Language, one could claim, is caught up in ‘addressivity’ by its very nature, regardless of whether a human enunciator or addressee is present� One possible solution is to think language as an assemblage within other assemblages (DeLanda 2006). Seeking to delink language from humans too rigorously may culminate in establishing it as a discrete, separated entity, thereby creating a performative contradiction at the heart of a quantum theory of language that emphasizes nothing if not interrelationship. From this point of view, language would also be an assemblage of co-actants, including the material substrate of language (visual, sonic, etc.), its ideational (neuro-chemical? ) components, and various interpretants, some of which would be animate actants. In other words, language would necessarily be transhuman, so that the principle task at hand would be to extend the domain of the non-human well beyond the very limited role hitherto assigned to it� On the other hand, the issue of the materiality of language as the site of its agency, whether both enhanced and shared, needs to be addressed� Manuel DeLanda exemplifies a resolutely materialist approach to the question. He has suggested that ‘the domination of this century by linguistics and semiotics … has had a very damaging effect … even on art. Today I see art students … afraid of the materiality of their medium—whether painting, music, poetry, or virtual reality’ (DeLanda 2000b). To counter this fear of the material reality of the artistic medium, DeLanda suggests a surprising therapy: ‘The key to break away from this is to cut language down to size, to give it the importance it deserves as a communications medium, but to stop worshipping it as the ultimate reality’ (ibid). Consequently, he claims, ‘once you accept all the nonlinguistic practices that really make up society (not to mention the nonhuman elements that also shape it, such as viruses, bacteria, weeds, or nonorganic energy and material flows like wind and ocean currents) then language itself becomes just another material that flows through a much expanded picture’ (ibid). Working out the implications of this veritable ‘provincialization of language’, DeLanda Quantizing language 135 sets language in a historical genealogy of morphogenesis (the transformations of structures) alongside the other type of materials that entered into the human mixture … Like minerals, inanimate energy, food and genes, the sounds, words and syntactical structures that make up language accumulated within the walls of medieval (and modern) towns and were transformed by urban dynamics. Some of these linguistic materials (learned, written Latin, for example) were so rigid and unchanging that they that they simply accumulated as a dead structure. But other forms of language (vulgar, spoken Latin) were dynamic entities capable of giving birth to new structures, such as French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. (DeLanda 2000a: 20) DeLanda makes a claim that is very similar to the one we have been making in the earlier chapters of this book: In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated ‘stuff’ simply enriching the reservoir of non-linear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes. Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality, in other words, they all represent the different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself. (ibid: 21) This generates a non-linear materialist history of linguistic morphogenesis that is explicitly ‘not a chronicle of “man” and “his” historical achievements but a philosophical meditation upon the history of matter-energy in its different forms’ in which ‘linguistic materials will be allowed to “have their say” ’ (ibid: 21, 22). DeLanda’s history has a microand a macro-dimension. At the micro-level he has recourse to a model of the changing ‘combinatorial productivity’ of language (ibid: 218) that employs the mineral metaphors that pervade the entirety of his book. Thus the work of materialist linguistics such as Zipf (1965: 247) are useful for offering a geological model of linguistic crystallization that describes the varying degrees of syntactic adhesiveness with of a language: ‘Some of the words, being more crystallized in arrangement than others, will cohere. Definite and indefinite articles will adhere to their nouns, auxiliaries to their verbs, prepositions to following objects�’ This granular morphogenetics of language at the syntactic micro-level has effects at the larger scale of dialectand language-formation. At the macro-level, DeLanda traces the long-term transformations of language-blocks. He tracks historical processes of standardization (i.e. the accumulation of combinatorial constraints) carried by words themselves as information (seen as ‘physical information’, not as semantic information; DeLanda 2000a: 219-20, referring to Harris) that can be seen as part and parcel 136 Chapter 6: Quantizing German of the nation-building process� Thus various German dialects coagulate into High German roughly in parallel to the process of the emergence of the German nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, a countervailing process of creolization and destandardization can be seen working ‘from below’ as the metropolitan languages are transformed by colonized subjects and immigrants. Here the linguistic mineral layers undergo a process of almost elemental erosion. DeLanda thus regards linguistic history from the standpoint of the extremely longue-durée perspective of global morphogenetic process of structure-formation (for instance, as dialects gradually assimilated into centralized languages; Balibar 1974; De Certeau, Julia and Revel 1975) and of structure-transformation (for example in the emergence of new creoles and varieties through colonization, the flows of disaporic or exilic populations, mediatic developments, and globalization [DeLanda 2000a: 230-52]). These are very long slow processes of the transformation of language as material. It is no coincidence that DeLanda compares the sedimentation and erosion of language massifs to the transformation of minerals that constitute the development of the global built environment, and its substrate, the fluid but extremely slow medium of the mineral form of the earth itself (DeLanda 2000a: 257-61). The third implication of the quantizing of language pertains to its geo-topography. Language would become a space without constitutive boundaries, driven as it is from the smallest level of phoneme and the sign by a generative principle that breaks open binaries, and thus, by definition, breaks apart the very idea of the boundary and its constitutive inside/ outside dynamic� There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, there are in effect so many boundaries—every linguistic encounter happens, in a sense, at a boundary, every word is already a ‘contact zone’—that the notion of the boundary ceases to have much sense. On the other hand, if the boundary can be multiplied endlessly, this is so because boundaries are a constitutive part the productive process of all encounters� They are both condition and product of an encounter. Boundaries cease to be sites of blockage, censorship, control, and becomes instead sites of productivity and generativity� Even where a linguistic barrier is set up, discourse is generated, even if it may resemble the scar-tissue that grows around an incision. And where linguistic boundaries are fluid, they serve as sites of translation, ‘contact zones’ that are generative of novelty not as an aberration of deviation from the norm, but as their basal default function� Quantizing German 137 Quantizing German Having set out in admittedly highly speculative terms three implications of a quantum theory of language for our ideas about language in general, I now turn to the prospect of the quantizing of German. From the outset it should be clear that there will be something paradoxical or even aporetic about such an undertaking. If quantum theory breaks down all boundaries under the force of the transformative processes it presupposes, how are we to name the very entity whose boundaries we are claiming to erode? In a sense, quantizing German would involve putting the very notion of ‘German’ as a discrete linguistic entity ‘sous rature’. We would have to rephrase this idea as ‘Quantizing German’, because the very act of quantizing would destabilize the language and its boundaries to the point where it would become problematic to speak of German as German. Another rhetorical trick to make this point might be to decapitalize the name of the language: german. At the same time as we confront this irreducible logical contradiction, we must also confront the irreducible pragmatic contradiction of the ongoing existence of languages, if only in their simple existence as collective self-regulating practices, let alone their labelling for descriptive purposes, as discrete entities. Indeed, what we see today, in the wake of resurgent nationalisms is a disturbing reinforcement of such trends towards separatism. Previously common language zones such as Serbo-Croatian have split up into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, each with an everyday rhetoric of banal linguistic cleansing and a mania for ethnic purism (e.g. the once universal Serbo-Croation ‘Prijatno! ’ [Enjoy your meal! / Bon appetit! ] has been largely banished from Croatian and replaced by ‘Dobar tek! ’). The tension between transformation and invariance—including in some cases transformation in the service of nationalist ossification—that characterizes ‘translation’ in the sense that Serres uses the term, thus applies to languages themselves as quantum processes� Quantizing German would involve two principal components. First, the language would not be identical with itself, but, would always already be translating within itself. Jürgen Trabant (1997: 97) has spoken of a ‘konstitutive Fremdheit’ [‘constitutive foreigness/ strangeness’] at the core of language. In every communicative interaction, he suggests, bleibt [es] aber jener fremde Rest. Das soll gar nicht geleugnet werden. Dieser Rest muß aber sein, er ist konstitutiv fürs Sprechen überhaupt. Jenes Nichtverstehen ist nämlich der nun einmal nicht wegzuräumende Rest einer lebens- und denk-notwendigen Alterität, die nicht nur bemerkenswert gut funktioniert, sondern die auch die Grundlage des menschlichen Lebens ist. Es ist der Preis für das Miteinandersein: Wenn 138 Chapter 6: Quantizing German die Menschen allein wären, brauchten sie nicht zu sprechen, und wenn keine Differenz zwischen mir und dir wäre, wäre, brauchten wir nicht zu kommunizieren. (ibid: 97) [there remains however this foreign residue. This should under no circumstances be denied. Indeed, this residue is existential, and is constituve for speech itself. For this non-understanding is the ineluctable trace of an alterity that is a necessary condition of life and of thought itself, one that not only works remarkably well, but is also the basis of human life� This is the price to be paid for community: were humans alone, they would not need to speak, and were there no difference between you and I, we would not need to communicate�] This notion of the ‘Fremdheit der Sprache’ [‘foreigness/ strangeness of/ in language’] and the resultant constitutive translativity of language itself can be seen in the most banal interactions, where the differing meanings of individual speakers must be negotiated on a daily basis in a plethora of micro-explanations. This micro-hermeneutics would arise, similarly, out of the encounters of dozens of registers and idiolects as they interact and register each others’ opposing usage of the language. No single register or idiolect would emerge from such encounters unchanged� Such changes, driven especially by migration and the everyday translational transactions that are undertaken between speakers of what is apparently one and the same language, is a constant motor of linguistic transformation (Hinrichs 2012). What is new here would be the perspective on such phenomena� When ‘ein neuer Dialekt entsteht’ [‘a new dialect emerges’]—say, in this case, Russianand Turkish-inflected ‘Kiezdeutsch’ (Wiese 2012)—this would have to be understood not as an exceptional event but as a manifestation of the fundamental normal functions of language: acceleration and the production of the new. Furthermore, this transformational essence of language would have to be understood not merely as a result of human interaction, but, as the name suggests, of a plethora of other actants, among them the ‘Kiez’ or ‘Vedel’ [‘Quarter’ or ‘precinct’ in Berlin and Cologne dialects respectively] itself. The Kiez is not merely the place where such linguistic transformations occur, but their pre-condition, and even more radically, a ‘strange attractor’ and thus a decisive factor in the direction they take. Site, location and the built environment would be actants within the quantizing of local languages. Self-translation as the quantizing core mode of being of language would be part of a broader translational activity of which humans would be only a small, if not entirely insignificant part. Second, the language would by definition always be pushing at external borders because its own core would be a border-crossing exercise� German would be a ‘pluricentric’ language (Clyne 1991b) not merely by virtue of its widespread usage in the German-speaking countries and regions in Europe (including its di- Foreign languages in German 139 alectical varieties), nor more broadly as a result of its extensive diasporic usage in Africa, in the Americas and in Australasia (Clyne 1991a), but also by virtue of the cognate languages with which it is often a geographical neighbour (Dutch, Flemish, Swiss German and the Scandinavian languages) but also very distant relatives (e.g. Afrikaans; see the conclusion to this book). The borders of German would be both internal (e.g. regional dialects) and international (including all the reaches of the Globe where Germanic languages or one sort or another are spoken). Pluricentricity would thus be a fractal, viral structure, extending both up and down within language hierarchies (Muhr, Norrby, Kretzenbacher and Amorós Negre, eds 2006), diversifying both major and minor languages (Muhr, Marley, Kretzenbacher and Bissoonauth, eds 2015). Pluricentricity would thus inherently subvert numerous assumptions about the respective valencies of both centres and peripheries, thereby flying in the face of blatant power differentials between and within language blocks, families, varieties, dialects. Pluricentric languages would by definition lay bare, indeed call forth translative relationships within any given language set and with its constitutive neighbours on its margins� Foreign languages in German These ideas are in a sense not new, but can be already detected in a 1959 radio address by Adorno, ‘Wörter aus der Fremde’ (Adorno 1961: 110-30) [‘Words from Abroad’ (Adorno 1991, I: 185-99)]. Adorno’s object of analysis is the resistance of locals to ‘Fremdwörter’, ‘foreign loan words’ whose anomalous position within the conservative language norms of the period can be read as an analogy of other languages around and indeed within the German language today. In what Adorno (1961: 115) calls ‘die Spannung zwischen Fremdwort und Sprache’ [‘the tension between the foreign word and the language’ (Adorno 1991, I: 189)] is to be found the power to break open the identity of language with itself: ‘Das konformistische Moment der Sprache, den trüben Strom, in dem die spezifische Absicht des Ausdrucks ertrinkt, vermag er [der Schriftsteller] durchs Fremdwort zu unterbrechen’ (ibid: 115) [‘With the foreign word [the writer] can effect a benficial interruption of the conformist moment of language, the muddy stream in which the specific expressive intention drowns’ (Adorno 1991, I: 189)]. Here, Adorno offers evidence for the more generally valid fact that ‘Keine Sprache … ist ein Organisches, Naturhaftes’ (ibid: 114) [‘No language … is organic and natural’ (Adorno 1991, I: 188)]. By this, Adorno means something close to the Modernist ‘alienation-effect’ that reveals the socially constructed nature of language and allows the critical observer to break open the smooth and deceptive 140 Chapter 6: Quantizing German surface of ideological common-sense. In other words, as Adorno notes, ‘Dabei ist freilich, was unorganisch scheint, in Wahrheit nur geschichtliches Zeugnis, das des Mißlingens jener Vereinheitlichung’ (Adorno 1961: 113) [‘What seems inorganic here is in actuality only historical evidence, evidence of the failure of that unification’ (Adorno 1991, I: 187)]. What is more germane to my argument however, is perhaps the ‘foreign’ core of thought in Adorno’s own sentence, the unintended meaning given by the negated ‘organic’ and the rejected ‘natural’, which point to the materiality of language, its generative (because historical) dynamic� The creativity of language is laid bare by the otherness and newness manifested in and perhaps provoked by the presence of the foreign word or the foreign language� This generativity would take the form of a ubiquitous process of translation, most clearly there where one would least expect it. Adorno reads the foreign word symptomatically, as a provocation that reveals language’s own repressed truth: ‘Wogegen man sich beim Fremdwort sträubt, ist nicht zuletzt, daß es an den Tag bringt, wie es um alle Wörter steht: daß die Sprache die Sprechenden nochmals einsperrt; daß sie als deren eigenes Medium eigentlich mißlang’ (Adorno 1961: 116) [‘Not the least of what we resist in the foreign word is that it illuminates something true of all words: that language imprisons those who speak it, that as a medium of their own it has essentially failed’ (Adorno 1991, I: 189)]. In other words, all communication fails to be transparent, even when it is taking place within the ‘same’ language. All communication is translation. ‘In jedem Fremdwort steckt der Sprengstoff von Aufklärung, in seinem kontrollierten Gebrauch das Wissen, daß Unmittelbares nicht unmittelbar zu sagen, sondern nur durch alle Reflexion und Vermittlung hindurch noch auszudrücken sei’ (Adorno 1961: 116) [‘Every foreign word contains the explosive material of enlightenment, contains in its controlled use the knowledge that what is immediate cannot be said in unmediated form but only expressed in and through mediation’ (Adorno 1991, I: 190)]. A foreign language is not something that one just learns at school; rather, it is present in everyday life, and from there contaminates even the core of one’s own language� Translation is ubiquitous, it starts at home, in the domestic space that at first glance is diametrically opposed to the foreign. This notion allows Adorno to begin to map a topography of language in which, to quote the anti-racism slogan from the 1980s, ‘Alle Menschen sind Ausländer: Fast überall’ [‘Everyone is a foreigner—almost everywhere’] (I return to this catchphrase in chapter 12 below). Adorno suggests that through the universal presence of linguistic foreignness, ‘es lockt eine Art Exogamie der Sprache, die aus dem Umkreis des Immergleichen, dem Bann dessen, was man ohnehin ist und kennt, heraus möchte’ (Adorno 1961: 112) [‘what lures us is a kind of exogamy of language, which would like us to escape from the sphere of Foreign languages in German 141 what is always the same, the spell of what one is and knows anyway’ (Adorno 1991, I: 187)]. The geography of a linguistic exotopia goes hand in hand with the genealogy of material creativity and newness� This geography effects fundamental shifts in the conception of the nature of the German language. Rather than imagining it as a consolidated block that has ‘settled’ (both in terms of location and substance) since Luther’s standardization of the vernacular, we need to think of it as a dynamic fabric whose somewhat tattered fringes extend across Euro-America and well into the Global South. If anything, we should imagine an entity that in some cases is accelerating its transformations rather than consolidating its stability. We need to evoke the utopian vision of a German that is translating itself forwards into the future. It is in this sense that we need to read Adorno’s evocation of a utopian character of the German language: Damit können die Fremdwörter etwas von jener Utopie der Sprache, einer Sprache ohne Erde, ohne Gebundenheit an den Bann des geschichtlichen Daseiendes bewahren, die bewußtlos in ihrem kindlichen Gebrauch lebt. (Adorno 1961: 120) [In this way foreign words could preserve something of the utopia of language, a language without earth, without subjection to the spell of historical existence, a utopia that lives on unconsciously in the childlike use of language. (Adorno 1991, I: 192; translation modified)] Adorno oscillates here between a spatial and a temporal paradigm. He imagines a linguistic utopia: a literal non-place, less in the sense of the ubiquitous hypermodern vacuum critiqued by Augé (1992) than as one that is unmoored from the customary cohesion between national identity, national territory and national language, thus appearing as a ‘einer Sprache ohne Erde’. For our purposes this emphatically does not mean a language that has ‘no place’, spoken by Theresa May’s (2016) maligned ‘citizens of nowhere’, but rather, one that is not rooted in the nationalist imaginaries of territorial belonging� That nationalist belonging carries with it the fantasy of a historical continuity, a ‘Gebundenheit an den Bann des geschichtlichen Daseiendes’ [‘subjection to the spell of historical existence’]� Together, these two paradigms add up to the murderous nexus of ‘Blut und Boden’ (blood and earth) that have underpinned racist ideologies of citizenship based in ius sanguinis (citizenship by lineage) rather than ius soli (citizenship by place of birth), with the former being wielded largely as a negative criterion, as a weapon of exclusion� These are the double axes of space and time that Adorno wishes to immobilize via the disruptive impetus of foreign words. Adorno discretely points to a specific German history of this nationalist history of language: ‘Diese Spannung [zwischen Fremdwort und Sprache] scheint aber dem Deutschen eigentümlich zu sein’ (Adorno 1961: 113, 115) [‘This tension 142 Chapter 6: Quantizing German [between foreign language and native language], however, seems peculiar to the Germans’ (Adorno 1991, I: 187)]. Nonetheless, except for brief references to the miniscule pockets of symbolic resistance to nationalist rhetoric during the First World War afforded by the usage of foreign words (Adorno 1961: 112; 1991, I: 186), and a sketchy history of the failure of an integrated Enlightenment-inflected language of the middle-classes in Germany, that even the violently standardizing language of the Third Reich could not achieve (Adorno 1961: 114; 1991, I: 188; see also Klemperer 1947), Adorno does not seek to trace a genealogy of the modern German language. However, he does retain a sort of rudimentary developmental scheme when he claims that the role of foreign words is ‘etwas von jener Utopie der Sprache … [zu] bewahren, die bewußtlos in ihrem kindlichen Gebrauch lebt’ (Adorno 1961: 120) ‘preserve something of the utopia of language … a utopia that lives on unconsciously in the childlike use of language’ (Adorno 1991, I: 192; translation modified)]. This developmental scheme involves the loss of utopian hopes that are connected to childhood—a moment of a connective ‘symbiotic real’, to employ the vocabulary proposed by Morton (2017: 15) that precedes a truncated, punitive ‘severance’ constituting Reality� This utopia does not merely disable nationalist rhetoric, it also projects a ‘non-place’ whose marker is negative because it exceeds place as conceived of in the nationalist imaginary� Rather than the bounded places of the nationalist fortress, this utopia would resemble perhaps a Foucauldian heterotopia (1994, IV: 752-62), one that is adjacent to real places and makes space for the otherwise repressed energies and imaginations banned from their constrained topographies� Adorno offers no more of a description of his utopia of language than to label it ‘eine Art Exogamie der Sprache’ [‘a kind of exogamy of language’] to which he attaches the impersonal expression ‘es lockt’ [‘what lures us’] (Adorno 1961: 112; 1991, I: 187). This externally-motivated emergence of language, etymologically linked to the notion of ‘obligatory out-marriage’, promises to generate novelty by escaping from the limitations of the already-known. It is driven, as the notion of marriage suggests, by desire for the other. Adorno’s metaphor of the ‘utopia of language’ is thus an initially negative imagination that segues into a positive phenomenon as the escape from the geography of the familiar and the same is propelled by the ‘strange attraction’ of the foreign: this ‘exogamy of language’ ‘lockt’: it lures, entices, tempts. Here Adorno’s notion of a linguistic utopia employs the same structural functions as quantum gravity theory: the underlying force of creativity is ‘appetancy’ or ‘affect’—that powerful force that pulls an entity into the gravitational force of an other entity, prompting transformations of its structure that will in turn generate new transformations, in an unpredictable, ‘exciting’ manner. Adorno puts the verb ‘locken’ in an impersonal form (‘es lockt’) cherished by German academic writing eager to avoid the appearance of Foreign languages in German 143 non-objective dilettantism. In Adorno’s usage, however, another valency of the impersonal is manifest. Elsewhere, Adorno names Hölderlin as an exemplification of the manner in which ‘die Künstler selbst indessen werden durch ihre Erfahrung darüber belehrt, wie wenig ihr Eigenes ihnen gehört, in welchem Maß sie dem Zwang des Gebildes gehorchen’ (Adorno 1965: 157) [‘artists’ experience teaches them how little what is most their own belongs to them, how much they are under the compulsion of the work itself ’ (Adorno 1991, II: 110)]. The (literary) work of art, seen by traditional bourgeois philology as that most essential expression of the (literary) artist’s inner self, does not belong to the artist; rather, the latter is obliged to be obedient to the form of the artistic genre itself. It is this submission to the impersonal, inhuman (or posthuman) ‘lure’ or ‘enticement’ of creative dynamics of language itself that constitutes the framework in which the poet or even the speaker finds heror himself caught up. How might one describe this process in some sort of concluding summary? That, precisely, is impossible, because the quantizing of German creates a situation in which closure and summation are not possible: rather, the German language becomes a site of endless ‘lines of flight’ beyond its own linguistic borders. In their essay on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari (1975; 1986) speculate upon the Prague author’s use of a literally (that is, geographically) ‘deterritorialized’ German to create a ‘minor’ literature, that is, a peripheral literature within a hegemonic literature whose very internal peripherality harbours the potential to generate cultural renewal. Their comments about Kafka’s stylistics can serve as a suggestive set of ideas about what a ‘quantized’ German might be able to do� Their notion of a minor language is based on the notion of a ‘polylingualisme dans sa propre langue’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1975: 49) [‘polylingualism of[/ in] one’s own language’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 26-7)]. Every language is marked by internal borders, by a ‘foreignness to itself ’ (Kristeva 1988) that means that the language itself is ‘est affectée d’un fort coéfficient de déterritorialisation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1975: 29) [‘is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16)]. Every language is thus translation within itself before it even begins to be translated into other cultural zones and vernaculars. What this means, in effect, is that the usage of a ‘minor’ language such as Prague German will ‘fera filer l’allemand sur une ligne de fuite’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1975: 48) [‘make the German language take flight on a line of escape/ ligne of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 26 ; translation modified)]. The language will become productive in ways that resemble the spill-over tipping-points of chaos theory, where the gravitational centre of a structure is pulled outside the basin of attraction by a ‘strange attractor’, an ‘intensity’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s jargon, that transforms—from within and without—both structures in the wake of the encounter. Foreign languages in German 145 PART 2: Theory in translation Sir Thomas Browne, The Works of Sir Thomas Browne. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1928), I, 208. Out of copyright� Foreign languages in German 147 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad The opening of W. G. Sebald’s long narrative of walking, Die Ringe des Saturn , finds its protagonist immobilized in the central hospital in Norwich, the provincial capital of Norfolk where the author taught from the early 1970s until his death in 2001. The narrative opens with a very typical view of walking, one that is indicative of deeply rooted assumptions about stability and movement in Western culture. Mobility is envisaged from the standpoint of immobility; openness and expanse are scrutinized from the point of view of closure; and the very action of writing is imagined from the point of view of framing (an underlying operation that enables the very existence of art [Lotman 1977: 2019- 17]), in other words, distance and separation. Sebald’s protagonist fulfills all these inherently binary expectations when describes the glimpse he has from his hospital room upon the outside world. He sees that, anscheinend aus eigner Kraft, ein Kondensstreifen quer durch das von meinem Fenster umrahmte Stück Himmel zog. Ich habe dieses weißes Spur damals für ein gutes Zeichen gehalten, fürchte aber jetzt in der Rückschau, daß sie den Anfang gewesen ist eines Risses, der seither durch mein Leben geht. (2008: 27) [I saw a vapour trail, [apparently of its own volition,] cross the segment [of the sky] framed by my window. At the time I took the white trail for a good omen, but now, as I look back, I fear it marked the beginning of a fissure that has since riven my life. (2002: 18)] Auspicious augury and symptom of destruction, autonomy and framing, white writing and hot air: all these binaries appear in Sebald’s text. However, from the outset their customary hierarchy is unsettled, because these binaries appear to be inextricably entangled with one another in this passage� Such entangled oppositions characterize Die Ringe des Saturn in its entirety, in fact, not merely as descriptors of content, but in their very entangled opposition� When Sebald describes das lähmende Grauen, das mich verschiedentlich überfallen hatte angesichts der selbst in dieser entlegenden Gegend bis weit in die Vergangenheit zurückgehenden Spuren der Zerstörung (2008: 9) [the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident in that remote place (Sebald 2002: 3)] 148 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad just such an opposition is evident� Sebald’s brief is double here� On the one hand, he detects in the natural landscape of Norfolk and Suffolk the ‘traces’ of ‘destruction’. Instinctively, we tend to focus on the content of this archaeological undertaking: we swiftly fix upon evidence of ‘destruction’, those phenomena indexed by the ‘Zer-’-prefix that signals ‘disconnection’ and ‘disarticulation’ (the opposite of con-struction) that constitute ‘a natural history of destruction’ (Sebald 2004), of ‘unsere beinahe nur aus Kalamitäten bestende Geschichte’ (Sebald 2008: 366) [‘our history, which is but a long account of calamities’ (2002: 295)]. Yet on the other hand, such destruction can only be re constructed as a history because because of ‘traces’ that ‘go’ far back into history. Initially, such reconstructions present a terrifying panorama of a sort of mega-catastrophe, as Sebald opines in an interview from 2001: es gibt diese Geschichten überall. Und diese Geschichten sind alle miteinander verbunden, auf die eine oder andere Weise. Es ist ein riesiges Netwerk des Schmerzes, das nach wie vor seine Auswirkungen hat. (Sebald 2011: 233) [These histories are everywhere. And these histories are all connected to one another, in one way of another. It’s a huge network of pain that continues to take effect.] Paradoxically, however, such networks do not only culminate in a multiplication and intensification of pain. These ‘Spuren der Zerstörung’ (Sebald 2008: 9) [‘traces of destruction’ (Sebald 2002: 3)] are marks that re-establish a ‘connective’ tisue—semiotic but also material—without which it would be impossible to testify to the work of destruction. Reconnection In a constitutive paradox that underlies Sebald’s work, the fundamental contestatory task of testifying to violence, discrimination and oppression, although it is a task ridden with pessimism, evinces in its very form a residual hope—an obscure but persistent belief in the integrative and reconciliatory power of the literary project itself. In this chapter, I will suggest that ‘translation’ is the name that one could give to this restorative impulse that appears to be so foreign to Sebald’s universally bleak fiction. Sebald’s text is, as it were, an implicit treatise upon the impossible possibility of witnessing as historical ‘translation’, a translative process embedded in both the landscape and the text, that resonates in its own work with translations, and the ways translation work with it. The ‘Riss’ (2008: 27) [‘fissure’ (Sebald 2002: 18)] or crack or split or gash that the narrator makes out within the window frame of the Norwich hospital room is the mark of separation or ‘Zerschneidung’/ ‘Sezierung’ (ibid: 21) Reconnection 149 [‘dissection’ (Sebald 2002: 13)] as a fundamental cultural topos. This topos of violence is explored with particular imaginative force in the episode devoted to Rembrandt’s painting of a ‘dissection’ [‘Prosektur’] of a common criminal (Sebald 2002: 12; Sebald 2008: 20). Sebald’s choice of anatomical knowledge as one of the markers of incipient scientific Enlightenment (see Foucault 1963), is a judicious one� The fundamental act of sectioning is one of the founding acts of Enlightenment reason. Such separative mentalities lie deeply at the heart of Western modernity, beginning with the separation of nature and culture that was contemporary with Rembrandt’s painting (Latour 2006), the destruction of the interwoven ‘prose du monde’ [‘prose of the world’] that joined words and things in a single sinuous continuum (Foucault 1966: 32-59; 2002: 19-50), and the hegemonialization of the isolating, analytical mental operations underpinning the technological and instrumental reason of the anthropocene. ‘According to [the objectivist] paradigm,’ notes Bird-David (1999: S77), already quoted above, ‘learning involves acquiring knowledge of things through the separation of knower and known and often, furthermore, by breaking the known down into its parts in order to know it.’ In very similar terms, Amitav Ghosh notes in a passage, also quoted above, that instrumental rationalism is predicated upon a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities … [by] break[ing] problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (‘externalities’) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable. (Ghosh 2016: 56) Sebald’s fiction depicts with grim obstinacy the persistent dominance of such separative mentalities from the early modern period through to the contemporary moment� However, I suggest in this chapter that though Sebald’s fiction relentlessly documents disconnection in its content , it simultaneously works, at the level of form , to reconnect disconnected epochs, shattered entities, disarticulated causalities. Even more, it performs that connectivity in the very mode of its construction� That construction is less an architecture than a process: an essentially translative operation that brings disparate entities into contact with one another so as to produce a new and transformative fabric of interwoven beings� Sebald takes authors such as, for instance, Thomas Browne and translates them into German as he integrates them into his text alongside writers from other epochs and cultural zones. Paintings such as Rembrandt’s must also be given a new language as their mute action is transformed into verbal description and interpretative commentary (see Guillerm, ed. 1986). The substitutive work of translation goes hand in hand with the appositional work of collage, itself a sort 150 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad of translation as disparate entities are brought into each other’s zone of influence, and thus made to communicate with each other� The translative ‘contact zones’ between these textual territories, events of fraught transitions, are crucial moments in Sebald’s text that epitomize his work of ‘seam-joining’ or caulking. All these modes of translation are carried out in the book not so much by the substitutive activity of interlingual translation (which works on the same axis as metaphor), as by the apposition (an operation related to metonymy) of textual episodes that often jump, associately, from place to time, or from past to present; and of various media, such as printed text, text-as-image, or image tout court � Sebald’s form is thus, essentially, metonymic rather than metaphoric in its fundamental impetus. It performs a connective work upon elements that would appear, at first glance, to be quite discrete from one another. The fact that such deeply disconnected elements can be connected is a fundamnetal message of the text. This integrative work militates against the disconnective effects of war, genocide etc. In particular, it resists the disconnective work of repression, silence, or amnesia, evinced for example in Sebald’s university teachers’ silence on their Nazi pasts, a silence that drove Sebald to leave Germany soon after beginning his degree in Freiburg (Sebald 2003b: 249-50; 2015: 12). In particular, it militates against the effects of trauma, ‘eine Dislokation auch in der Zeit, der abstraktesten Heimat der Menschen’ [Sebald 2003b: 154] [a ‘dislocation in time, that most abstract homeland of humankind’]). Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn thus provides an exemplary text for that connective pedagogy that I discuss in the part 3 of this book—a pedagogical undertaking ‘an denen einem schlagartig aufgeht, daß alles mit allem zusammenhängt und daß man sich deshlb um alles kümmern muß’ (Sebald 2011: 233) [‘in which it may suddenly become clear to one that everything is connected to everything else and that one must take responsibility for everything’]� The message of Sebald’s text, then, is that of connection itself� Performatively, it answers the question, was sind das für unsichtbare Beziehungen, die unser Leben bestimmen, wie verlaufen die Fäden [, die zusammenkommen] in der Vernetzung … anscheinend weit auseinander liegender Dinge … (Sebald 2003b: 244) [what are these invisible relationships that determine our life, what is the path of the threads [that result] in the networked connectedness of things apparently far apart from one another? ] The text’s mode of collage is thus a performative riposte to the very catastrophes it documents, and whose interconnectedness it seeks to lay bare via the liberties that only fiction can take with historical causality. Its content is dis- Reconnection 151 connective, but its form is connective. And that connective form, to speak more precisely, takes the form of translation-Übersetzung. The work of interlingual translation is thus a fundamental operation among other modes of translation that resemble it structurally in their common business of transformative joining� Together, these various modes of translation add up to networks of connectivity that Sebald, following his Norwich exemplar Thomas Browne (1928: I, 203), figures visually, going so far as to imnsert an image in the text, in the form of the Quincunx, das gebildet wird von den Eckpunkten eines regelmäßigen Vierecks und dem Punkt, an dem dessen Diagonalen sich überschneiden. (Sebald 2008: 29) [quincunx, which is composed by using the corners of a regular quadrilateral and the point at which its diagonals intersect. (Sebald 2002: 19-20)] The illustration of the Quincunx shows a circle at each of the intersections of its diagonals, that is, at the tips of its lozenge-like diamonds. The meeting points of the lines are not simply geometrical intersections, vanishing points of no dimensions. Rather, they are sites to be occupied, ‘contact zones’ constituted by the meeting of disparate ‘lines of flight’. This diagonal network does not merely figure forth a concept of connectedness. It appears to manifest concretely a process of connectivity; indeed, it may even be generative of connectivity. This generativity is evinced in the the plethora of proxies, avatars or twins of its basic pattern, such as the scales of the herring (Sebald 2008: 77; Sebald 2002: 57, also with a drawing) that Sebald offers at frequent points within the text. The connective-transformative operation of translation, spatialized and visualized in the Quincunx, also models the activity of walking that constitutes the diegetic framework of the book. There are several levels of meaning, each one progressively more complex than its predecessor, that accrue to walking within Sebald’s text� At a first, very superficial allegorical level, the the Quincunx figures the perambulatory subject’s walks from site to site along lines of learning—literally, the line-after-line accumulation of scholarly general knowledge that strews Sebald’s text—figured by the diagonals of the Quincunx (see Ingold 2015). Learning has here two senses: on the one hand, it functions as a noun, so that each segment of the protagonist’s walk (which can be easily traced on the map, if the reader so wishes) is associated with a mass of information from the world of culture or nature; on the other hand, as a verb, so that the various phases of the walk become part of the subject’s development within the text, making Ringe des Saturn/ Rings of Saturn a kind of highly non-linear Bildungsroman � Both of these senses also gain impetus from the fact that the topos of walking is already deeply embedded in a British cultural tradition (Macfarlane 2012; Wallace 1993). This 152 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad developmental but non-linear notion of walking-learning trickles down into the next level of meaning� At a second, more profound level, the Quincux can be understood as figuring the multiple relationships that surround and indeed constitute the mobile subject at any one point in time. Here, the circles located at the intersections of the diagonals would mark the subect’s locus. The walking subject would thus constitute a stable focus at the centre of a map that transforms as the subject walks, much like the oceanic star-maps of Pacific navigators such as Tupia that so perplexed early European visitors (DiPiazza and Pearthree 2007; Eckstein and Schwarz 2018), or indeed, any contemporary digital navigation device. The subject-centred notion that is evoked here is deceptive, though. The subject is only perspectivally the centre of what in fact is an infinite network. Life is devolved to the subject by other living beings, who in turn have life devolved to them by yet others, so that life appears as an immense network of living-ness, through which any subject moves, propelled forwards by the constantly changing attractive force of other actants (Ingold 2011). The narrative of walking is thus in fact an allegory of an alert, conscious and deliberate human existence aware of its place within the natural environment and attuned to the way its own life is devolved from that landscape� It is with such an idea in mind that Sebald, not long before his death, commented in a 2001 interview that Das Herumgehen zu Fuß in der Landschaft ist eine Form der Aneignung der Vergangenheit, die es am ehesten ermöglicht, etwas zu sehen. (Sebald 2011: 262) [Walking around on foot in the landscape is a form of appropriation of the past that is the best way of making it possible to see something.] His statement is counter-intuitive. Common sense would assume that ‘seeing’ is a self-evident faculty. The landscape is there and one merely needs to walk through it. Sebald contradicts this assumption. Walking enables a recovery of the past that is the condition of possibility of seeing the present, both temporal and spatial. Walking produces and configures a constellation of verbal and visual icons that can only then be connected to one another—thereby allowing their configuration to crystallize into visibility. Walking is a connective process of encounters (one place is linked to another by the very fact of travel) that enables the assembling of verbal and visual elements into a relationship that gives them a meaning. An icon in isolation, whether spatial or temporal, is as such invisible—contrary to the reifiying, individualizing assumptions we have inherited from Enlightenment thought. Only when an entity is connected to other entities in a mobile fashion does it gain a meaning, that is, become epsitemologically visible. To walk is to ‘translate’ (in the sense of transport) within a natural en- Translating Sebald Translating Conrad 153 vironment that is a space-time continuum of tranformation (sometimes natural, sometimes ‘destructive’) that is inherently relational. ‘Translation’ is the process of creating encounters that ‘translates’ entities into visibility, thereby setting other process of transformations in motion� Translating Sebald Translating Conrad Let us turn, in order to see what such aporistic proclamations might mean, to the case at hand: the translation of Sebald’s Rings of Saturn by Michael Hulse (2002). This translation tends to assert itself as original work of literature in English, as will become evident in my examination of one specific passage of the text, by ‘translating’ more authentically Sebald’s intertexts than Sebald himself� This paradoxical formulation is important, because it unsettles the relationships between original and translation, thereby displacing the assumed temporal causality (and implicit hierarchy) between primary and secondary textual instances, and the dominance of metaphor as the underlying trope of translative equivalence. In its place emerges metonymy, with the production of networkor rhizome-like constellations in space and time. These are not replicative or reflective in nature, but rather, productive and generative. In a very literal sense, Hulse’s translation ‘englishes’ Sebald (Hulse 2011). Ironically, Hulse’s translation often returns to the originals when rendering Sebald’s copious citations within the text� Thus, where Sebald either paraphrases or translates his citations, either by himself or by citing others’ translations, Hulse’s translation in some cases repudiates translation by restituting the original, as in passages from Browne or, indeed, much of Conrad’s text, taken from Heart of Darkness (Conrad 1973) or A Personal Record (Conrad 1988) (see Hulse 2011: 204-5). Perhaps the most striking example of this is the strange story of a Major General Le Strange, taken from a local newspaper and reproduced as an image in the text. Where Sebald’s German (2006: 82-3) translates and paraphrases, Hulse’s English version of the narrative (2002: 62-3) follows the newspaper article, pasted into the text as a full-page text-image, word for word� The metaphorical relationship of original to translation here is not merely literal, it is genuinely iconic! Hulse’s translation is thus in some senses more faithful to the prior intertexts than Sebald’s original—more original than the original. However, even this paradoxical distinction, may be a spurious one. For even a verbatim citation from an earlier text translates it in the sense of geometry, shifting it to a different position while retaining its essential coordinates. And if we invoke Derrida’s notion of iterability in Marges de la Philosophie (1972b: 154 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad 247-324, 365-93; 1982: 207-73; 307-30), it becomes clear that even a word-forword rendition of an original, which in the linguistic sense is not a translation at all, the very change of context gives the same words in a new connection a new meaning� The new context inevitably endows the same words with a different inflection, making their meaning different—in other words, translating them within the one and the same language, perhaps even within the same text, from one sentence to another� Thus, even when there is no linguistic shift on the metaphorical axis, that is, on the axis by which the phrasing of the source text is replaced by the phrasing of the target language, in an operation which, at least at a pragmatic level, posits identity, there is none the less a necessary transition on the syntagmatic axis� In other words, to take another pertinent example, Browne, ‘in his own right’, and Browne in the context of Sebald-in-translation, even when the wording is identical, are not the same Browne� This is so because Browne in fact never stands alone, ‘in his own right’. Browne is always contextualized, and this context endows his words with a specific meaning. The point where this contextualization becomes visible—at least in principle—in Sebald’s text are the constantly recurring transitions, often seamless and barely perceptible, between Sebald’s own prose and that of the writers he inserts into his text� These are ‘translations’ within the structure of the ensemble of sentence between its constitutive elements and their respective epochal matrices, transformations both textual and temporal, which together constitute the now of the text we are reading� In confusing the terms of original and translation, suggesting that they inevitably blur into each other, that behind every translation, hidden even in the putative original, there is another translation, I am not merely making a point about the fundamentally translative nature of language even when it is understood as a discrete mother tongue� My thesis is that language as a permanent state of translation takes on an ethical colouring in that it describes the only way possible to bear witness to history and its nightmares. Furthermore, because translations always point back to other translations, as Paz (1992: 154) points out, they form a community that inevitably links various instances of suffering with one another across the globe and down the ages. It is within this framework, then, that I come to interlingual translation in the context of Sebald. Joseph Conrad, his ‘translation’ into Sebald’s text on the one hand, and his ‘retranslation’ in Michael Hulse’s English translation of Sebald (that I have been quoting from the outset) on the other, provide the focus for my reading of ‘translation’ in Die Ringe des Saturn . I suggest that Conrad provides a foil for one of the major concerns informing the entirety of Sebald’s oeuvre, namely, how to react to the Holocaust and the Second World War as child born as the war drew to an end, as a youth growing up aware of the silences imposed Translating Sebald Translating Conrad 155 upon the still recent wartime past, and as an expatriated student in Switzerland and the UK in the 1960s (Sebald 2003b: 249-50; 2015: 12). Conrad offers Sebald an indirect foil to discuss matters that cannot be addressed otherwise� The Holocaust and the war are approached by Sebald in a number of different ways across the breadth of his works, but it is striking that this central topic is almost never addressed explicitly or directly� Often, rather, Sebald deals with the Holocaust in oblique, fragmentary form, so that for instance remains the shadowy unsaid of the novel Austerlitz (2003a) from beginning to end (Wood 2011). This refusal of direct portrayal is doubtless related to the unrepresentability of trauma, which is in turn related to the difficulty of historical representation. As the passage on the battle of Waterloo implies, die Kunst der Repräsentation der Geschichte … beruht auf einer Fälschung der Perspektive. Wir, die Überlebenden, sehen alles von oben herunter, sehen alles zugleich und wissen dennoch nicht, wie es war. (Sebald 2008: 158) [the representation of history … requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and we still do not know how it was. (Sebald 2002: 125)] ‘Survivors’ might simply refer to those who look back on the past and its dead, but in the context of the world-historical traumas the text refers to—the Congo, the genocide perpetrated by the Croatian Ustaše, the Holocaust—it has a more sinister meaning� The translator of the past cannot translate it precisely because she or he has survived it� The survivors cannot bear witness to the catastrophe because they have not experienced it as the true victims have, while those who have truly experienced it in its full force cannot witness because they are dead: in Celan’s (2003: 198; 2014: 65) infamous turn of phrase, ‘Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen’ [‘No one / bears witness for the / witness’]. Translation is an ethical task, but impossible duty, as Derrida (1985) pointed out in the famous essay on Benjamin; so too is the evocation of historyical trauma. Sebald’s formulation about the unrepresentability of historical trauma is sandwiched between two long sections on Joseph Conrad, who is always referred to by Sebald as Korzeniowski, and Roger Casement, in the Congo. This positioning is highly significant. One way of evading this ‘falsification of perspective’ in ‘the representation of history’, is to implement, as a positive strategy, the sort of fragmentation and episodic, anecdotal quality of the fiction which is characteristic of Sebald’s writing� The metonymic structure stands in, as a sort of placeholder, for the absence and impossibility of metaphor. As a placeholder in-between, however, the passage about the impossibility of historical representation—in other words, the impossibility of historiographical 156 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad metaphor—connects fragments of the Congo past and thus performatively does the work of metonymic, appositional connectivity. This in turn points to another way of aproaching the past, one that is indicated by the opening of the chapter on Conrad/ Korzeniowski. The narrator falls asleep in his hotel in Southwold while watching a BBC documentary about Roger Casement and Joseph Conrad. Da mir, bis auf diese paar Zeilen und einige schattenhafte Bilder Conrads und Casements, alles entfallen war, was der Erzähler, wie ich annehmnen mußte, in der Folge berichtet hatte über die Lebenswege der beiden Männer, habe ich seither versucht, die von mir damals in Southwold (unverantwortlicherweise, wie ich meine) verschlafene Geschichte aus den Quellen einigermaßen zu rekonstruieren. (Sebald 2008: 132-3) [since I had lost the rest of the narrator’s account of the lives of Casement and Conrad, except for these few words and some shadowy images of the two men, I have since tried to reconstruct from the sources, as far as I have been able, the story I slept through that night in Southwold. (Sebald 2002: 104)] A lacuna ensues in the place of a narrative, which can only be filled by recourse to other narratives (‘Quellen’/ ‘Sources’). The notion of ‘source’ or origin is misleading, however. A chain of never-quite-substitutive narratives extend, in this instance, back via Hulse’s English translation to Sebald’s German narrative to Conrad’s English fiction and his comments on Casement, to the natives of the Congo whose plight they, in various forms, both sought to document. Where an ‘original’ might be found—as in the restitutive work of Hulse’s translation, for instance—it often turns out be be yet another translation: fiction, or the semi-fictive work of autobiography. In the project of looking for oblique, metonymic approaches to aspects of European history that defy direct metaphoric representation in narrative, alibis for the role of the displaced, expatriate writer are of central importance. The translator seeks other translations, proliferating, generative of rhizomatic networks rather than recuperations of the truth, to palliate the impossibility of the task at hand. Like metonymy, translation is one of the names for Sebald’s pessimistic, but ultimately creative and not entirely hopeless historical itinerary� Marlow’s grove of death In order to ground these meditations in more empirical textual analysis, I turn now to a single passage which, it will transpire, possesses an exemplary significance within Sebald’s text. The passage takes up the words of Joseph Conrad’s narrator Marlow early on in the tale he tells a group of fellow sailors in Heart of Marlow’s grove of death 157 Darkness � Sebald excerpts Marlow’s words at the moment where he discovers a group of African slave-labourers dying of exhaustion resulting from the exploitation they have experienced at the hands of the Belgian colonizers. For the sake of heuristic clarity, I am going to seek to reconstruct the process whereby Sebald might have created his own text, beginning with the Conradian ‘original’, then comparing with Sebald, and finally with Hulse, whose translative work is in some senses reparative (see Bandia 2014). Here I am reconstructing in a roughly sequential order my own genuine (and zigzag) analytical progress, which proceeded from Sebald to Conrad and thence to Hulse. I begin by citing from Conrad’s original phrasing in Heart of Darkness (the continuous underlining signals textual segments that will be taken up verbatim by Sebald and Hulse): Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die� They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom� Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees� Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young—almost a boy—but you know with them it’s hard to tell. (Conrad 1973: 44-5) By way of comparison, it is useful to take a brief look at Freißler’s 1926 German translation, one of the numerous German translations to which Sebald may have referred. Admittedly, however, given his long-term British expatriation and his immersion in English literature, it is more likely that Sebald used Conrad’s original. (The classic Penguin edition [1973] was part of his personal library [Catling 2011: 404]): Schwarze Gestalten kauerten, lagen, saßen zwischen den Bäumen, lehnten sich gegen die Stämme, klammerten sich an die Erde, halb in dem trüben Licht, halb im Schatten verborgen, in allen Stellungen des Schmerzes, der Auflösung und Verzweiflung. 158 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad Wieder erdröhnte ein Sprengschuß von der Klippe her, von einem leichten Erzittern des Bodens unter meinen Füßen gefolgt. Die Arbeit ging ihren Gang. Die Arbeit! Und dies war der Ort, an den sich einige der Helfer zurückgezogen hatten, um zu sterben� Sie starben langsam—das war klar. Sie waren keine Feinde, sie waren keine Verbrecher, sie waren nun nichts Irdisches mehr—nichts als schwarze Schatten, krank und verhungert, die durcheinander in dem grünen Dämmern lagen� Man hatte sie aus allen Winkeln der Küste auf Grund gesetzlich einwandfreier Arbeitsverträge zusammengeholt; verloren in der ungewohnten Umgebung, auf ungewohnte Nahrung gesetzt, siechten sie dahin, wurden untauglich und erhielten schließlich die Erlaubnis, beiseite zu kriechen und auszuruhen. Diese sterbenden Gestalten waren frei wie die Luft—und fast auch so dünn. Ich begann das Glitzern von Augen unter den Bäumen wahrzunehmen. Dann entdeckte ich beim Niederblicken ein Gesicht nahe an meiner Hand. Die schwarzen Gebeine lehnten der Länge nach mit einer Schulter gegen einen Baum, die Augenlider hoben sich langsam, und die eingefallenen Augen sahen zu mir auf, riesengroß und leer, mit einem blinden, weißlichen Flackern in den Tiefen der Augäpfel, das langsam erstarb. Der Mann schien jung, fast ein Knabe, —aber ihr wißt ja, wie schwer es bei den Leuten zu sagen ist. (Conrad 1959) It is important to include at least one of the numerous German translations of Heart of Darkness , beause it indexes a continually transforming reception of Conrad: from the figure of the seafaring teller of manly yarns in the 1920s; via the anti-imperialist conscience in the GDR reading of the 1970s; to the exemplification of Modernist narrative method in the 1980s and 1990s (Lorenz 2017: 121-147, esp. 141-7). Sebald, though expatriated, is a distant part of that reception process� Now to Sebald’s rendition of the same episode. It is immediately clear that Sebald’s paraphrase is in every sense of the word a paraphrase. He departs from both Conrad’s original and the German translation—if he is using one at all. (The dotted underlining in the passage below marks passages that correspond directly to Conrad’s original). Most strikingly, he places Marlow’s account in the present tense (the relevant verbs are marked in bold type below), presumably in order to stress the unbroken immediacy of the horrors that Marlow is recounting in his narration of the past. It is as if he seeks to bring to life the contextual proximity of Marlow’s deck-board story-telling. In Conrad’s text, that storytelling process is ostended by an introductory and concluding frame narrative, whereas within the body of Sebald’s text this narrative immediacy is placed within the narrative fabric itself: Korzeniowski … wie er später seinen Stellvertreter Marlow in Heart of Darkness erzählen ließ, [stößt] ein Stück weit außerhalb des besiedelten Areals auf einen Platz … an dem die von Krankheit Zerstörten und von Hunger und Aerbeit Ausghöhlten zum Marlow’s grove of death 159 Sterben sich niederlegen. Wie nach einem Massaker liegen sie da in dem gräulichen Dämmer auf dem Grunde der Schlucht. Offenbar hielt man diese Schattenwesen nicht auf, wenn sie sich davonschleichen in den Busch� Sie sind jetzt frei, frei wie die Luft, die sie umgibt, und in die sich sich nach und nach auflösen werden. Allmählich, berichtet Marlow, dringt aus dem Dunkel der Glanz einiger aus dem Jenseits auf mich gerichtete Augen. Ich beuge mich hinab und sehe ein Gesicht neben meiner Hand. Langsam heben sich die Lider. Irgendwo weit hinter dem leeren Blick rührt sich nach einer Weile ein blindes Flackern, das gleich wieder erlischt. Und während so ein kaum dem Knabenalter entwachsener Mensch seinen letzten Atem verströmt … (Sebald 2008: 151-2) Michael Hulse’s translation in turn takes immense liberties with Sebald’s text— seeking, however, to remain faithful to Conrad pre-text. It is important nonetheless to note that these liberties were always taken in consultation with Sebald himself, and often at the latter’s instigation (email from Hulse of 3 October 2018; see also Hulse 2011: 199-200). Hulse (with Sebald) makes major alterations to Sebald’s paraphrase, returning accurately to several isolated Conradian elements in the text and, as soon as he arrives at Marlow’s direct discourse, restoring the original entirely, as the underlining demonstrates: Korzeniowski … (as Marlow later describes in Heart of Darkness ) came upon a place some way off from the settlement where those who were wracked by illness, starvation and toil had withdrawn to die. As if after a massacre they lay there in the greenish gloom at the bottom of the gorge. Evidently no on cared to stop these black shadows when they crept off into the bush. * I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees, says Marlow� Then, glacing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes loked at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. And as this man, scarcely more than a boy, breathed his last … (Sebald 2002: 119-20) Hulse’s most radical action is to reinsert the original Conradian text into the fabric of Sebald’s paraphrase. Some of his alterations, however, seem to weaken Sebald’s text at points where, despite its paraphrases, it is stronger and more emphatic than Conrad’s original. Hulse reverses Sebald’s presents back to Conrad’s (and Freißler’s or other translators’) preterites. Oddly enough, Hulse deletes the sentence about being as free as air (marked by my asterisk), which is almost the only element that Sebald does retain untransformed from Conrad’s originals� This work of translation reestablishes connections between epochs in ever stronger ways even as the links between the respective texts as metonyms of 160 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad those epochs appear to become more and more distended. It would seem that fidelity or infidelity are not central issues within the cross-section of translation histories that we see in the relationships between Conrad, Sebald and Hulse. Clearly, ‘fidelity’ in the narrow sense is not necessarily an index of the close artistic cooperation that pertained to Hulse’s and Sebald’s collaboration on the translation. Fidelity and infidelity fluctuate and play an often contradictory role in conveying what Benjamin (1991, IV-1: 14; 1999: 74-5) called the ‘Intention’ or ‘meaning’ [‘Meinen’] of the translative text—that which guarantees, in Serres’ (1974: 11) formulation, ‘l’ensemble de messages optimalement invariants par toute stratégie de traduction’ [‘the entirety of messages that are optimally invariant by virtue of all strategies of translation’]. Rather, the ‘quantum’ amplification of the message appears to function in a non-linear fashion. Connections are sought and forged by following multiple possible routes of correspondence� Such a paradoxical procedure is already present in Sebald’s text in ways that are not directly associated with literal interlingual translation� The central disconnective catastrophe that subtends all of Sebald’s work, the Holocaust, is so often manifest as an unsayable, as the ultimate linguistic disconnection—as an untranslatable. At such moments of textual muteness the image sometimes intervenes to reestablish connections, though these do not function as markers of truth or authenticity (see Knoch 2001). It is significant, then, that when Sebald speaks of the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, the text is interrupted, precisely at the point where an historical event is marked with precision via a date, by the image. … aus dem Westen mächtige Quellwolken heraufkamen und langsam einen grauen Schatten über die Erde zog. Viellicht ist es diese Verdüsterung gewesen, die mich daran erinnerte, daß ich vor mehreren Monaten aus dem Eastern Daily Press einen Artikel ausgeschnitten hatte über den Tod des Majors George Wyndham Le Strange, dessen Domizil das große steinernde Herrenhaus von Henstead jenssits des Barckwassersees gewesen war. Le Strange habe, so hieß es in dem Artikel, während des letzen Krieges in dem Panzerabwehrregiment gedient, das am 14. April 1945 das Lager von Bergen-Belsen befreite … (2008: 79, 82) [… great cumulus clouds brewed up out of the west casting a grey shadow upon the earth� Perhaps it was that darkening that called to my mind an article I had clipped from the Eastern Daily Press several months before, on the death of Major George Wyndham Le Strange, whose great stone manor house in Henstead stood beyond the lake. During the last War, the report said, Major Le Strange served in the anti-tank regiment that liberated the camp at Bergen Belsen on the 14 th of April 1945 … (Sebald 2002: 59)] Marlow’s grove of death 161 In both Sebald’s German and Hulse’s English, the sentence is broken—immediately after the date—by a double-page image that simultaneously disconnects the work of historical narration, and reconnects it in other ways� The double-page spread shows a view of dying bodies strewn over the ground in a grove of pine trees at Bergen-Belsen� The image stand in and reconnects the cleft within the written text� The role of such visual icons—both interrupting and mediating—is already indicated by the text’s own intertextual referentiality. It is equally significant, that Sebald’s text suggests a connection between the accumulations of clouds in the west, and the final lines of Heart of Darkness , where civilized London is linked to the colonial ‘darkness’: ‘the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches [of the Thames estuary near London] became more sombre every minute … The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness’ (Conrad 1973: 28, 121). Conrad’s concern is to use the site of narration itself as an instrument that suggests connections between metropolis and colonial periphery, with the ship-board narration as a mediating instance. In a similar fashion, Sebald’s narration mediates between the microlevel of nature (silkworms, herrings) and the macrolevel of world history, between human History and Natural History and (‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte’ [Sebald 2003b: 69]), between past and present, and between various sites around the earth, from Africa to China to the Norfolk Broads. This connective function between remote part of the globe and the historical events that have taken place there is taken up, when words fail, by Sebald’s icons� It comes as no surprise, then, that the separating-mediating image of Bergen-Belsen recalls, in visual form, the grove of death in Heart of Darkness , described in Sebald’s paraphrase: ‘Wie nach einem Massaker liegen sie da in dem gräulichen Dämmer auf dem Grunde der Schlucht’ (Sebald 2008: 152) [‘As if after a massacre they lay there is the greenish gloom at the bottom of the gorge’ (Sebald 2002: 120)]. This passage functions, in Sebald’s original, almost as an internal instance of ekphrasis glossing the black-white-grey photo of Bergen-Belsen. Sebald’s apparently willful deviation from Conrad’s ‘greenish’ gloom (subsequently ‘corrected’ by Hulse) in favour a ‘gräulichen Dämmer’ [‘greyish gloom’] in fact establishes a connecting visual index to the Holocaust and its iconographic residues� Thus a concatenation of visual and textual allusions, whose spatial configuration in the German original is almost exactly reproduced in the translation, reveals the elaborate but indirect parallels being set up between Conrad’s Congo and the Holocaust. But the connections do not stop there. The verticals (trees) 162 Chapter 7: Translating Sebald Translating Conrad and horizontals (corpses) of the Bergen-Belsen image resonate visually with a preceding image of Jews and Serbs hung by the Croatian Ustaše, inserted five pages before the Conrad episode (Sebald 2008: 124), thus extending the scope of the Holocaust to its European predecessors. (The mass killing by the fascist Ustaše preceded and in some ways inspired the Final Solution, a link Sebald makes by foregrounding the participation of erstwhile SA-member, Wehrmacht officer and later UN-Secretary General Kurt Waldheim [Sebald 2008: 126-7; Sebald 2002: 98-99].) As if this is not enough, the same verticals and horizontals are to be found in a photo of fisherman and their catch at Lowestoft (Sebald 2008: 73; Sebald 2002: 54). The image precedes the Bergen-Belsen photo by six pages. Where the trees stand in Bergen-Belsen, the fishermen take their place; where the supine forms of the corpses lie stretched out, the mass of herring poured across the warehouse floor replicates their collective death. Sebald continues the conceptual assimilation of human catastrophes to natural cataclysms by using a series of cognate images, including pictures of trees destroyed by a freak storm that appears as a harbinger of today’s global-warming-driven weather turbulence (Sebald 2008: 284, 329; Sebald 2002: 228, 265)—or of Sebald himself under a Lebanese cedar that has long since disappeared in one of the waves of diseases not dissimilar to the plague that wiped out elms all across Europe (Sebald 2008: 326-7; Sebald 2002: 262-3). Via a repeating structural isomorphism (i.e., the replication of structural characteristics on the plane of substitutability, or the axis of metaphor), combined with spatial apposition (the axis of metonymy), Sebald suggests a visual translation that links distinct atrocities or catastrophes, right through to the impact of the human race upon the environment, across historical periods and indeed across modes of hegemony and exploitation—a ‘riesiges Netwerk des Schmerzes, das nach wie vor seine Auswirkungen hat’ [‘a huge network of pain that continues to take effect’], to reiterate Sebald’s (2011: 233) succinct summary already quoted above� Text as contact zone Sebald’s entire novel can be seen as an ‘open text’ that contains various media and languages within itself, and is connected intertextually to many other texts and images outside its boundaries, thereby forming a cluster of cultural artefacts and their natural cognates. As such, Sebald’s text forms an immense ‘contact zone’. It is an exercise in the macroscopic construction of connections that thus refutes and revolts against a tenacious tendency towards myopia within European literature. A focus upon the microscopic—albeit in the name of synecdoche, as Lukács (1955) would have it—has dominated the European novel since its Text as contact zone 163 inception. Amitav Ghosh (2016: 59) notes of the fictional places of the modern novel that [w]hat the settings of fiction have in common with sites measured by surveyors is that they too are constructed out of discontinuities� Since each setting is particular to itself, its connections to the world beyond are inevitably made to recede (as, for example, the imperial networks that make possible the worlds portrayed by Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë). Unlike epics, novels do not usually bring multiple universes into conjunction; nor are their settings transportable outside their context in the manner of, say, the Ithaca of the Odyssey or the Ayodhya of the Ramayana. In fiction, the immediate discontinuities of place are nested within others … In this way, settings become the vessel for the exploration of that ultimate instance of discontinuity: the nation state� Sebald’s novel of walking the flat expanses of the Norfolk and Suffolk while meditating upon the history of the world and the life of the cosmos eschews any such boundaries—in particular the boundaries of the nation-state, against which the author’s own voluntarily exilic, biographical rebellion is of particular import—and their attendant caesuras and censorships. Despite its intimate connections to to a specific landscape, Sebald’s Ringe des Saturn seeks less to model (synecdochically) than to participate in the interconnectedness of the cosmos itself. The text is part, like one of the nodes on Browne’s Quincunx, of a network of correspondences located at various overlapping and intertwined scales from the macro-historiographical and -geographical down to the micro-dynamic of individual living beings� In this way, Sebald celebrates, and perpetuates (that is, translates, and thereby endows with an afterlife) a ‘Vorstellung der staunenswerten Selbstvermehrung and Vervielfältigung des organischen Lebens’ [‘notion of the wondrous increase and perpetuation of life’]; his text contributes in some way to ‘die grundsätzliche Unausrottbarkeit der Natur’ [‘the [fundamental] indestructibility of nature’] (Sebald 2008: 72; 2002: 53). Sebald’s text is coeval with the ‘Lebensstrom unserer Erde’ [‘current of life that runs through the earth’] and its ‘pulsierendes’ [‘pulsat[ing]’] (Sebald 2008: 47; Sebald 2002: 34) network of exchanges and translations that perpetuate life as ‘Resilienz’ [‘resilience’] (Sebald 2003b: 132). Although Sebald’s text can also be equated with what he elsewhere calls an ‘Unglückschronik’ (Sebald 2008: 122) [‘chronicle of distaster’ (Sebald 2002: 95)], the very mode of construction of this chronicle is already a translative form of resistance that, in some mysterious way, restores the linkages severed by a multitude of catastrophes� Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner In one of his most bizarre images of the paradoxical post-apartheid South African city, Johannesburg author Ivan Vladislavić has the protagonist of his collection of urban micro-meditations in Portrait with Keys (2006) fall over a piece of geometry. Walking home through inner-city Johannesburg, the narrator trips over a scrap of packaging tape in the lying on the pavement: Suddenly, it’s as if a lasso tightens around my ankles … There is a loop of thick white paper around my ankles. One seamless piece, barely large enough for my feet to fit through. How on earth did this happen? (Vladislavić 2006: 19) The strip of packaging tape, it transpires, is a complex conceptual artefact. When I pick up the loop again, I realize for the first time that it has a twist in it. It is a Möbius strip. A one-sided figure, a three dimensional object with only one surface. I have fallen over a paradox. (ibid: 21) In the Möbius strip, it is impossible to distinguish inside and out. Inside segues into outside and vice versa� Vladislavić offers via this entangled geometrical object a neat figure of the transformations of the erstwhile segregated city. Since the early 1990s, its Central Business District (CBD)—an image of which adorns the cover and precedes the conclusion to the present volume—has been no longer closed to the African majority population as it was under pass-law-dominated Afrikaner nationalist hegemony� Similarly, its peripheries are now shared out between an uneasy mix of sprawling townships, informal shanty settlements and fortress-like estates or ‘gated communities’� The peripheral centre of Sandton has even become an alternative CBD, a satellite centre to which the banks relocated when the former CBD, with crime-ridden Hillbrow on its doorstep, became too insalubrious for their liking. Johannesburg is a city ‘turned inside out’ (Murray 2011: 87-135). The city ‘no longer operates in section, it no longer has a below and an above, an inside and an outside’ (Bremner 2002: 124). Vladislavić’s image is not just useful, however, for articulating the geographical transformations of the city. It also has politico-demographic resonances. The inside-out of the Möbius strip also describes the ambivalent position of the white minority population (of which Vladislavić himself, the scion of Irish and 166 Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner Croatian immigrants, is a member), stripped of its former political power and ideological hegemony, but still in possession of considerable economic clout� But the descriptive reach of the Möbius image extends further still. In this chapter, I will suggest that it also comes to describe the ambivalent position of the contestatory organic intellectual within the moral economy of apartheid and its ‘decolonized’ aftermath. In Portrait with Keys , this ambivalence is devolved to language itself, in particular to English, a minority language endowed with increasing socio-economic prestige. Weighing in with less than 10 % of the linguistic population, English comes fourth behind isiZulu, isiKhosa and Afrikaans, yet is the language of the rising economic and political classes. In the mouths of speakers for whom English may be a second or even a third language, utterances English in often possess a strange quality: ‘The logic turns his sentence inside out’, says Vladislavić of a car-park attenant with whom he converses (2006: 71). Even the English language is subjected to the paradoxical logic of the Möbius strip, as Vladislavić’s (2006: 19) ‘loop of thick white paper’ suggests. In this chapter I will examine the ways in which this inside-out logic is evinced in one of Vladislavić’s more recent texts, Double Negative (2011) which, contrary to its binary title, is a triptych recounting the vagaries of a young man who grows up under apartheid, leaves the country for the UK in the final violent years of crumbling Afrikaner dominance, returning to the new Rainbow Nation like many expatriate intellectuals only after the transition to democracy has been achieved. The book is centrally concerned with the self-deception of citizens under a racist and authoritarian regime both at home and in exile, both inside and outside the body politic� My reading will focus upon the similarly inside-out rendition of a German aphorism that undergoes an ambivalent transformation in the German version of Double Negative (2015) rendered by Leipzig-based African literary study scholar and freelance translator Thomas Brückner. How does a fragment of an ‘outside’ culture, an embedded quotation left partly in a foreign language, fare when (like the protagonist of the novel as he leaves and then returns to South Africa) it is repatriated to its native context? What does this process of return mean when the ‘native’ context is one that was, from the outset, marked by conflict, alienation and friction? What happens to the linguistic ‘foreign body’ in the text when its translated vehicle, the novel as a whole, is transported into the majority language of the erstwhile minority fragment? A possible answer: the outsider within the text becomes an insider within the text that itself is now an outsider. Transiting to Germany, I suggest in this chapter, Vladislavić’s text curiously transports with it the structural paradoxes of its own place of origin, hidden now in the very elision of the foreign fragment� Translation and Transition 167 Translation and Transition How do we translate translation? How do we map the process of transformation that is translation, keeping track of its moves in what is effectively another version of it, a third meta-translation? These are the questions implicitly addressed by Thomas Brückner in his translation of Vladislavić’s Double Negative � Brückner does this performatively, fixing upon the translation of a well-known catchphrase from postwar (West-)German culture that is embedded, in German, in the English original. The passage explains the moral and existential quandaries of the young Neville for whom life as a privileged, educated member of the ‘liberal’ English-speaking minority, conscious of the rampant injustices and escalating violence of the apartheid system in its final phase, becomes intolerable: I understand this better now than I did then. At the time, I was trying to grasp my own part in the machinery of power and more often than not I misjudged the mechanism� Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt , my friend Sabine had told me� Seid unbequem . Be troublesome. Be sand, not oil in the workings of the world. Sand? Must I be ground down to nothing? Should I let myself be milled? It was abject. Surely one could be a spanner in the works rather than a handful of dust? I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. (Vladislavić 2011: 18-19; italics in original) [Heute verstehe ich das besser als damals. Damals versuchte ich noch, meine Rolle in der Machtmaschinerie zu begreifen, und oft genug schätzte ich deren Mechanismus falsch ein. Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt, hatte meine Freundin Sabine einmal zu mir gesagt. Seid unbequem . Sand? Musste ich zu nichts zerrieben werden. Soll ich mich zermahlen lassen? Es war erbärmlich. Bestimmt konnte man ein Schraubenschlüssel am Getriebe sein und nicht nur ein Handvoll Staub. Ich wollte lieber Hammer als Nagel sein. (Vladislavić 2015: 26-7; italics in original)] Every reader of the German translation will immediately recognize the citation beginning with ‘Seid Sand …’, without perhaps necessarily being able to locate the words’ context or identify their author. They form the final lines of Träume [ Dreams ], a radio play by Günter Eich, originally broadcast in 1950 by NWDR (North-Western German Radio) and published in book form three years later (Eich 1953) with the addition of the famous lines: ‘Seid unbequem, seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt’ (Eich 1953: 186; 1973: II, 322). Brückner, as a scholar-translator educated and trained in the GDR, would have been familiar with them, either from their original moment of publication, or from the later 1980 publication in East Germany (Eich 1980: 47) and a GDR radio broadcast in 1981. This long but uneven broadcastingand publication-history and the diffuse reception of Eich’s lines across an occupied, then divided and finally reunified 168 Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner Germany perhaps explain the minimal slippage to be found in Brückner’s translation of Eich’s famous injunction. Brückner reproduces Vladislavić’s version of Eich (‘Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt’) and then replicates part of the image a few lines later with the turn of phrase ‘am Getriebe’� The repetition and transformation evinced between ‘ im Getriebe’ and ‘ am Getriebe’ is an index of the widespread diffusion of the phrase, but also of the increasing imprecision that went hand in hand with its popularization. Further signs of this diffusion and imprecision can be found when the same phrase, alongside other well-known fragments from Eich’s text (‘Be sand, not oil. Nein, schlaft nicht, während die Ordner der Welt beschäftigt sind! Don’t sleep while the filing clerks of the world are busy! ’ [Vladislavić 2011: 85; italics in original]) crop up later in the novel and in Brückner’s translation (Vladislavić 2015: 103])—where, significantly, they are shorn of the explanatory paraphrase� This slippage between ‘ im Getriebe’ and ‘ am Getriebe’ deserves close attention because it can be seen as a node of ambivalence and perhaps distortion (or creative misunderstanding? ) that resonates with central concerns of Vladislavić’s novel: ‘Repetition. Things had begun to double’ (Vladislavić 2011: 59). Brückner’s ‘Schraubenschlüssel am Getriebe’ (literally, a ‘spanner’ or ‘screwdriver on the transmission’ or ‘ on the works’) is an apparently over-literal translation of Vladislavić’s ‘spanner in the works’, and produces almost the opposite of the English idiom’s meaning: Brückner’s ‘ am Getriebe’ (rather than ‘ im Getriebe’) suggests, rather than an interference with the mechanism, a more compliant adjustment or regulating its functioning. Brückner’s translation tends, so it would seem, in almost the opposite direction to Vladislavić’s original idiom. Yet Brückner has little choice, for the most obvious translation for ‘a spanner in the works’ is, in fact, ‘Sand im Getriebe’. But that expression has just been used a couple of lines previously, and Brückner clearly wishes to avoid repeating it at such close quarters� Moreover, the main component in the turn of the phrase, ‘spanner’, cannot easily be relinquished, because it is locked into an opposition with the immediately subsequent ‘handful of dust’ that works as a synonym for the preceding ‘sand’: the spanner denotes the agency of active resistance to the system, however minimal it may be, while the ‘dust’ signals a purely passive, even more diminutive, form of reistance� Given the technical difficulties that constrain the translator at his point, Brückner himself appears to be caught between being a ‘Schraubenschlüssel am Getriebe’ and a ‘spanner in the works’ within the cogs of this bilingual machinery of ‘transmission’. In effect, however, Brückner’s rendering turns out to be a felicitous mistranslation� There are several reasons for this� First, if Brückner appears to mistranslate, he is merely doing so on the back of Neville’s prior mistranslation. Neville wilfully misunderstands the thrust of Translation and Transition 169 Eich’s dictum, translated for him by his friend Sabine. He over-literally interprets the act of resistance implied by the metaphor of ‘sand in the cogs’ as a destructive rather than obstructive process. For Neville, the sand does not offer resistance to the machine so much as submit, almost masochistically, to it. This is a blatant mistranslation of Eich’s notion that tendentiously reduces its metaphorical import to a real material process of pulverization. Neville misrecognizes the latent metonymy at the heart of metaphor, the shift from one semantic field to another that subtends the subsequent metaphorical process of metaphorical substitution (Genette 1972: 60). He understands metaphor as pure identity of terms, that is, via a reductive literalism� By reducing the metaphor, Neville reduces the multiple possible outcomes of the introduction of a foreign body into the machine’s construction. Literalism works here as a reductive process of the multiple imaginative possibilities of language and thus of the multiple potential that is inherent in the real itself. Neville is an anti-quantum translator. However, as we will see below, Brückner’s over-literal translation of this over-literal translation gives over-literalism an extra turn of the screw (Brückner’s ‘Schraubenschlüssel’ at work! ) which, in fact, renders it extraordinarily productive rather than reductive� This becomes clear as we turn to the second reason why Brückner’s translation transpires to be a felicitous mistranslation. Its perhaps accidental connotation of positive engagement in the system (‘Schraubenschlüssel am Getriebe’) quite effectively indexes the way white English-speakers’ complicity in apartheid (the luxury of a moral condemnation of segregation and oppression while enjoying the material privileges of whiteness) in effect bolstered the system (Steyn 2001). Brückner’s over-literal translation also describes a real, material process of ‘subjectivation’ under the regime of apartheid, in Foucault’s (1988b) sense: the process of subjugation functions so well because it productively offers subjects niches to exist in a positive sense, modes of being that conceal the fact that they are inherently modes of self-subjectification—and self-deception— where power is always already at work. This is in fact one of the main burdens of the early part of Vladislavić’s text, where Neville recalls on the first page, ‘We sat around the dinner table arguing about wishy-washy liberalism and the wages of domestic workers while Paulina [the Black South African domestic worker], who had been with my family since before I was born, clattered the dishes away through the serving hatch’ (Vladislavić 2011: 9). Another character makes this point more explicitly: ‘Is there any creature more complacent that a white South African? You’ve mastered the art of self-deception’ (ibid: 58). Whether the narrator has really escaped this self-deluding complicity (‘I understand this better now than I did then’ [ibid: 18]), whether he really appreciates the seductive traps of the system in whose transitional transformation he 170 Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner has only partly participated, returning to take up the same privileged position as before, now however with irony rather than bewilderment, is questionable� Certainly profitable white complicity in an inequitable socio-economic system did not diminish with the transfer of political power to the black South African majority. During the real period of the fictional narrator’s return to a politically transformed South Africa, genuine material transformation failed to come. Income levels in black households actually fell by about 20 per cent in the first five years after the official end of apartheid, while incomes in white households rose by 15 per cent in same period; the proportion of South Africans living under the poverty line rose in the period 1996-2009 to 41 per cent of the population, and by 2015 were up to to 55 per cent (Bond 2004: 819; Butler 2009, 90-1; Lehohla 2017; Plaatjies 2011: xxvii). The transition from one white wealth-black poverty equation to another may one of many possible meanings implied by the novel’s eponymous Double Negative . Neville is absent from South Africa during the real period of transition on the cusp of the 1980s to the 1990s. His triptych narrative structure thus reflects his own almost seamless transition from one from of privileged complicity to another� One complicity is buttressed by the apartheid police-state, the other by the global neoliberal economy. Neville’s transition is less from a white minority police state to a black majority democracy, than from one morally and politically compromised position to another� And in fact, this self-deluding, almost wilful refusal to understand one’s own position within a discriminatory and exploitative order is implicit in the narrator’s meditation upon the fragment in German. Neville indulges in what looks like a calculated misunderstanding of the Eich aphorism, baulking against the literal force of the metaphor (sand in a machine). He interprets the metaphor in the most negative possible sense, seeing it as a grinding machine which brooks no opposition, rather than interpreting it positively, understanding sand as that minute element that may hinder the smooth running of the machinery. Neville flees the system that may grind him down, using the imaginary hammer as an excuse for not performing even the modest forms of activism in which his friend Sabine claims to have been involved. (Neville does however discretely cast doubt on her credibility, and her subsequent assimilation into the neoliberal establishment may give some credence to this scepticism [Vladislavić 2011: 81-83, 164-66]). Indeed, in both the German context of the 1940s and the South African context of the 1980s, being sand in the cogs, rather than a spanner in the works, was probably a very realistic appraisal of ordinary citizens’ extremely limited by nevertheless genuine scope for resistance. Active resistance against the system may not have been possible for most citizens, but small acts of noncompliance in the everyday might have been feasible (see for instance Jalowicz-Simon 2014; Translating Translation 171 2016). Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s (1988: 247-9) meditations on the limitations of political activism from the confines of Tegel Prison in 1945 offered a theorization of this ambivalent situation. Indeed, accepting the nullity of one’s resistance may be the flip side of an acknowledgment of a fundamental complicity. Such an acknowledgement may in turn however provide a realistic framework for the conditions of possibility of resistance, thereby providing guarantee of a kind of minimal political credibility, as Mark Sanders has pointed out in Complicities (2001). Brückner’s ‘over-literal’ translation of the ‘spanner in the works’ thus works in a way that is ‘over-revelatory’, drawing attention to political and economic realities far outside the comfort zone of bourgeois liberalism and thus essential to its uncomfortable self-recognition� Translating Translation The fundamental ambivalence in the positioning of the subject within and against the workings of power, manifest in the white citizen’s status within the political transition from apartheid, is reflected in the texts’—Vladislavić’s English (2011) and Brückner’s German (2015)—more explicit work with translation: namely, those operations performed upon that text-within-the-text which is marked as a translation: Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt , my friend Sabine had told me� Seid unbequem . Be troublesome. Be sand, not oil in the workings of the world. Sand? (Vladislavić 2011: 18-19) Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt, hatte meine Freundin Sabine einmal zu mir gesagt� Seid unbequem . Sand? (Vladislavić 2015: 26-7) Vladislavic translates Eich. Brückner, for fairly obvious reasons, does not. How could he, anyway: the German quotation has returned to its home language, making any translation of itself except itself redundant, if not simply impossible, except in some Borgesian fantasy of a perfect, and perfectly redundant, one-toone correspondence (Borges 1976: 62-71). Translation eliminates translation: Brückner dispenses with Vladislavić’s elucidatory English translation following the italicized German. More problematically, however, he also partly dispenses with the italicization itself, which may or may not be a justified translation decision—one of the many that a translator is constantly obliged to make. What are the pros and cons of such a decision? On the one hand, there’s no longer any need to mark the linguistic foreignness of Eich’s German within the Brückner’s translation. What may get lost thereby, however, is the cultural-political foreignness indexed by the linguistic 172 Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner foreignness� The reference to linguistic and cultural exteriority that attaches to the person of Sabine is also lost, and perhaps thereby the memory of other politically engaged German-speakers in apartheid South Africa such as the politically active churchman Wolfram Kistner (Engel, Hinz and Schroer, eds, 1988). On the other hand, the ostentatious marking of the citation itself as an intertextual element (Helbig 1996: 98-112) is erased by Brückner’s eradication of the italicization in ways that may index a significant depoliticization of the contemporary German target culture. Eich’s gesture of retrospective postwar antifascism and his call to ongoing resistance fades back into the fabric of a text that is patently marked by bad faith—perhaps a discrete index of a non-unjustified post-‘Wende’ scepticism among a generation of East German left-wing academics who found themselves ‘abgewickelt’ in the wake of 1990s purges of GDR university staff. From their point of view, one might surmise, West-German antifascism had always been tainted by its complicity with post-war capitalism and the alliance with US-imperialism, and the dismantlement of East-German intellectual institutions after 1990 was merely the logical consequence of such ideological alliances� Why, then, however, the maintenance of the italics for the final injunction, ‘ Seid unbequem ’? Is this, perhaps, Brückner’s gesture towards a minimal, almost residual form of resistance that remains in a context where the GDR, at least in the eyes of its often passionately committed supporters, has been lost as a bastion of state-sponsored economic redistribution, and as a very pragmatic donor of aid to groups such as SWAPO in its struggle against South-African Afrikaner Nationalist militarism, in a world entirely under the dominance of neoliberal capital? Be this as it may, Brückner remains faithful to Vladislavić’s other ‘translation’, which is to reverse the order of Eich’s original. Eich’s ‘Seid unbequem’ is a preliminary injunction of general import, which is then elucidated as a specific mode of resistance. By contrast, Vladislavić’s specific injunction to resistance is summed up by the rather weaker call to be merely ‘troublesome’. This change of sequence may itself be understood as indexing a fundamental narrative shift in what is widely understood as a post-post-colonial political doldrums (Scott 1999, 2004, 2014). In the wake of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, it has become grimly evident that apart from the repeal of the legal framework of apartheid on 17 June 1991 and the establishment of a black majority government elected by non-segregated democratic procedures, a great deal of the substance of apartheid inequity has remained intact—as the figures given above may indicate. A black middle class has emerged, but for the great majority of black South Africans, poverty and unemployment have increased, service provision remains miserable, and, in a number of shocking recent episodes, Translating Translation 173 especially the killing of striking miners at Marikana in 2012, police violence has continued (Alexander et al. 2012 Boraine 2014; Marais 2011; Saul 2014). At this point it may become evident why I began this analysis not with the translation of Eich’s epithet itself, but with the political-semiotic knot indexed by Brückner’s over-literal (and therefore brutally revelatory) translation of the ‘spanner in the works’. Let us transpose political transition onto the plane of linguistic transformation. If we extrapolate economic change or its absence (the increase of both white prosperity and black poverty after 1994, that is, transition without transformation) onto the model of translation we see between the two versions of Eich (Eich in Vladislavić’s original and Eich in Brückner’s German rendition) we are confronted with an almost complete absence of transformation. Indeed, Brückner’s translation of Vladislavić’s translation of Eich appears to dispense with translation altogether. At first glance, Brückner’s translation looks like the perfect translation, where nothing is lost—perhaps because, like the double negative of Vladislavić’s title, translation cancels out translation. Brückner’s translation of Vladislavić’s translation of Eich is the perfect target-language-oriented translation, it leaves no trace of foreignness, precisely because it is not foreign in the target language� So far, so good: we appear to be in the domain of translation-as-minimal loss, a status which could possibly be transposed upon the initial years of the post-apartheid government, where some efforts were made to implement real transformation, though they had little impact upon the entrenched structures of half a century of well-organized apartheid policy� By the same token, however, the translation of Eich in Brückner’s version loses its functional foreignness (marked by the Vladislavić’s use of italics, which Brückner, for precisely this reason, removes), and its illocutive value (it linguistically performs the foreignness of which it speaks in metaphorical terms of mechanics and of an impediment to mechanics posed by the foreign body in the works). This erasure of foreignness is so complete that the translation becomes at best a non-performative statement, at worst a performative contradiction� The Eich quotation declares a type of contestation that it no longer genuinely enacts� What is lost in translation is the German fragment’s disruptive foreignness, its ‘grittiness’ within the all-too-smooth clichés of Neville’s recollections (compare Lewis 1985). Eich’s lines, in Brückner’s rendering, become grains of sand in the linguistic machine which have been so finely ground (perhaps something akin the ‘handful of dust’ that the protagonist mentions) that they no longer function as grains of sand. If anything, for the German reader, rather than the Verfremdungseffekt of Vladislavic’s italicized Germanicity, there will be the satisfaction of successful recognition of a familiar epithet, cultural self-complacency confirmed—a sort of Lacanian ‘Aha-Erlebnis’ when the subject recognizes 174 Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner itself, quite literally here, in the mirror of (literary) language (Lacan 1966: 93; 2006: 94). The middle class, well-educated Bildungsbürger , having learnt about Eich, if not read him, at high school (see for instance Eich 2009), will recognize heror himself, in the texts of the canon of bürgerliche Bildung , precisely, as a Bildungsbürger , more precisely, as a liberal, mildly but not dangerously critical individual of the species� There is nothing contestatory or subversive here, it would seem, in the reader’s recognition of an erstwhile revolutionary catchphrase now assimilated to the canon of middle-class ‘general knowledge’ or allgemeine Bildung � The liberal self, even the critical version of that self, is a product of a liberal ideology that separates the economic and the political so as to mask the exploitative bases of capitalism inherent in its slave-trade origins while reserving justice to an idealized normative political sphere. Liberalism believes that critique may adapt or adjust the system (much like a spanner on the works) without altering the fundamentally exploitative nature of capitalism (Mann and Wainwright 2017: 79-87). The liberal self is thus by definition complicit with capitalism and its global inequities and mobilizes critique, if at all, so as to elide its complicity with a system whose bases it de facto accepts as an inevitable ill� Thus, Brückner’s translation is simultaneously both entirely successful and (for precisely that reason) entirely failed. It accurately reflects, in its performative erasure of the disruptive force of translation, broader processes of ‘containment’ that are indexed, for instance, in the co-optation of Sabine by the post-apartheid neoliberal environment (Vladislavić 2011: 164-66), and the loss of old ‘Struggle’ convictions and practices (if they ever existed …) (ibid: 81-83). This is a genuine loss, if we are to refer back to Eich’s putative intention and grant that intention some credence in a gesture that respects the originary status of the source text—though this transpires, as I show towards the end of my analysis, to be a more than problematic notion in Eich’s case. The famous lines that Vladislavić quotes are listed both as a poem in the relevant volume of Eich’s complete works (1973: I, 222-3) and make up the final section of the radio play Träume in its 1953 printed version (1953: 185-6; 1973: II, 322). The broadcast radio play rehearsed a series of surreal scenarios that, even without the final lines, were disturbing enough to generate considerable protest from listeners (Schafroth 1976: 60; Schmitt-Lederhaus 1989: 27-49). In particular, Eich’s insistence that the surreal and the real, dream and nightmare, past and present, might be intimately connected with one another offended the sensibilities of a West-German audience eager to forget the details of the past decade (see for instance Frei 1996). Eich himself commented, ‘Wenn es mir gelänge, den Hörer aus seiner Sofaecke aufzuschrecken, so wäre mein Ziel erreicht. Insoweit würde ich auch Proteste begrüßen, eben als ein Zeichen der Translating Translation 175 Beunruhigung’ (Mörderische Angelegenheit 1951) [‘If I am successful in shocking my audiences out of the cosy corner of their sofa, then I will have achieved my goal. For that reason, I would welcome protest, as precisely a sign that I have unsettled people’]. Eich’s injunction to ‘denke daran, daß du schuld bist an allem Entsetzlichen, | das sich fern von dir abspielt—’ (Eich 1953: 151; 1973: II, 296) [‘remember, you are to blame for all the outrageous things | that take place far away from you’] is an injunction, underlined by the final dash, to translate in a mode of paranoid connectivity that joins self and world, micro and macro, inner and outer: ‘Alles was geschieht, geht Dich an’ (Eich 1973: I, 220) [‘Everything that happens concerns you’]. It anticipates upon Sebald’s (2011: 233) memories of experiences ‘an denen einem schlagartig aufgeht, daß alles mit allem zusammenhängt und daß man sich deshalb um alles kümmern muß’ [‘in which it may suddenly become clear to one that everything is connected to everything else and that one must take responsibility for everything’]. Such notions may strike one as paranoid, bordering on a sort of universal conspiracy theory (Butter 2017). However, the idea of a universal connectedness of things is very close to contemporary field theory or systems theory from the natural sciences (Capra and Luisi 2014; Hayles 1984). As Smolin (2000: 63-4) notes, The world cannot be understood as a collection of independent entities living in a fixed, static background of space and time. Instead, it is a network of relationships the properties of every part of which are determined by its relationshhips to the other parts … The relations that make up the world are causal relations. The world is not made of stuff, but of processes by which things happen. Elementary particles are not static objects just sitting there, but processes carrying little bits of information between events at which they interact, giving rise to new processes … Yet despite this insistence upon the relational, non-discrete or entity-based notion of the universe as an infinite field of causal interconnections, the quantum gravity theory from which this book draws its inspiration nonetheless stresses the ‘granular’ character of reality. Combining the fields and waves of relativity theory with the particles of quantum theory, it suggests that there are basic, measurable building blocks of material reality: ‘granular’ bundles of gravitational forces—minimal units of field-relationality, as it were—that generate the dynamic processuality underpinning the materiality of the cosmos (Rovelli 2016: 110). The ‘granular’ character of gravitational quanta resonate with the metaphors of ‘sand’ in Vladislavić’s and Brückner’s texts. These grains of sand are both part of the system because they are complicit in its workings, but also part of the system because they are responsible for that to which they are inevitably connected� By virtue of that responsibility, they are also capable of 176 Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner influencing and transforming if they accept their complict involvement. Their ambivalent status within the field correlates with that of translation itself, maintaining continuity within discontinuity. And for quantum gravity theory, the quantum packets of gravitational forces are in a sense the fundamental units of translation, minimal pairs of gravitational relations whose tensile connections are generative of the very dynamism of life itself� By contrast, the bourgeois mentality that sees itself reflected in the smooth, harmless German-back-to-German translation of Eich in Brückner’s version of Vladislavić would like to dismiss these connections and imprison events in largely self-contained historical compartments� The bourgeois mentality, as the etymology of the term itself indicates, is a separative one� ‘Bourgeois’ is derived from Old French via a Late Latin borrowing from the early Germanic root ‘burg’ (castle, fortress), and is predicated upon the geographical walls of the pre-modern town� Separation is at the heart of the modern bourgeis social mentality, as it is at the heart of the bourgeois’ native conceptual instrumental rationality� Bourgeois comfort and complacency depends upon ignoring (and thus conceptually severing or obviating) the real connections that embed the bourgeoisie in worldly socio-economic power networks. How to resist such embeddedness? ‘Seid unbequem, seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt’ (Eich 1973, II: 322) is the logical moral response to this implication of self in the world of power. If one is implicated, to do nothing is to willingly embrace one’s complicity. Complicity cannot be avoided, but it can be resisted or actively configured. Eich as translator What Eich sketches in his infamous catchphrase at the moment of its coining is a mode of politicized involvement in the world that rejected the complacency of the post- Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle] and its implicit claims for a single empirical reality that excluded the near past (whence the insistence, in Träume , on surreal dreams as the return of the repressed fascist past) and the near future (the Bundeswehr, the postwar successor to the German Wehrmacht, was founded in 1955 and immediately joined NATO with the attendant obligation of mutual military support in the case of armed conflict) (Neumann 1981: 78-9). Eich mobilizes an implicit poetics of translation that is also a poetics of transgression, because it invokes a German Romantic tradition that sees the world as replete with magical messages� Such hidden messages constitute an alternative code of reality that contests the Wirtschaftswunder and its powerful claims for the absolute monopoly of capitalist economics as the single governing principle of the social fabric� Translation as a general operator of decoding Eich as translator 177 works as a ‘Hermeneutik der Welt’ [‘hermeneutics of the world’] to explicate these messages, thereby making uncomfortable connections that open up the closed, blinkered world of D-Mark-generated luxury (ibid: 69-92, 70, 75, 77, 85). Eich (1973: I, 93) is explicitly interested in the process of translation, as evinced by the poem ‘In anderen Sprachen’. But this translative hermeneutics is not straightforward or unilinear. In Der Tiger Yussuf , from 1952, published in the same volume as Träume in 1953 (Eich 1953: 68; 1973: II, 584) imagines translation as a figure of poetic activity: it is a paradoxical mode of translation, where the original is missing, and in any case is couched in a language that doesn’t exist� The circus tiger Yussuf explains that jede Vorführung ein Dialog ist, ein stummer Dialog, wenn man so sagen darf, ein Dialog, von dem die Beteiligten nur selten etwas wissen, in einer Sprache geführt, die es nicht gibt. Mann kann diese Dialoge allenfalls übersetzen, was einerseits schwierig ist, da das Original fehlt, andererseits die Unvollkommenheit aller Übersezungen nachweist� [every performance is a dialogue, a mute dialogue, as it were, a dialogue of which the participants are only seldom aware, conducted in a language that doesn’t exist� One can at best translate these dialogues, although this is particularly difficult because there is no original, which simply confirms the inadequacy of all translation.] Translation, in Eich’s conception of the operation, does not offer a figure of perfectly transported knowledge, but rather, of a site of disruption. This perhaps explains why Brückner’s erasure of the disruptive nature of the ‘Seid unbequem’ dictum, as an injunction to and as a performance of disruptive translation cannot be too easily booked as a simple loss of some originary integrity. For at one level, there is nothing to lose� Paradoxically, it is not possible to appeal to the original text and its integrity in analysing Brückner’s translation because, ‘Seid bequem’ was not part of the original radio play transmission, but was added to the print version of the script (Schafroth 1976: 61). This famous quote thus only emerges in the intermedial translations or ‘afterlife’ of the radioplay. Its own translative afterlife, of which its peculiar trajectory via Vladislavić’s South Africa and then back to Brückner’s Germany are several late episodes, is in effect the afterlife of an afterlife. Thus the italics that Vladislavić imposes upon Eich’s words and Brückner subsequently erases are merely indices of various phase transitions in the ebbs and flows, the successive fluctuations in the (after)lives of the text. The contestatory value that undoubtedly adheres to Eich’s words is thus not a stable factor, but the result of a relational field. Contestation must be negotiated anew for every successive political context of its mobilization. Contestatory translation does not remain contestatory but itself demands constant retranslation, in a successive remaking of afterlives. 178 Chapter 8: Turning Translation Inside-Out: Vladislavić, Eich, Brückner Here of course I am referring to Benjamin’s (1991, IV-1: 10-11; 1999: 72) famous notion of the ‘afterlife’ [‘Fortleben’] of a literary work, where it is the translation that in many cases retrospectively endows the original with a posthumous value it may not have had for contemporaries� Benjamin reverses the customary sequential-hierarchical relationship of original and copy, partly in the light of his meditations upon the reproductibility of art works in the modern age, so as the create the possibility of multivectorial relationships of influence. Seen in purely temporal terms, Benjamin’s paradigm shift multiplies but doesn’t fundamentally disrupt the author-based notion of influence. However, when Benjamin’s ideas of translative afterlives are read spatially, in the light of his metonymic, appositional theories of collage and montage, we may begin to accede to a notion of translative relationality which is not merely multipolar, but also systemic and multiscalar. Here, Eich’s injunction to think in synecdochic, almost paranoid connective terms, already quoted above, when read in the context of his imagery of sand and system, open up a different view of translation. They oblige us, for instance, to think in terms of the ‘con-temporary’, in which distant scenes of suffering are bought close to us by the affective work of cultural texts (Ganguly 2016). To invoke Eich again: ‘denke daran, daß du schuld bist an allem Entsetzlichen, | das sich fern von dir abspielt—’ (Eich 1953: 151; 1973; II, 296) [‘remember, you are to blame for all the outrageous things | that take place far away from you’]. Synecdoche is a subset of metonymy, and by definition shifts metonymy in the direction of differential economies of scale. Translation seen as a metonymic, rather than a metaphoric operation—what Neville fundamentally misunderstands—can be seen to structure the relationships not merely between texts, but between large-scale literary systems. Economies of scale encompass various calibrations, from the regional to the national to the global, and may dovetail with each other in a multiplicity of ways: do we regard the South African novel within the broader context of Africa, of literatures in English, within the vectorial domain of translation into German, or within the context of world or global literatures? It is only within the imbrications of various systems and their scalar locations that we can tease out the real valencies of contestatory translation� At the interface between the humanities and sciences, the emergent notion of scale is fast becoming a new paradigm. Especially as we become increasingly aware of the immense scale of planetary environmental degradation and of the ‘hyperobject’ (Morton 2013) called global warming, economies of scale become relevant to the conceptualization of the contemporary. Synecdoche, the relationship of part to whole, is the literary equivalent for scalar notions such as that of the tipping point in the sciences (Lenton et al. 2008). In current scholarship on world literatures it becomes relevant in articulating the relationships Eich as translator 179 between national and global literary systems (see for instance Dixon 2016). Theories of scale are not theories of smooth translation, but rather of disjunctive conjunction� Multiscalar transpositions are uneven, disruptive, provocative, creative� Their relationships of fractal embedding are turbulent and fundamentally non-linear. They epitomize the frequently identified phenomena whereby cultural renewal emerges at the interstices between systems—the points at which sand and system interact� This is why the particular context in which Vladislavic sets the Eich citation is significant. His protagonist Neville ‘misjudges’ the system, and promptly goes on to exemplify that misjudgement in his reaction to the Eich quote by rejecting the idea of being ground to dust by the machinery of power—he’d rather be the hammer than the nail that is struck. Neville’s imagined alternative between being crushed by the system and controlling it results in his leaving South Africa for the UK� But the alternative is false: he simultaneously exaggerates a feared loss of agency and overestimates a fantasized excess of agency, translating the latter in the freedom to escape the system. Like many artists and intellectuals, he is simultaneously aware of the paltry political force of cultural work, and tends to exaggerate the political effect of aesthetic gestures—such as the analysis of discourse or the production of close readings (of which the current exposition is an example): as Liz Grosz (2005: 2) notes, ‘The critique of text never actually transforms texts or even necessarily produces better, more elaborated and developed texts; not does it commonly change the opinion of adherents to the positions or claims elaborated in those texts’ (compare Lazarus 2011: 55). Neville’s false alternatives neglect the real (if modest) agency that acknowledges the limitations of one’s action as the real condition of possibility of political effectiveness. Given the close-knit global networks of capital, we cannot escape the workings of power (compare During 2010). Converesely, however, we can wield agency consciously if we first admit our situatedness and then analyse it. Only then can we be sand in the works—compromised, complicit, insignificant, but possessed nonetheless of agency however minimal it may be. Neville’s misjudgement of the system is a misjudgement of the spatial imbrications of multiscalar translations between subject and system, text and context, work and canon, national and global, and so on. Translation, it transpires, may be one way of creating an ‘implicate order’ (Bohm and Hiley 1993: 350-89) within such scalar dimensions, so as to keep on working, within the interstices of one’s one complicit positions within the system(s), towards contestatory transformation� Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … What does it mean to translate ‘after’ in an era in which time is dramatically out of joint? The sequentiality of our epoch is seriously disturbed, admitting of no easy eschatology of redemption (Scott 1999). Rather, it functions according to what Aravamudan (2013: 9) calls a ‘catachronism’: ‘The shadow of tomorrow’s impending ecological disaster leaps over today and reunites with abandoned conceptions of human finitude from a past rich with apocalyptic nightmares that the Enlightenment had temporarily vanquished.’ The anthropocene may announce a crisis of a qualitatively new sort, one that forces those who foresee it to contemplate their own future demise. As Aravamudan (ibid: 8) notes, ‘The “Anthropocene” has been proposed as the name for the new geological epoch of the Quaternary within which we suddenly find ourselves’; within this bizarre epochalization, the present moment itself is ‘anticipated from some future standpoint that could very well be a vantage point beyond human existence�’ Well before the notion of climate change had become current (see Chakrabarty 2009), Sebald, wandering among the ruins of a disused atomic weapons testing-ground off the Suffolk coast, presciently imagined himself in precisely this manner ‘unter den Überresten unserer eigenen, in einer zukünftigen Katastrophe zugrundegegangenen Zivilization’ (Sebald 2008: 294) [‘amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe’ (Sebald 2002: 237)]. This future ‘afterness’ is one that is far more radical than the Modernist sense of ‘belatedness’ that drove intertextual work with the canonical tradition (Ames 1992) because it questions the very anchoring of the subject within a temporal—and not merely a textual—fabric. It evokes the possibility of the subject’s erasure not by virtue of the overwhelming creativity of language, but because of the overwhelming destructiveness of human action upon the natural world� What would it mean to translate ‘after’ an original in a time in which translators themselves may soon have no ‘after’—and in which translation itself may be on the brink of faltering? With just such a cultural mood perhaps in mind, the Australian poet John Kinsella notes that among contemporary poets, ‘[t]here is an emphatic belief that poetry can make a difference. The mere production of it suggests this. Despair has not closed the door to utterance, though of course, it might in the future’ (2007b: 193). Where is the threshold between stubborn speech in today’s world and silence in tomorrow’s? What of the generativity of 182 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … language in a world that appears to be given over to accelerated environmental collapse? In this chapter, I seek to answer this unanswerable question by turning to Kinsella’s 2018 volume of poetry, The Wound: Poems after Buile Suibhne and Friedrich Hölderlin � The title itself proclaims its poetic agenda: Kinsella ‘afters’ his poetic precursors� But this is not a Modernist programme of reinscription of ‘individual talent’ within tradition� By ‘reversioning’ what he calls ‘templates’, a tactic he has deployed by recycling poets as diverse as Dante, Blake, Milton (Kinsella 2017: 8-9; Kinsella and West-Pavlov 2018: 59), Kinsella does something in and against a temporal process of environmental entropy that has reached epic proportions in our times� But in order to understand what Kinsella’s ‘aftering’ or ‘reversioning’ really means in its work of ‘transposition’ (to use Pym’s [2016: xii] term, quoting Vinay and Darbelnet [1972: 55]), we need to linger on an activity already familiar from the earlier chapters on Sebald and Vladislavić: walking. Kinsella’s volume, like all of his work, has deep affinities to what de Certeau (1988: 101, qtd in Kinsella 2017: 20) once called the ‘long poem of walking’. (Vladislavić [2006: 53] also uses de Certeau’s turn of phrase in his collection of Johannesburg essays, many of which describe walks through the city: ‘Walking along Viljoen Street in Lorentzville one day …’ [ibid: 52].) Kinsella’s volume of poetry draws upon two poetic figures who are both wanderers. Walking and mobility links these apparently dissimilar poetic icons: the mad king Suibhne (aka Sweeney), protagonist of the medieval Irish epic, condemned to wander as a bird, who composes poetry as he goes; and the (supposedly) mad Swabian poet Hölderlin, who, after a itinerant life as a tutor in a number of wealthy households, and a psychic collapse followed by treatment in a Tübingen clinic, comes to settle in the famous tower on the Neckar. Both poetic figures have generated numerous creations in their honour: Suibhne inspired T. S. Eliot, Flann O’Brien and Seamus Heaney, just as Hölderlin inspired René Char, Paul Celan, Peter Weiss and Friederike Mayröcker. In Kinsella’s dual volume, their respective imaginative charges converge in a work of remarkable force. Both Suibhne and Hölderlin are mad poets, but more importantly, both are connected via poetry to place. And Kinsella’s interest in them arises from his own peripatetic relationship to place. His interest in Suibhne has been sparked by his repeated sojourns in Cork in the West of Ireland, while his preoccupation with Hölderlin has been triggered by several stays since the 1990s in the German university town of Tübingen (see Kinsella 2000: 38). (At the seam between the two parts of the book, these disparate cultural and geographical experiences converge in a poem entitled ‘The Old Professors Try to Knock Sweeney off His Perch in the Hölderlinturm’; Kinsella 2018: 63-4.) Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … 183 Of these journeys and sojourns, Kinsella comments: ‘Having spent a lot of my adult life living in various countries other than that of my birth, and being doomed (against my wishes, ultimately) to be a perpetual wanderer, memory and the associations of words with a specific place tend to be disrupted. Perhaps that is why I also persistently write over the place I come from’ (2007b: 191). Write over also means, as we will see below, walk over : Kinsella’s own wanderings—he is an inveterate hiker—have thus resulted in a dual volume of verse that meditates at length upon the destruction of place in the contemporary epoch� To ‘write over’ is to enter into a relationship with a work, that like a place, pre-exists one’s own arrival. Yet the act of writing/ walking engages with what is always already a multiple, vibrant entity with its own histories: to be already extant, already there, does not mean to be immobile, fossilized, or singular (Ingold 2000: 189-208). The encounter with what precedes one is an interaction with that multiplicity that constitutes the ecology of the place/ text and its histories, thereby continuing and perpetuating them via the act of walking over/ writing over … or perhaps, writing on(wards)/ walking on(wards). It is an act of futurity that draws upon the dynamic pasts and present of the text and the place� In this chapter, concentrating on the Hölderlin sections of Kinsella’s The Wound , I shall show how these translation (and their cognate transposition) processes are necessarily multiple, because the landscapes from which they draw their inspiration are themselves multiple. ‘Inspiration’ works here not merely in a banal Romantic sense, focussed upon the person of the poet, but more radically in a sense close to that of quantum translation theory, where the poetic subject is a relatively insignificant element in an entire configuration of cascading creativity� In the Hölderlin sections of The Wound , Kinsella transposes a work that is already multiple. In a very rudimentary manner, this is so because, as he notes (2018: 10), he draws upon Michael Hamburger’s (2004) very voluminous translations of Hölderlin’s poems and fragments, where the translations lie face to face with the originals on double page spreads—the first of several ‘doubles séances’ that we will encounter here� But the multiplicity of the translative endeavour goes back even further, because it is extremely difficult, in the case of Hölderlin, to speak of ‘originals’ in any straightforward sense. Hölderlin’s ‘originals’ (originals, perhaps? ) themselves were multiple, often undergoing quite dramatic transformations in the process of their successive revisions (Hamburger in Hölderlin 1998: xxxix). Thus the persistently fragmentary nature of Hölderlin’s poetry, that Adorno (1965: 156-209) famously celebrated under the heading of ‘parataxis’, becomes a basic principle of composition. No poem is anything except a fragment of the sum total of its possible versions. No poem is more than a brief cross-section of the long process of its own becoming. No poem is 184 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … ever complete, but rather, is susceptible of constant re-working, as the various versions of many of the poems testify. Hölderlin’s poems are not created once and for all, but have their own (after)lives in the most literal sense of the word: they undergo a constant, almost organic process of change that does not even cease with their author’s death—as exemplified by Michael Hamburger’s identification of the manuscript of ‘Friedensfeier’ in London in 1954 (Hamburger in Hölderlin 1998: xxxix; Sattler 1975/ 1977: 115). Multiply created poems call forth, by a logical process of contagious transformation, multiple translations, as Hamburger’s many successive volumes of Hölderlin translations between 1943 and 2004 testify. Nor does such unceasing translative activity cease with the completion of a monumental and apparently definitive volume of translations (2004), or even with translator’s death; rather, that inherently dynamic and unstable project continues to interpellate and provoke other poets. Kinsella’s poetic engagement with Hölderlin via Hamburger’s mediation is just such a case of ongoing creative entanglement resulting from Hölderlin’s interpellation and provocation. Thus, when Kinsella (2013, II: 80) says in an essay written in 1996 that ‘one’s oeuvre is merely a process of redrafting’, he is not speaking of Hölderlin, but of himself—and nonetheless suggesting, several decades before the encounter with the German poet in his own work, one of several reasons why their respective poetics resonate so deeply with each other� Yet if we might thus quite appropriately speak here of a ‘contact zone’ inhabited by Hölderlin, Hamburger and Kinsella, we also need to include in this configuration two other quite literal ‘zones’ with their respective actants. The first is that of the natural world and its creativity, a creativity that devolves to the work of the poet in and on language. The second is that of ‘war zones’ both military and environmental, that increasingly characterize our contemporary world: ‘we have been in a state of world war for a number of years now’, notes Kinsella, immediately adding, ‘especially in a world where nature is increasingly being destroyed or disturbed, and can be undone in extreme ways, instantly’ (2007b: 192). The poets and/ or translators comment upon and engage the very life-oriented principle of poetic creation in these antithetical zones of creation and destruction� This chapter reads three poems by Hölderlin and their respective translations by Hamburger, against the subsequent transpositions by Kinsella, to suggest that the historical configurations of successive poets and/ or translators reworking each other’s material constitutes a ‘long (chronotopic) space’ (Hitchcock 2009) or historical corridor that is always heavily conflicted. On the one hand, the poets’ and translators’ work in that corridor participates, positively, in the dynamism of the natural world (best described by quantum gravity theory) that resists, on the other hand, in a contestatory and subversive manner, the Walking 185 ubiquitous world of war that unceasingly stymies the world of nature� The unceasing and open-ended work of poetic creation and translation is fuelled by the dynamic of the natural world itself, with which language is intimately bound up, and by the necessity of continuing to resist a double war on humans and nature that threatens from every quarter� Walking Hölderlin’s (2004: 757-5) late poem ‘Der Spaziergang’ [‘The Walk’] is a central reference point for Kinsella’s ‘reversioning’ poetic practice because it allows him to place his own quotidian landscape practice—walking—in direct apposition to Hölderlin’s, or perhaps, more appropriately, to place it ‘after’ Holderlin’s ‘Walk’ (Kinsella 2018: 75-6). At first glance, Holderlin’s poetry appears to epitomize his supposed late retreat from confrontational poetic experimentation towards a an apparently more conventional lyric mode: ‘Süße Ruhe’ [‘lovely quiet’] and ‘lieblichen Bilder’ [‘graceful views’] present an idyllic Württemberg landscape, ‘das herrliche Bild / Der Landschaft’ [ ‘These glorious pictures … / Of the landscape’]. (Hölderlin 2004: 754-5, lines 4, 9, 14-15). But this appearance is deceptive. Such reconciliatory images are disturbed by discrete notes of discord, not so much in the references to the poet’s melancholy (lines 5-8), which also belong to the Romantic tenor of the poem, as in the awkwardness of the spatial expression used to described the speaker’s path through the countryside: ‘Wo ich umher mich leite’ (line 3). Thus it is not the landscape itself, with its stock elements such as streams, bridges, trees, gardens, or fields, that registers traces of what Kinsella will call a ‘counter-pastoral’ (Kinsella 2007a: 132). Rather, the disturbance of the idyll is encoded in the poetic subject’s mode of movement through that landscape, manifest in the poem’s linguistic structures� The wedge that ‘umher’ shoves between subject and verb epitomizes the ‘hiatus’ or ‘Suspension des Immergleichen’ [suspension of ‘eternal invariance’] which Adorno (1965: 183, 188n66, 162; 1991, II: 129, 340n36, 113) identifies as emblematic of Hölderlin’s paratactic method. That spatio-temporal interval imposes a new gaze upon the landscape via the disruption of its linguistic framing. In this way, the reader may become aware of other such disruptions that upset the idyllic atmosphere: for instance, a suspicious line-break splits apart ‘das herrliche Bild’ and ‘Der Landschaft’ [‘These glorious pictures … / Of the landscape’]. Such a caesura (‘Zäsur’ or ‘Schnitt’) once again epitomizes Hölderlin’s ‘reihende Technik’ [‘serial technique’] based upon ‘harte Fügungen’ [‘harsh arrangement or jointure’] (Adorno 1965: 188, 189, 188n66; Adorno 1991, II: 133, 134, 340n36). 186 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … Hamburger clearly baulks at the awkwardness of ‘umher’ in ‘Wo ich umher mich leite’ (line 3), and the way it that shoves apart self (‘ich’) and reflexive verb of movement (‘mich leite’). Thus he translates this turn of phrase as ‘Where I conduct my footsteps’, thereby eliminating the intrusive ‘paratactic’ fragmentation of the syntax and restoring the grammatical coherence of the poet’s body and/ or self. In this example, Hamburger, as so often, despite his best intentions ‘not to rationalize the texts by ironing out their oddities’ (Hamburger in Hölderlin 1998: xxxix), finds himself obliged to smooth over the syncopated syntax of Hölderlin’s originals. To his credit, however, he manages to hold open the fissure in the second example (‘These glorious pictures … / Of the landscape’). Kinsella is aware of these cracks in the Romantic edifice, both those in Hölderlin’s original and in Hamburger’s translation, because he makes them the mainstay of his transposition in the poem ‘Subtexting Hölderlin’s Der Spaziergang [The Walk]’ (2018: 75). In the light of Kinsella’s avowed opposition to pastoral and its constitutive repressions, one might want to hear ‘subtexting’ as ‘subverting-texting’. Commenting elsewhere on Hölderlin (Kinsella and West-Pavlov 2018: 331-2) Kinsella rejects Badiou’s impulse, in the wake of Heidegger, to ascribe to Hölderlin a putative ‘homeland’ or ‘Heimat’ ethos: I would argue that Hölderlin’s texts dismantle such readings not through their late ‘madness’, but because of the necessary breakdown of language in face of his immersions in a classicism of ‘homeland’. His own poetic language undoes these ‘undertones’ that the right might use for false purposes later, even now� The site of the homeland is being de-evented� Hölderlin’s ‘Ihr Wälder schön an der Seite, / Am grünen Abhang gemahlt’ [‘You wayside woods, well painted / On the green and sloping glade’] (2004: 757-5, lines 1-2) come unstuck from their canvas only a few lines later, with the peeling away of ‘das herrliche Bild’ [‘These glorious pictures’] from ‘Der Landschaft’ [‘the landscape’] (ibid: 754-5, lines 14-15). Kinsella subverts this already discretely dislocated triangle between subject, landscape and painting, so central to Modernity, by pushing it towards an extreme that is grotesque rather than picturesque. The poem’s protagonist is witness to a drunken excursion in the forest that disturbs his own more meditative walking: Spray-painted woods don’t welcome the fool and his crew—the ‘Juice Krew’ led by ‘Jimbo’, jester in his hat, dragger of the trolley laden Walking 187 with beer and paint. (Kinsella 2018: 75). The title of the poem ‘Subtexting Der Spaziergang [The Walk]’ does indeed offer a view of a ‘sub’-standard ‘texting’ of the forest via destructive sprayers—no idyllic painterly pastoral here� This debased mode of chemical-driven writing is nonetheless entirely in a tradition of the anthropocentric mode of landscape painting/ writing that ultimately manipulates nature for its own narcissistic self-reflection. Kinsella’s larrikin spray-painting lads are the grotesque culmination of a Romantic self-obsession that in its anthropocentric form, if not in its content, is never far away from ecological destruction� If we feel that Kinsella’s caustic parody may be excessive—out of proportion to the incipient deconstruction of landscape romanticism in Hölderlin—we need only turn the page to understand how much of a debt Kinsella owes to the poet on the Neckar. For this is not the end of the story. Kinsella ‘reversions’ ‘Der Spaziergang’ twice. A second transposition, prefixed ‘Searching’ (Kinsella 2018: 76), immediately follows ‘Subtexting’. This double tribute to Hölderlin is not kind, but its doubleness gestures towards the sheer generative power of Hölderlin’s work—and, as we shall see in a moment, to the generative power of nature itself. The poem begins with a symptomatic closure (‘private woods’, line 3, emblematic of the commodification of nature extending from the early modern enclosures, via the ubiquitous fences of the settler colony [see West-Pavlov 2010] through to contemporary landgrabbing [Engelert and Gärber, eds 2014]). From there, it segues, via a display of the speaker’s caution regarding the ticks endemic to South German forests, into a parodic ventriloquism of a self-deluding nature-appreciation that reposes upon a willed blindness to environmental destruction. Closure is internalized in a series of moves that transit via a brief registration of nature as a threat and then shut down that recognition� The ‘woods are closed’ (line 1) and so is the speaker’s mind: If I just place one foot carefully in front of the other and keep to myself. I will note the welltended small gardens and then farmlets and fields and it will all come together in a quaint picaresque. I will not see the paint spraycans tossed aside, and graffiti is the script of some kindly little god� Powerlines� They’re a thread to follow. (lines 16-27) 188 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … Pastoral can only be maintained by closing one’s eyes to the privatization and commodification of the landscape and to the ecological imbalance or even destruction that ensues—evinced by the ticks (the ‘ixodidae / that spread Lyme disease’, lines 7-8) whose German zone of influence is gradually moving northwards as a result of climate change and the milder winters it causes (see Khasnis and Nettleman 2005). It is not merely the content of the two ‘reversionings’ that come ‘after’ Hölderlin’s ‘Der Spaziergang’ that is significant in this context. Mapping ecological destruction and bourgeois disavowal in a manner that is commensurate with the exponentially increasing devastation in the two centuries since Hölderlin’s moment of writing is doubtless part of Kinsella’s message—but there is more at stake here. Of greater import is the ‘double séance’ [‘double session/ sitting’] (Derrida 1972a: 215-345) itself. And this ‘double séance’ is the point at which Kinsella’s form begins to countermand the destruction registered at the level of the content� The double ‘afterness’ of the creative transposition means that after the ‘after’ comes another ‘after’. If ‘after’ was ever a marker of belatedness, nostalgia, loss, tragic distance from the original, this is no longer the case: ‘after’ begins to appear here, and now, as a productive series of successive encounters generating something new at each occurrence. In a piece written at the time of these ‘reversionings’, Kinsella mentions his work on Hölderlin’s transformations of Pindar, which gives a further turn of the screw to the multiple layers of productive poetic-translative-transpositional creation: I have been working with Hölderlin’s brilliant Pindar translation (they are beyond that! ) ‘fragments’ of 1805 … Michael Hamburger’s translations of the Hölderlin fragments (1994) are in themselves reversionings of Hölderlin’s reversioning, but I am taking it exponentially further. The versions mutate into other versions, and so on. (Kinsella and West-Pavlov 2018: 324) It is important to note that this creative process is not situated merely between text and text, but also between text and landscape� Just as there are multiple textual encounters, so too there are multiple spatial encounters. Indeed, this multiplicity is the essence of the encounter between subject and place, just as it is the essence of the encounter between poet and text� Kinsella notes: In a sense, all writing is speculative, in that we can’t entirely process what constitutes the place/ s we write. Atrophy, growth, the consequences of chaos … there is no fixedness, no certainty. We can only observe change. There is no stasis, there is no ‘fixed picture’. But there is no living picture as well, no tableaux vivants outside the arranging, the presenting. The truth is in the living, not in the capturing. All place is History 189 movement. Or Aristotelian motion. Change. I write change from in situ � We are at the centres of all events. We are affected by all events. We are the event. Place as event. It is a spectacle for something or someone and all of us, or we can choose to ‘let it be’, making it no spectacle at all. (2017: 94) Place is inherently unstable, inherently mobile, constantly changing. You never step into the same landscape twice. It is not merely the generativity of text that calls for retranslation. It is the very generativity of the landscape itself that demands poetic ‘translation’, that in turns demands poetic re-translation: reversioning� Translation and retranslation are generated, from the outset, by an originary multiplicity and productivity of place itself. Walking is a mobile way of encountering the mobility of place. Walking cannot but spill over into poetry, and in turn into translation and/ or transposition� Kinsella reports a correspondence with a fellow poet who asks him, ‘Do you think there is a connection between composing poems while walking and writing work over time that is ongoing and unfinished? ’ And I replied, ‘I do … and I know that when I can’t walk I find the ongoingness of poem-making stifled and a different kind of unfinishedness comes into place—an unfinishedness that is not the generative sort that allows for the eternally open poem (tendency to create longer compiling works), but rather fragments searching for other fragments. And solitary walking creates its own companions—and making poems as you walk is a way of creating these “companions”, the poem becomes the accompaniment, and if you walk with others, the poems become dialogic and multi-voiced’. (Kinsella 2017: 91-2) Thus the process of walking is a way of performatively acknowledging a mobility of the self (perhaps in the self) that engages with, indeed emerges out of the mobility of place. The poem of walking as a response to a ‘template’ (or templates, in the case of Hölderlin) is a responsive continuation of the mobility of the original which itself is a continuation of the mobility of the original place� If poetry, in Culler’s definition of the lyrical tradition (2015: vii), addresses the natural world, it is because it has always already been addressed, pre-emptively, by the world itself: out of call and response, a history of poetic dialogue ensues� History Speaking of the Caribbean, a cultural contact zone not entirely dissimilar to Kinsella’s settler-usurped Noongar world, Édouard Glissant (1981a: 199; 1989: 105-6) has posited that 190 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … [l]’individu, la communauté, le pays sont indissociables dans l’épisode constitutif de leur histoire. Le paysage est un personnage dans cette histoire. Il faut le comprendre dans ses profondeurs� [[t]he individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its meanings need to be understood.] Glissant’s insight is crucial for understanding Kinsella’s project. It is the agency of place, its irrepressible dynamism and mobility as a configuration of vital actants, that taken together, are coeval with the ‘life’ that generates the ‘afterlives’ of poems� This is the deeper meaning of the ‘after’ in the title of Kinsella’s volume and the obsessively repetitive ‘afters’ in the title of almost every one of the poems it contains� The ‘after’ of the many titles is, in its own proliferation, a temporal phenomenon, because it is also a spatial phenomenon that partakes of the generativity of the matrix of place� What, then of history? If, to quote Kinsella again from a text already cited, ‘[a]ll place is movement. Or Aristotelian motion. Change. I write change from in situ … We are affected by all events. We are the event. Place as event’ (2017: 94), then history itself is nothing less than the ongoing network of such placebased events of dynamic vitality� In order to tease out this idea and see how Kinsella weaves it further, I turn first to his ‘reversioning’ of Hölderlin’s ‘Der Winkel von Hahrdt’ [‘The Nook at Hardt’] (Hölderlin 2004: 458-9). Hölderlin’s poem describes a site where Count Ulrich of Stuttgart is said to have hidden from his pursuers after having been banished, because of his attack on the free imperial city of Reutlingen in 1519, from the Swabian Confederation. Hölderlin notes that the ‘Grund’ is ‘gar nicht unmündig’ [the ‘ground’ is ‘quite able to speak for itself ’] (lines 4-5): ‘oft sinnt, über den Fußtritt / Ein groß Schiksaal / Bereit, am übrigen Orte’ [‘often, over the footprint, / A great destiny ponders / Made ready, on the residual site’] (lines 7-9). The notion that the ‘ground’ can speak, that the ‘footprint’ is a sort of signature or script, less of the passing human being than of the ‘residual place’ itself, underpins Hölderlin’s ‘Idee einer allegorischen Naturgeschichte’ [‘an allegorical history of nature’] (as Adorno called it; 1965: 159; 1991, II: 111). It is the tension between the past and its pastness, indexed by a line-break (‘Da nemlich ist Ulrich / Gegangen’ [‘For there Ulrich / Once walked’], lines 6-7), the traces of the past within place (‘am übrigen Orte’ [‘on the residual site’], line 9), and the future (‘bereit’ [‘Made ready’], line 9), that constitutes this syncopated ‘natural’ history in which the human plays only a subsidiary role. The impersonal ‘destiny’ reflects or ‘ponders’, its ‘greatness’ in excess of the speaker’s putative subjectivity, its reflective agency sequentially expressed in the inaugural positioning of ‘oft sinnt’ (rearranged though by Hamburger History 191 into a neat S-V-O sequence), and spatially expressed in the hierarchical ‘over the footprint’� But what ponders? —Language itself as the fabric of historical sequence and the immanent embodiment of ‘destiny’. In historiographical terms, says Adorno (1965: 190; 1991, II: 135), ‘Die Instanz, der Hölderlin sich nun fügt, ist die Sprache. Losgelessen, freigesetzt, erscheint sie nach dem Maße subjektiver Intention parataktisch zerrüttet’ [‘The authority to which Hölderlin now accommodates is language� Set free, language appears paratactically disordered when judged in terms of subjective intention’]. Of course, as Adorno implies, it is language, embedded in place itself, that paratactically displaces human intention. (At this juncture it is worth quoting again Adorno’s claim that Hölderlin embodies the manner in which ‘die Künstler selbst indessen werden durch ihre Erfahrung darüber belehrt, wie wenig ihr Eigenes ihnen gehört, in welchem Maß sie dem Zwang des Gebildes gehorchen’ (Adorno 1965: 157) [‘artists’ experience teaches them how little what is most their own belongs to them, how much they are under the compulsion of the work itself ’ (Adorno 1991, II: 110)]. Translation bodies forth this process even more radically, as evinced in the shift of emphasis in Hamburger’s long work of translation and re-translation of Hölderlin, which displays a gradual shift of focus from the poet to the poetic language itself [Bartels et al. 1994/ 1995].) In Kinsella’s ‘After Hölderlin’s “Der Winkel von Hahrdt” [The Dell at Hahrdt]’ (2018: 86), the ‘Winkel’, a split in the rock, becomes a ‘Dell’, less here an idyllic hollow than, as in German, a ‘dent’—the brutal gash or ‘Wound’ of the collection’s title: The bush is gone, but wheelbarrows are arriving to staunch the wound—woodchips of shattered trees, verdure’s fragments of ghost, market-failure’s dissed commodity. (lines 1-4) The tensions of historical loss, residual trace and futurity are transposed into an Australian context of forest destruction, the great passion of the early settlers and an enduring obsession of contemporary Antipodeans (Griffiths 2001), at which Kinsella never ceases to rage� Where the trees once were, and erosion and salinity are the result, woodchips are imported to hold the shifting earth and retain the evaporating moisture. This reparatory work is always inadequate to restore the original environmental situation, even if natural constellations are surprisingly capable of reconfiguring themselves despite the havoc caused by humans (Tsing 2015). As Georges Canguilhem (1972: 137) observed, ‘[a] ucune guérison est retour à l’innocence biologique car il y a irréversibilité de la normativité biologique’ [‘healing never means a return to biological innocence 192 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … because there exists an irreversibility of biological normativity’]; rather, ‘guérir c’est se donner de nouvelles normes de vie, parfois supérieures aux anciennes’ [‘healing means acquiring new norms of life, sometimes norms superior to the old ones’]� Such adaptivity notwithstanding, the solution is part of the problem, so there is no ultimate escape from this ‘natural history of destruction’ (Sebald 2004). It is only within this history that partial solutions might be found: These causes that stem out of night, canticles to dawns that are never quite the same—but out of an enclave of hope, where charismatic selves imagine a future of comforting growth, belief is marked out, communicated. (lines 5-9) In this remarkable, if ambivalent transformation, new ‘stems’ can be seen to be shooting, and the ‘dell’ or ‘wound’ becomes ‘an enclave of hope’� The optimism openly displayed here is attenuated by the doubtless ironical allusions to Charismatic Evangelical Christianity, with its otherworldly hope and apolitical (i.e. de facto right-wing conservative) salvationist individualism. More soberly, the vehicle for such transformations are ‘canticles to dawns that are never / quite the same’. By virtue of his deployment here of a marker of genres of ecclesiastical song more traditional than those of fundamentalist religion, Kinsella hints at the poem’s reluctance to embrace the idea of a cheap return to Edenic purity. In such ways, Kinsella also signals his complex debt to, and sinuous transposition of the ‘geschichtshafte Hymnik Hölderlins’ [‘Hölderlin’s hymnic work, which itself is processual and historical’ (Adorno 1965: 170; 1991, II, 119)]. Explaining such devices and their ambivalent maintenance of continuity amongst avant-garde subversion, Kinsella acknowledges: ‘I encode my work in traditional ways—often using traditional rhythms which I disrupt with colloquialisms and dialect, using set forms from a variety of cultural spaces … —but also encode it with un-mnemonics that cause a disintegration of sense upon rereading, especially as context shifts and changes’ (2007b: 189). The ‘un-mnemonic’ registers the impossibility of returning to the natural past� Such transformations evince what Kinsella calls ‘mimicries and their attendant inverted mnemonic transliteration’, explaining that he ‘write[s] to unremember, not to remember— it is a means of arranging the flood of information into art, not into confession or nostalgic reconnection’ (Kinsella 2007b: 186). Memory cannot but be syncopated and unruly when considering the larger historical panorama of the destruction of the Indigenous and then post-conquest environment of Australia. War 193 War It is in this context that we can now turn to the third poem from The Wound that I wish to address: ‘After “Friedensfeier” [Celebration of Peace] (Kinsella 2018: 67). This poem opens the half of The Wound that is devoted to Hölderlin, thus signalling the primary importance that Kinsella gives to its concerns about historical process and narrative within his own business of ‘aftering’ Hölderlin. Hölderlin’s ‘Friedensfeier’ (‘Celebration of Peace’) (2004: 523-33) alludes to real events such as the Peace of Lunéville and Napoleon’s Festival of Peace in Paris in 1801. Nonetheless, the poem constantly eschews reduction to these worldly political events, containing a plethora of possible levels of meaning—thereby distancing itself from what transpired to be a fragile peace in a century of ongoing wars. Hölderlin’s distended syntax casts syntactic elements sometimes only a couple of words, sometimes a whole stanza away from their rightful place. In that way, it becomes a performative, linguistic statement about the syntax of history, a ‘Suspension des Immergleichen’ [suspension of ‘eternal invariance’] (Adorno 1965: 162; 1991, II: 162) where expected resolutions do not come at the rightful time, or perhaps never at all. In this way, a notion of teleological secular-political eschatalogy is dispersed into a natural history and a blurred agency of historical resolution borne out by the paratactic structures of syntactic-poetic events (Schmidt 1990: 76-105). Because history does not resolve itself according to the false promises of repeated ‘Celebrations of Peace’, the poem cannot come to an end. Its sceptical work must be carried on by later inheritors such as Hamburger and Kinsella in their respective moments of subsequent global conflict: Hamburger (Hölderlin 1943) in the Second World War, Kinsella during the long-running Syrian Civil War (not yet ended as I write): But I am standing in for you in this celebration of peace talks—the connivings of Munich to let death stop in Syria, a bit. (Kinsella 2018: 67, stanza 2, lines 21-4) Translation never comes to an end, because war goes on� The poem must be retranslated, again and again, precisely because the poets are embroiled in history: ‘Hölderlin stehen die reale Geschichte und ihr Rhythmus vor Augen’ [‘Hölderlin is thinking of real history and its rhythm’] (Adorno 1965: 171; 191, II: 120), just as Kinsella is a witness to the futile Syrian peace talks in Munich in February 2016. Thus, Kinsella’s Hölderlin poems are conflicted, unresolved transpositions’ of Hamburger’s conflicted, unresolved translations of Hölderlin’s always conflicted, unresolved, and thus multiply-transformed poems. Kinsella’s ‘After 194 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … Hölderlin’ thus indexes a multifarious relation of temporal succession or belatedness and poetic indebtedness� The relationship of poetic-translative-transpositional ‘afterness’ is thus driven by history itself� Hölderlin imagines a world history in which language is entangled within conflict, imbuing it with an ‘Ekel vor der Kommunikation’ [‘disgust at communication’] that drives the poet to seek a higher, abstract language in poetry (Adorno 1965: 179; 191, II: 126): Schicksaalgesetz ist dis, daß Alle sich erfahren, Daß, wenn die Stille kehrt, auch eine Sprache sei. Wo aber wirkt der Geist, sind wir auch mit, und streiten, Was wohl das Beste sei. So dünkt mir jetzt das Beste, Wenn nun vollendet sein Bild und fertig ist der Meister� (Hölderlin 2004: 528, stanza 7, lines 83-7) [This is a law of fate, that each shall know all others, That when the silence returns there shall be a language too� Yet where the spirit is active, we too shall stir and debate What course might be the best� So it now seems best to me If now the master completes his image and finished. (ibid: 529, stanza 7, lines 83-7)] This search for an end to the profane language of conflict, presaged in the opaque, ‘silent’ or ‘uncommunicative’ language of poetry, is also evinced in the dislocated syntax that makes the maker of art (‘der Meister’) a belated derivative of the work of art itself (‘Wenn nun vollendet sein Bild’). Kinsella takes up this challenge of artistic ‘depersonalization’ (if we may purloin this notion from Eliot [1932: 17-18], and Kinsella confirms this intuition) and turns it towards the business of forging poetry in political times: So we’re asked to stop what we’re doing and do it another way. Who is doing the asking? Silence works the conventions of language. It’s a mask. (Kinsella 2018: 69, stanza 6, lines 71-3) But Kinsella’s silence is not there to raise ‘masked’, ‘depersonalized’ individual experience to some sort of sublimated artistic value, as in the Modernist tradition (Eliot 1932: 18-21). Rather, silence, for Kinsella, pulls the individual voice back into the orbit of the collective commons and the global good. Silence, restored to its rightful place at the heart of language, lays bare the interdependence that underpins the cosmos: War 195 But I am not the protagonist of this text. That is you. And when I say I, I mean you. It’s about the space we occupy and what is claimed. How much is apportioned to the bargaining table. Which fragment of us will fit where. Oriental. Occidental� What is a ‘country’ where well over ten percent of the population has been eliminated? (Kinsella 2018: 67-8, stanza 3, lines 27-33) Here the heuristic value of a fragmented ‘paratactic’ poetic practice instituted by Hölderlin and continued by Kinsella within an overlapping set of cultural references, geographical zones, and political struggles, becomes evident. The ‘paratactic’ practice encompasses the splintering of self, the scinding of syntax, and in this way, the opening up of the jagged edges of poetry to other times, places and populations: ‘And when I say I, I mean you. / It’s about the space we occupy and what is claimed. / … Which fragment of us will fit where.’ Because Kinsella’s poetry is always talking ‘about a concept of infinite space [i.e. connectedness of all things], of mutual respect, aid and sharing. Of the right of all animals. Of the biosphere to define its own terms outside the capitalist competition of human desire to thwart thanatos, to gain some kind of immortality’ (Kinsella 2017: 25), he cannot but think in terms of trans-individual connectedess: We would invite you over but the water is so deep, is so wide, is so measured by the weight of coin fallen through its bloody nets over millennia� That Syrian palm. Elusive shade. The testy winter sun. As the monuments fall to the bloody-minded, the clouds refuse to carry you anywhere. Flight. And now to fight ‘people smugglers’ they have their NATO warcrafters patrolling to benefit us all. In the wild places of European cities, where the balance of nature is so delicate. (Kinsella 2018: 68, stanza 4, lines 44-53) The interconnections are multiple: Kinsella’s ‘Syrian palm’ dialogues with Hölderlin’s ‘syrische Palme’ and Hamburger’s ‘Syrian palm tree’ (Hölderlin 2004: 524-5, stanza 4, line 42)—and perhaps even with Count Eberhardt’s Jerusalem palm that still today forms the symbol of the University of Tübingen, where Kinsella composed these verses. Hölderlin’s Napoleonic Wars are brought into transhistorical contact—of the sort that Hölderlin himself cherished (Adorno 1965: 194; 1991, II: 140)—with the Syrian conflict and the horrifying death toll 196 Chapter 9: Kinsella transposing Hamburger translating Hölderlin … paid by Syrian and African refugees as they seek to make the dangerous crossing on the Aegean or Mediterranean routes into a Europe guarded by the navies and coast guards of the EU and its allies. These connections militate, poetically, against the distance that rich Europe wants to maintain between itself and its poorer neighbours (‘the water / is so deep, is so wide’)—while profiting from the sales of weapons to the conflicts that drive the refuges to flee (‘is so measured by the weight / of coin fallen through its bloody nets over millennia’). For Kinsella, poetry is a way of inserting oneself into a history that does not merely belong to humans, even though they have done much to render its ‘invariance’ precarious to the point of potentially bringing about their own extinction� To write poetry, he says, ‘is to recognise the language of animals, to recognise the vulnerability of our own conditions. It is about error and uncertainty, about the quirks that appear in the predictable’ (Kinsella 2007b: 59). Poetry does not merely record the aleatory nature of natural history, a non-linear liveliness that humans have turned into a chain of incrementally accelerating instabilities. Far more, it seeks to unmask the façade of regularity that the elites employ to conceal the dimensions of the destruction wreaked on nature and all its inhabitants. It does this by reworking language in the wake of other poets’ prior reworkings: ‘To challenge syntax, to challenge common sense, is to challenge the status quo’ (ibid: 59). The status quo and its putative stability depends upon keeping one’s eyes closed to the maelstrom of history unfurling across the water; the regularity of syntax is a linguistic cognate of the spurious linearity of history that assures us that the world is reassuringly as it has always been� Opening up syntax to irregularity, then, goes hand in hand with opening up the text to its violent contexts. One way of doing this, Hölderlin, Hamburger and Kinsella demonstrate in concert, is to also prise open the text in its diachronic closure, looking backwards and choosing a predecessor (Pindar and Sophocles for Hölderlin, Hölderlin for Hamburger, Hölderlin-Hamburger for Kinsella) and then translating forwards from the present so as to create a future� This process of translative-transpositional futurity is immensely unruly, inherently unpredictable, and thus deeply subversive. As Kinsella (ibid: 59) says, ‘poetry, for me, is about resistance. It is where my pacifist revolution takes place. It can and does change through communication. It is positive, in the end.’ Yes, with only one proviso—there is, of course, no end. That is what translation is all about. War 197 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s award-winning novel Tram 83 (2014) opens in the dilapidated Gare du Nord [‘Northern Station’, Mujila 2015: 1], of the ‘Ville- Pays’ [‘City-State’, Mujila 2015: 3]. The ‘Ville-Pays’, modelled on Mujila’s native Lubumbashi in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is a truly post-modern ‘city-state’ that has seceded from the rump ‘Arrière-pays’ [‘Back-Country’, Mujila 2015: 16], perhaps in imitation of the Katanga secession of 1960, or of a more recent and briefer local coup in 2013, not to mention the long-running ‘Congo World Wars’ of the 1990s-2000s (Prunier 2009). Mujila’s demotion of the mainstay of national territory to the status of ‘backwater’ signals a bold upending of the customary hierarchies of centre and periphery, progess and backwardness, that frames the entire narrative. The Gare du Nord, a nineteenth-century monument from the time of Stanley originating in Northern-Hemisphere Modernity, epitomizes what Habermas (1990) famously called ‘ein unvollendetes Projekt’—‘an unfinished project’—as une gare dont la construction métallique est inachevée. (Mujila 2014: 10) [a station whose metal construction is unfinished. (Mujila 2015: 2)] The Gare du Nord stands as a temporal image for the ‘failed state’ syndrome that the secessionist city epitomizes: the state has virtually ceased to exist save for an industrial-military core owned by the ‘Général dissident’ [‘dissident general’]. This core consists of the local mines (‘la Polygone’) [‘the Polygon’] personally owned by the rebel commander-cum-warlord-dictator and guarded by his private army of thugs. The railway station, built by the erstwhile colonizers to connect the extractive economy of the Congo colony to world markets, and thereby, to bring the African hinterland to a position ‘an der Schwelle der Weltgeschichte’ (Hegel 1961: 163) [‘on the threshold of the World’s History’ (Hegel 1956: 99)], is a metonym of the mobility and speed supposed to characterize European Modernity. By the same token, however, it also represents the failure of the colonizers to deliver on their promises, and the putative collapse of what civilization could be installed in the colonial periphery after the advent of independence� The station is a metonym for mobility and industrial progress in a colonial periphery whose temporal backwardness (‘déraillements, retards’ [Mujila 2014: 10], ‘derailment[s], delay[s] [Mujila 2015: 2]) is measured by its distance from metropolitan centres and its incompletion� 198 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 The Gare du Nord contrasts sharply with the eponymous bar named Tram 83, where much of the action takes place. If trains connote throughout the text industrial progress and the opportunity to move outside the closed space of the African periphery, then the tram is a more humble mode of vehicular transport: bound by the metropolis, exclusively for the transport of persons rather than industrial goods, the tram represents a minor, local modernity. Indeed, given that Tram 83 is connected to transport in name only, it might be thought to stand as a parody of Modernity, and emptying out of its contents. Indeed, it would seem that it embodies a generalized negation of forward movement and progress as locomotion: Les creuseurs des mines et les étudiants … empruntaient le même itinéraire pour nulle part. (Mujila 2014: 12) [The students and diggers of mines … headed off on the same road to nowhere. (Mujila 2015: 5)] By extension, Tram 83, a site of non-movement and non-locomotion, comes to connote a negation of history, not only by the Global North as it gazes South— but by the South itself: as one of the protagonists says, ‘Je n’ai que faire de mon passé’ [‘My past holds no interest for me’] (Mujila 2014: 25; Mujila 2015: 19). Correspondingly, its habitués see little future for themselves except in the everyday business of survival in the ruins of modernity. It is precisely at this point, as I demonstrate in this chapter, that Tram 83 does, however, fulfil its promise as a metonymy of a local, minor temporality that is worthy of its name� This minor temporality, I suggest, presents an escape from a deadlock between the time of modernity and its utter negation—a negation that Africa, in the imaginary of the West, has come to emblematize (Mbembe 2001: 1-2). Epitomizing such imaginaries, Tram 83 depicts a society in ruins in the wake of the civil wars that have torn apart the political, social and economic infrastructure of the ‘Ville-Pays’ since the early 1990s. The novel appears to embody a society that has fallen into what Han (2009: 9-18) calls ‘Un-Zeit’, a time in which a sort of acceleration without logic, without ‘halt’ or hold or anchor (ibid: 12) goes hand in hand with a relentless anti-preteritist presentism: Prof d’histoire … C’est une perte d’énergie. Nous, on vit au present. (Mujila 2014: 38) [History teacher … It’s a waste of energy. We live in the present moment. (Mujila 2015: 34)] Han’s description of an un-achored temporality is largely focussed upon the alienated technological acceleration of the Global North, but is not totally irrelevant to the Global South (especially given his South-East Asian provenance). His term could equally well describe the a-technological scramble for survival Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 199 in an environment of total infrastructural collapse portrayed in Mujila’s fiction. This temporal structure, characteristic of many imploded polities of the Global South, has elsewhere, and with a different inflection, been termed ‘accelerated underdevelopment’ (Álvarez qtd in Chanan 2004: 228). The ‘acceleration’ that characterizes the postmodern societies of the Global North (Rosa 2005) is accompanied by an ‘implosive violence’ contrasting markedly with the ‘explosive’ violence of colonial and postcolonial genocides and exploitation (Han 2011). Nonetheless, those societies of the Global South nonetheless ‘implode’, in the words of Mbembe (2001: 52-8), after their own fashion, and experience other versions of ‘acceleration’ that also go hand in hand with a ‘schrumpfende, flüchtige Gegenwart’ [‘shrinking, volatile present’] (Han 2009: 13). Such acceleration is associated with the scarcity of resources and the need to constantly hunt for the means to guarantee survival� The characters of the Ville-Pays are not part of Rosa’s (2005) constantly accelerating capitalist time of competition, because almost nothing in produced in the Ville-Pays—it is largely decoupled from global capitalism. It produces raw materials (diamonds, coltan, etc.), but even that economy is an oligarchic one, linked to the General’s family allegiances, and regularly includes spectacles of orgiastic destruction when the pits collapse, thereby allowing the General to eradicate those whom he believes have been stealing from him� The only commodity that is really plentiful in the Ville-Pays is pornography (Mujila 2014: 43; 2015: 39), just as the only resource apart from minerals is the body itself: Le nouveau monde, les canetons [child prostitutes] mangent à la sueur de leurs seins. (Mujila 2014: 25) [The New World, the baby-chicks eat by the sweat of their breasts. (Mujila 2015: 20)] Either as a brute muscular force for mineral extraction or as an token in sexual commerce, the only wealth most people possess, the only bargaining chip for making a future, is their own corporeality: Règle numéro 46, baise le jour, baise la nuit, baise et baise encore car tu ne sais pas ce que demain te réserve. (2014: 82) RULE NUMBER 46: fuck by day, fuck by night, fuck and fuck some more for you know not what tomorrow brings. (Mujila 2015: 84). The immediacy of the body as the only remaining resource available to the subject entails a temporality that is similarly limited in its future reach, a temporality of immediate pleasure and gratification of desire (marked by a repetition of ‘baise … baise … baise … baise’ [‘fuck … fuck … fuck … fuck’]) and/ or need, or of simple survival. Is this the ‘a relation of pure immediacy to the world and 200 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 to themselves’ that Mbembe (2001: 4) pillories as the hegemonic anti-transcendentalist stereotype of Africa since Hegel? In this chapter, by contrast, I suggest that Tram 83 does more, however, than simply map the collapse of civilizational time into a putative third-world or Global South chasm of timelessness, ‘a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos’ (Mbembe 2001: 3). Mujila’s Ville-Pays is not simply a ‘place where the future had come and gone’ (Naipaul 2002 [1986]: 30) that returns us to Hegel’s (1961: 163; 1956: 99) ‘Geschichtsloses’ [‘Unhistorical[ness]’]. Rather, Tram 83 proposes a model of temporal existence that is radically exterior to and in excess of the bleak binary alternative of European sequential progress or its grim Global South negation or indeed reversal (Sarr 2016). As this chapter progresses, the opposition that I sketch out at the opening of the chapter is increasingly revealed as a mere heuristic device that is overhauled by the mode of temporality elaborated in what follows� The opposition between modernity and its failure, between the Gare du Nord and Bar Tram 83, will fade away in a model that, paradoxically, surges up in its futurity as applying to both North and South. This is more than merely a model of ‘alternative modernities’ (Gaonkar, ed. 2001). I claim that Tram 83 sketches out a mode of dynamic interaction that incrementally creates futures that in turn create new futures in the form of an immanent, contextual, self-generating fabric that is constantly weaving itself into existence at its forward edge. Mujila’s Ville-Pays is a ‘un laboratoire du futur’ [‘a laboratory of the future’] in the phrasing of his compatriot In Koli Jean Bofane (2014: 289; 2018: 186). Although Bofane is speaking specifically of Kinshasa, the epithet can be equally applied to Mujila’s native Lubumbashi and its fictional equivalent, the Ville-Pays. It is in this context that I scrutinize the German translation of Mujila’s Tram 83 by Katharina Meyer und Lena Müller (Mujila 2016). Mujila lives in Graz, Austria, and wrote the novel as a writer-in-residence on various scholarship programmes first in Langenbroich, Germany and then in Graz (Kieselbach 2017). The French-language ‘original’, whose socio-economic and ontological matrix remains the DRC, is crafted in the Global North—in that Germanophone space into which it makes a second immigration in the form of the German translation by Meyer and Müller. Though praiseworthy for its introduction of Mujila to a Germanophone audience, the translation is not entirely successful because it largely fails, I argue, to render Tram 83 ’s central temporal concept in an appropriate manner� This is not merely a question of linguistic failure. In a context in which some African polities have reached advanced stages of ‘social deregulation’ (Markantonatou 2013), phenomena that can be seen, albeit in an as-yet underdeveloped The near-future 201 form, in many reaches of the Global North, a text such as Tram 83 has a significant mediating role to play. As Mujila himself says, ‘Ich versuche, eine Brücke zwischen mündlicher und schriftlicher Literatur zu bauen. Für mich ist alles eine Frage der Brücke. Zwischen Graz und Kongo, zwischen mir selbst und Kongo, zwischen meiner afrikanischen und der österreichischen Erinnerung. Ich lebe über zwei Kontinente, in verschiedenen Sprachen’. (interview, Kieselbach 2017) [‘I’m trying to build bridges between written and oral literature. Between Graz and the Congo, between myself and the Congo, between my African and Austrian memories. I live across two continents and in several languages’.] Mujila’s text also builds bridges between various times, between a future that in Africa has already arrived and that in Euro-America is looming on the horizon. The German translation of Mujila’s text can be seen as a way of affording Germanophone readers a glimpse of something that may resemble, if current trends within global neoliberalism continue apace, their own potentially nottoo-far-distant future fate (Ther 2016). Mujila’s text may be read, from this point of view, not merely as an account of a dystopian Global South sliding backwards into a barbaric state of underdevelopment, but rather, as a survival guide for the Global North as it travels towards a place no longer so very far away� Under these conditions, translation is not merely a spatial ‘transport’ or ‘crossing’ (Übersetzung) or ‘carrying over’ (Übertragung’) of a meaning or cluster of meanings from one cultural domain to another. It is also a temporal operation, as Pym (2010: 2) implies when he glosses the Sanskrit/ Hindi ‘anuvad’, a ‘repeating’ or ‘saying later’ of an original. It may contain a bleak forewarning of possible prospects to come for a Northern zone still lingering in the last twilight of an epoch of state cohesion and social democratic benevolence. And as a result of that, the translation(s) of Mujila’s fiction take on the task not merely of creating ‘afterlives’ for the original, but of proposing possible ‘afterlives’, modes of ‘living on’ (Derrida 1979), for its/ their Global North readers readers as they steer into their own uncertain future� The near-future As numerous commentators point out, Tram 83 is characterized by an extraordinary energy and accelerated rhythm of narration: ‘ Tram 83 … is a lively, frenetic novel’ characterized by ‘brief chapters, erratic pace’ that make out ‘the chaotic energy and abounding liveliness of the novel at full throttle’ (Blair 2016). Even Mujila himself notes such characteristics in his description of the rhythm of 202 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 life in his native Lubumbashi: ‘Wenn Du im Kongo bist, läuft alles sehr, sehr schnell’ (interview, Kieselbach 2017) [‘When you are in the Congo, everything happens very, very fast’]� This speed is a manifestation what one might term a temporal affect, a ‘time of affect’ (Hansen 2004), or even tempo as affect. This affect is embodied in and borne out by the narration of a place, indeed, by that place itself. In what follows, it will transpire that speed as affect is not merely a ‘feeling’ transmitted by the narration, nor a identifiable temporality of the literary diegesis itself (e.g. Bal 1997: 99-110), but involves a specific practice and politics of temporality as a mode of concrete, material relationality� There is something feverish, almost breathless about the narrative pace of Mujila’s writing that indexes a specific temporality of the postcolony: On se demande dès l’aube ce qu’on va manger et puis avec le soleil on se réintègre dans le cycle de la Ville-Pays, on pêche, on creuse, on fouille, on cueille, on invente, on baisse, on transpire, on vend, on échange, on colporte, on abuse, on corrompt, on boit, on chie dans les escaliers, on s’identifie au jazz, on nargue les touristes blancs. Tout se liquide, à chacun d’inventer son système. (Mujila 2014: 76). [As soon as dawn breaks you wonder what you’re going to eat, and then, with the sun, you reintegrate the cycle of the City-State, you fish, you dig, you scavenge, you glean, you devise, you fuck, you sweat, you sell, you trade, you peddle, you abuse, you corrupt, you drink, you shit in the stairwell, you identify with the jazz, you taunt the white tourists. Everything dissolves/ becomes liquid, everyone devises their own system. (Mujila 2015: 77-8, translation modified)] This speed tends to annihilate the long-term future, as the intervals between the present and the future shrink increasingly, as the horizon of the future draws closer and closer: ‘Tout se liquide’ [‘Everything dissolves/ becomes liquid’]. As Mujila’s (2014: 182; 2015: 199) narrator observes, ‘La vie est courte et il faut savoir tirer profit d’elle, au maximum’ [‘Life is short and you need to know how to live it to the full’]. Mujila himself works to the same rule: his sentences are constituted of exceedingly short, syncopated units, and they fill his pages to the full. There are two ways of envisaging this shrinking, ‘short’ future: it has both a negative and a positive face. The negative face is well known. A deeply ingrained tradition of ‘Afropessimism’ (Bayart, Mbembe, and Toulabor 1992: 257-65; Diop 2007: 84; Mamdani 1996: 285; Zeleza 2008: 2) sees Africa as displaying all the characteristics of a society stripped of future perspectives. Ugandan Francis Imbuga (1990 [1976]: 32) claimed at the end of the Amin period, that ‘[w]e have killed our past and are busy killing our future.’ De Boeck and Plissart (2004: 194), speaking of a DRC traumatized by a decade of war, suggested that ‘prospect of a future [has been] cannibalized’ and that ‘society has, in apocalyptic terms, arrived at the end of times’. Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (2002: xix) diagnosed the loss The near-future 203 of ‘the ability to dream, to project ourselves into the future and start working towards it’. Similarly, Mbembe, glossing Fanon, describes the ‘deep injuries inflicted on those who had been the victims of white supremacy’ manifest in ‘their inability to project themselves forward in time’ (Mbembe 2013b). Piot (2010) sensed a post-1989 ‘nostalgia for the future’ and mourning for ‘futures past’ (Scott 2004: 210). The second way of imagining this shrinking future is more positive. What looks at first glance like a truncated future might simply be a ‘proximate future’ (to take a term from phenomenology used by Husserl [1991: 11-12] and Gell [2013: 104]). In the context of African notions of time, Mbiti has identified, on the basis the diachrony/ synchrony distinction between the KiSwahili concepts of sasa and zamani , a near (‘short’) future in which time is not so much projected forward as ‘created or produced’, ‘made’, in close conjunction with the fabric (and the fabrication) of social and geographical space. Mbiti notes that ‘[w]hen Africans reckon time, it is for a concrete and specific purpose, in connection with events but not just for the sake of mathematics. Since time is a composition of events, people cannot and do not reckon it in a vaccuum’ (Mbiti 1969: 19). The ‘vacuum’ is an explicit reference to the ‘homogene und leere Zeit’ [‘empty, homogeneous time’] (Benjamin 1991, I-2: 700, 702; 1999: 252, 254) of Western linear temporalities� They are homogenous because they are empty, and empty because they are linear, stripped of all contextuality save that which links one instant to those that precede and succeed it� They constitute a streamlined, purified, ‘thin’ time. By contrast, the African time described by Mbiti is ‘thick’ with multidirectional connectivities. In his words, interaction and creative encounter are at the heart of temporal dynamism: ‘Instead of numerical calendars there are what one would call phenomenon calendars, in which the events or phenomena which constitute time are reckoned or considered in their relation with each other and as they take place, i.e., as they constitute time’ (Mbiti 1969: 19). Time does not exist outside the event, and the event, in turn, does not exist outside a relationship. Time is thus a ‘composition’ in the sense imagined by Mbembe (2013a: 13), for whom one of the basic principle of African sociability is ‘compositionality’, ‘understood as being made and remade through the ethical interaction with what or who is not him [i.e. the subject of the interaction].’ Here, the event is always ‘composed’, ‘com-posed’, placed together: relational, interrelational, including interpersonal� Time emerges out of the ‘com-positionality’ of life� Such ideas need to be unpacked at length, because the terms Mbiti uses are all susceptible of misinterpretation within the Western contexts into which he is speaking: thus the event will inevitably be heard by a Western listener as referring to an isolated unit of chronological causality, standing alone within 204 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 a sequential linearity (Koselleck 1979: 19). But this is exactly what Mbiti does not mean. The event, for Mbiti, is a ‘contact zone’, not an isolated unit. Time, for Mbiti, is a dispersed, networked product that emerges out of a fabric of interlocking space-time-events that are constantly producing the new out of those interlocking interactions. Time is coeval with life itself, because time is the unfurling of life as it creates itself at the leading edge of the encounter� As Simondon (1964: 260) claims, ‘le vivant vit à la limite de lui-même, sur sa limite’—‘The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (as quoted in Deleuze 1990: 103). Once could retool Simondon’s dictum in this sense: ‘le temps se produit à la limite de lui-même, sur sa limite’ [‘Time produces itself at the limit of itself, on its limit’]. Here, each interactional event would be the forward limit, the leading edge, at which time unfurls in a generative wave. Every relational event is thus a translative, generative ‘contact zone’ in the manner explored above in the chapters on quantum theory (chapters 4 and 5). Time itself is the generative process that has no existence apart from the fabric of interrelational and interrelated events� This concept of the event, seemingly couched in terms relatively familiar to Western ears, but in fact radically foreign in their implications, allows Mbiti to conclude: ‘In western or technological society, time is a commodity which must be utilized, bought or sold; but in traditional African life, time has to be created or produced. Man is not a slave of time; instead, he “makes” as much time as he wants … [is] in the process of “producing” time’ (Mbiti 1969: 19). Time is not somehow abstracted and outside the relational event, independent of it and thus universalizable. Rather, time is in and of the relational event, local and specific, and is made by it, and is thus a material production like everything else. Time, then, is that dynamic, unfolding fabric of life itself that is constantly weaving new connections along the seams and at the unhemmed borders where interactions (space-time meetings of disparate elements) take place. This is why this ‘short’ future does not reach far. It is embedded in the appositional logic of concrete meetings, which means that its range does not reach much further ahead than the space of social interactions� This is also why, however, it is endowed with an energy and creativity far more vibrant than the long-range gaze of linear time, which orders coming events into the extrapolated logic of a regulated process� In the light of these ideas, we can re-read the words of Mujila’s (2014: 182; 2015: 199) narrator when he says, ‘La vie est courte et il faut savoir tirer profit d’elle, au maximum’ [‘Life is short and you need to know how to live it to the full’]� On the one hand, life is short in part because it is a scarce resource in a world marked by insecurity, risk and precarity: The near-future 205 Ici, l’espèrance de vie est quarante et un ans, qu’on le veuille ou non. (Mujila 2014: 76) [Life expectancy here is forty-one years, whether you like it or not! (Mujila 2015: 78)] Mujila (2014: 76-7; 2015: 78-9) does not hesitate to underscore such realities when he lists, over the space of two pages, the most frequent causes of death of the miners and underage prostitutes� On the other hand, however, life is also ‘short’ because the ‘profit’ of life, its extraordinary richness, is contained within the ‘short’ future� The ‘shortness’ of this future is what generates its dynamism and its energy� The fact that any instant can interact with innumerable others opens up life to a cascading creativity not available to the linear sequence� Tram 83 is thus a space replete with meetings whose possible consequences follow the trajectory of non-linear, ‘chaotic’ unfurlings: Le point de départ pour tous ces personnages, le soif en eux … Mais la fin ne semblait pas facile à digérer. (Mujila 2014: 82) [The starting point for all these characters was the thirst in them. But the ending didn’t seem easy to stomach. (Mujila 2015: 85)] In contrast to this unpalatable dénouement, one that resonates with Mujila’s sober acknowledgement of poverty and hunger, the more positive spin-off of a contextual, appositional time is the wonderment of astonishment. Following García Canclini (2014: 26-8), one might want to conceptualize the local connections and intensities of the future-making meeting-places of African time as embodying an ‘immanence’ of location that generates an ‘imminence’ of the unexpected future. This temporal mode celebrates ‘the ephemeral as an affirmation of life … as a disposition toward what might come, as paying attention and waiting’ (ibid: 184-5). The social face of this cascading time of creativity is social energy, pure raw affect: as Mujila (2018) himself says, ‘In Kinshasa z. B., der Hauptstadt im Kongo, gibt es überall Musik, laute Geräusche, viele Menschen. Dort herrscht eine unglaubliche Energie’ [‘In Kinshasa, for example, the capital of the DRC, there is music everywhere, loud noises, people everywhere. An unbelievable energy drives everything’]. This energy is the generator of speed and rhythm, it underpins what Mbembe 2001: 16-17) terms an ‘emerging time’: ‘what distinguishes the contemporary African experience is that this emerging time is appearing in a context—today—in which the future horizon is apparently closed, while the horizon of the past has apparently receded’. An emerging time means two things. On the one hand, it is a time that is coming into view, is being recognized as such, is gaining currency as a specific mode of temporality. On the other hand, what is emerging into view is its quality as an ‘emergent’ medium: something that evolves according to the cascading, non-linear dynamics of creative virtuality 206 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 as it spills over the borders of what is simply given. Against the ‘appearance’ of a lost past and a closed future, phenomena that Mujila documents often enough in his novel, there is a more profound and resilient reality which is that of ‘emergence’ itself. Thus Mbembe (2001: 17) can note elsewhere that ‘Research on Africa … has assimilated all non-linearity to chaos, forgetting that chaos is only one possible corollary of unstable dynamic systems’—or even better, that ‘chaos’ does not simply mean disorder and entropy, but rather, the creative neg-entropy of non-linear emergence, unpredictable, irrepressible, and coeval with life itself� Such ideas are sexualized in Mujila’s Ville-Pays where the carnal encounter is both a mode of survival and a celebration of interaction: ‘Nous sommes chaleureuses, inventives, flexibles avec nos chairs …’ (Mujila 2014: 169) [‘We are warm and welcoming, inventive, flexible with our flesh …’ (Mujila 2015: 184)]. Such a proclamation may seem an excessively ornamental invitation to sexual commerce with a prostitute, but it is also to be taken literally: the body is the only remaining resource, all that is left in the now, but it is also an infinite site of invention: ‘Tu aimes l’argent! ’—‘J’aime la vie’ (Mujila 2014: 95) [‘You love money! ’—‘I love life’ (Mujila 2015: 98-9; translation modified)]. And the body is generative of futures� These are not those of long-term investment, capital accumulation, and thus deferral of expenditure: ‘Je n’aime pas les préliminaires. Ça tue le plaisir’ (Mujila 2014: 96) [‘I don’t like foreplay. It kills the pleasure’ (Mujila 2015: 100)]. Rather, they are the ‘near’ futures of tangible interrelational proximities� The most frequent verbal marker of this notion of time is the young prostitutes’ call-sign, their standard come-on when they solicit their prospective clients at the bar: ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ [‘Do you have the time? ’]. What looks at first glance like a falsely innocent passing enquiry, an ingenuous manner of striking up an acquaintance, is in fact a complex temporal operator. ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ is first and foremost an interpellation: ‘Vous’ stands at its head, signalling its mode of ‘addressivity’ (Connor 1996: 9), its function of forging a meeting. ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ is not a question about clock time as measurement, but rather, constitutes an interrelational performative that inaugurates a ritual engagement. ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ asks, Do you have time for me? —or even better, Can we make time for us? Time, in this utterance, is not an abstract entity, nor ‘a commodity which must be utilized, bought or sold’ (Mbiti 1969: 19), nor even something that is available and can be shared out (as in ‘sparing’ someone a minute), but is something that will be ‘made’ in the engagement between two or more persons, just as the couples subsequently ‘make’ love: Toutes les nuits ont ceci de particulier … Elles viennent du Cœur, improvisent, facilitent de multiples accords de partenariats entre corps étrangers. (Mujila 2014: 41) The near-future 207 [All nights have this particularity … They come from the heart, improvise, and facilitate multiple partnerships between foreign bodies. (Mujila 2015: 37)] Furthermore, time is not something that precedes the utterance itself, something extant and in reserve that the utterance might access or operationalize. Rather, the performance brings times into being—for as long as it effects its ‘affect’. Because it is a performative, the time of ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ has be constantly reiterated—whence its occurrence on fifty-two occasions within the text. After the close of the first chapter, which elevates the Gare du Nord to the symbol of an unfinished modernity, and includes the first instantiation of the interrogative, ‘Vous avez l’heure, citoyen? ’ [‘Do you have the time, citizen? ’] (Mujila 2014: 10; 2015: 3), the action swivels to the bar Tram 83 in the second chapter. Within the location of the bar, the series of expletives ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ takes up its role as basso continuo. In the ten pages of that second chapter alone (2014: 17-27; 2015: 10-22), the expression ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ (from now on without an explicitly named addressee) occurs ten times. This pattern of insistent iterativity continues on through to the close of the action, with 41 subsequent instances in the rest of the text� This interpellative time is not universal� On the contrary, it is entirely contextual and relational, persisting as long as the interaction endures, susceptible of perpetuation only from one subsequent interaction to another. Mujila (2014: 160; 2015: 175) jokingly complains, ‘Au Tram 83, impossible de converser sans être interrompu! ’ [‘At Tram 83 it was impossible to converse without being interrupted! ’]: every interaction calls forth other interactions, ‘interruptions’, ‘interruptive signs’ in Massumi’s (2015: 54) parlance, interpellations that terminate one interaction but by the same token open it up to the next and render it generative of further connections� There is nothing exotic about this mode of temporality, nor, conversely can it simply be equated with the ambient precarity of the Global South� Rather, it is a temporality whose dynamic is coeval with the immanent material creativity of things, the living functionality of beings in the real world: At an extremely small scale, space is a fluctuating swarm of quanta of gravity which act upon each other, and together act upon things, manifesting themselves in these interactions as spin networks, grains interrelated with each other … Physical space is the fabric relating from the ceaseless swarming of this web of relations� The lines [linking the nodes of granular gravitational quanta] themselves are nowhere; they are not in a place, but rather create places in their interaction� Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity … As we abandon the idea of space as an inert container, similarly, we must abandon the idea of time as an inert flow along which reality unfurls … time no longer exists in the fundamental theory: the quanta 208 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 of gravity do not evolve in time … Time emerges, like space, from the quantum gravitational field. (Rovelli 2016: 150-2) Classical Western (Newtonian) time, by contrast, has pulled back from the material world and hardened into a stable, putatively neutral measure in the service of capital. It has peeled itself away from this immanent creativity of the material world, raising itself above the common life of things to a stratospheric linear time that can thereby claim to be standardized, global, universal (i.e. non-contextual). By virtue of its reified universalism it can measure all things, persons, processes according to a single measure, all the while looking suspiciously similar to that other universal gauge of value, money—with which it entertains an intimate and corrupting relationship (West-Pavlov 2013). It is because the interpellative, relational time of Tram 83 is so very different to the reified, abstracted, segmented time of Western capital accumulation that the former temporal mode is of such significance. The interpellative time of the South is capable, when appropriately translated, of offering something radically different, to a Global North increasingly threatened by a temporality of precarity with which the Global South is all too familiar� Translating (or failing to translate) for the future Despite this closeness of the putative African ‘near future’ to the temporal dynamics of life itself, one could nonetheless plausibly claim that Mujila is selling an exoticized precarity to rich and well-educated Euro-American audiences. Such audiences consume the recipients of literary prizes such as the Man Booker, according to whose aesthetic parameters many Booker texts, winner or not (Mujila’s novel was longlisted for the Man Booker in 2016 [Man Booker Prize 2016]) are quite consciously crafted in the first place. Poverty and precarity are, as it were, on the platter� Mujila himself makes a strong case for a socially motivated realism, which certainly underpins many aspects of his portraiture of everyday life, albeit jocular and ironic by turns, under a regime of Global South precarity� But this does not quite take account of the large place that temporality has in his fiction. I would suggest that in its translated manifestation, Mujila’s focus on temporality displays elements that are close to a form of global temporal diagnosis, and a form of temporal therapy. Mujila’s translation, from the DRC to Europe, from French to English and German, is a form of diagnosis, and of prophylaxes. A recent review (Turner 2014) of the much-read and much-pilloried 1972 report issued by the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), Translating (or failing to translate) for the future 209 confirms that most of its prognoses of resource depletion, which culminated in predictions of a ‘civilizational collapse’, have lost little of their predicative power� The input parameters underlying the various computer models run by the group almost fifty years ago have remained constant according to the ‘business as usual’ approach upon which they based their core prognoses� This suggests that the global collapse envisaged in the report because of drastic fossil fuel and food shortages sometime around the middle of the twenty-first century is likely to occur, compounded rather than alleviated by global warming, though possibly be deferred (but then all the more acutely exacerbated) by new resources and extraction methods such as shale oil and fracking. Half a decade ago, Turner (2014: 16) concluded: Regrettably, the alignment of data trends with the LTG [ The Limits to Growth ] dynamics indicates that the early stages of collapse could occur within a decade, or might even be underway. This suggests, from a rational risk-based perspective, that we have squandered the past decades, and that preparing for a collapsing global system could be even more important than trying to avoid collapse� There are a number of authors who now assume that the tipping points of global warming and resource depletion have now been passed, and that adaptation rather than mitigation are the primary tasks at hand ( Jamieson 2014; Maslen 2017). Given the increasing likelihood that it is too late to avert a global resources/ climate catastrophe, Tram 83 may, in its translated, northward-bound avatar, be carrying with it a message from the future about how to survive in the aftermath of a catastrophe that Global South regions have already endured. African policies have been through an exogamic (colonial/ neo-colonial/ Structural Adjustment Programmes [SAPs]) cataclysm that has fuelled Northern capitalistindustrial growth and thereby paved the way for the endogenic (anthropocene/ capitalocene) global catastrophe that now threatens their Northern counterparts as well. In these matters, the Global South has decades of grimly acquired expertise to offer its inexperienced Northern neighbours. Is Tram 83 selling Global South strategies for survival on the global market, as a sort of desperate last stand, via the aestheticization of poverty, or is this a genuine alternative to Global North options of ‘coping, hoping, doping, and shopping’ (Streeck 2017: 41-5)? Does it possibly propose an alternative model: one that takes living in the present and the ‘close’ future as a basis for establishing an innovative time regime? Does it offer a temporal models that eschews European notions of future investment whose final outcome results in borrowing and buying time (Streeck 2013, 2014) at the cost of generations to come? 210 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 There has been in recent years a much-derided tendency to hail visions of Africa as the planetary denizen of the future. According to such imaginations, [c]ontrary to the received Euromodernist narrative of the past two centuries—which has the global south tracking behind the curve of Universal History, always in deficit, always playing catch-up—there is good reason to think the opposite: that, given the unpredictable, underdetermined dialectic of capitalism-and-modernity in the here and now, it is the south that is often the first to feel the effects of world historical forces, the south in which radically new assemblages of capital and labor are taking shape, thus to prefigure the future of the global north. (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012: 12) Speaking of African cities such as Lagos, Accra, and Abidjan, Rem Koolhaas (qtd in Nuttall and Mbembe 2008: 4) has suggested in the unpublished manifesto ‘Lagos, How it Works’, that the megalopolises of the Global South ‘represent a crystallized, extreme, paradigmatic set of case studies at the forefront of globalizing modernity … Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos.’ Such counter-intuitive announcements of How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa (the subtitle of Comaroff and Comaroff 2012) have been much ridiculed. Certainly they run the risk of reinscribing ‘the Manichean dualism that holds Euro-America and its others in the same fixed embrace’, as Comaroff and Comaroff (2012: 7) themselves note; the notion smacks of a linearity that threatens merely to reverse the old hierarchy of developmentalism� Clearly, global trends, even in Africa, are more complicated than such simplistic reversals imply: Mbembe (2012a: n.p.) notes, for example, that the unemployed surplus populations that characterize the current stage of capitalist exploitation are generated by quite distinct phenomena in different zones of the global economy: deindustrialization in the North on the one hand, and the demands of the racially encoded ‘raw economy’ in the South on the other� But claims that the South somehow ‘prefigures’ the future of the North in a ‘counter-evolutionary’ fashion (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012: 7) bear careful attention nonetheless, for a convergence on the basis of an increasingly ubiquitous ‘devenir nègre du monde’ [‘global becoming black’] (Mbembe 2013c, 2017) does appear to be taking place, however unevenly this process may be advancing. It is on this basis that the German translation of Tram 83 may transpire to be a truly temporal translation as hinted at by Pym� The translative temporality of the respective versions of Tram 83 reposes upon a ‘prophetic vision of the [near, African] past’ (Glissant 1961: 7; Glissant 1981b: 17) that mobilizes its work on a planetary ‘near future’� The German view on the coming crisis has been best articulated in recent years by the economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck. In his most recent work, Streeck (2017: 1-46) portrays a global financial order in the grip of an ever more Translating (or failing to translate) for the future 211 all-encompassing and voracious neoliberal system of capital accumulation� This system produces two parallel modes of extraction� First, as profit margins shrink, more and more labour has to be squeezed out of workers for less and less rewards, more and more capital has to be transferred away from ordinary citizens and from the states that hitherto offered them support, and redistributed upward to a tiny, immensely wealthy elite� This system has driven incremental long-term slashes to state funding and reduction of the social welfare state apparatus, replacement of governance-via-governments by governance-by-financial bodies (central banks and suprastatal financial institutions), and the growth of oligarchic governance and corruption. The system has produced the slow reduction of wage levels globally (Harvey 2010; Lanchester 2018), and the sinking living-standards of the middle classes, a rapidly growing gap between rich and poor, with the emergence of a small but hugely rich elite even in formerly poor Global South nations, and an increasingly large underclass of precarious and un(der)employed citizens even in the rich Global North polities (Milanovic 2016). As a result, there has been a widespread retreat of electoral democracy and the rise of autocratic regimes and populist right-wing parties, and the universal creeping rise of political instability and unpredictability (Runciman 2018; Streeck 2013, 2017). Second, at the same time, ever more resources need to be extracted from the global environment, with ever more waste products fed back into the system, exacerbating the resource depletion crisis predicted by the Club of Rome from the early 1970s (Meadows et al. 1972). Such patterns have now been consolidated by half a century of ‘business as usual’ (Turner 2014), and compounded by the net global results of climate change� The accelerating results of climate change and global predation are rapidly generating scarcity of almost all planetary resources: water, arable land, living space, peace and security, and so on (Latour 2018). Global socio-economic and environmental structures offering support and sustainability become increasingly eroded, economic and environmental patterns become increasingly erratic in the absence of regulating frameworks, and thereby exacerbating the already increasing polarization between haves and have-nots. Streeck foresees ‘a period of deep indeterminacy —a period in which unexpected things can happen at any time and knowledgeable observers can legitimately disagree on what will happen, due to long-valid causal relations having become obsolete’ (2017: 12). Despite the unpredictability of events within this coming period, however, Streeck can confidently map its broad sociological contours—because they are already with us. He claims that ‘[c]ontemporary capitalism is vanishing on its own, collapsing from internal contradictions … What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, 212 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 now under way, is … a lasting interregnum … a prolonged period of social entropy, or disorder (and for precisely this reason a period of uncertainty and indeterminacy)’ (2017: 13). What does this mean in detail? Streeck defines an interregnum as ‘a breakdown of social interaction at the macro level, depriving individuals at the micro level of institutional structuring and collective support, and shifting the burden of ordering social life, of providing it with a modicum of security and stability to individuals themselves and such social arrangements as they can create on their own.’ Streeck summarizes: ‘A society in interregnum, in other words, would be a de-institutionalized or under-institutionalized society, one in which expectations can be stabilized only for a very short time by local improvisation, and which for this very reason is essentially ungovernable’ (2017: 14). All in all, Streeck foresees a society devoid of reasonably coherent and minimally stable institutions capable of normalizing the lives of its members and protecting them from accidents and monstrosities of all sorts. Life in a society of this kind demands constant improvisation, forcing individuals to substitute strategy for structure, and offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long dark interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age (2017: 36-7) —or, Streeck might have added, were he better versed in non-European economic sociology (see Tooze 2017), like the period of imposed SAPs in the Third World of the 1980s and 1990s. Streeck’s bleak but carefully detailed portrait of the gradual exhaustion of capitalist society and the attendant breakdown of institutionalized ordering structures bears comparison with Mbembe’s description of the state of African polities in the wake of imposed SAPs from the 1980s onwards. Mbembe’s portrait of the results of austerity in the South looks very much like a long-existing foretaste of the results of austerity that Streeck diagnoses in the North. Taking a rigorously historicizing stance, Mbembe sketches the legacy of an African traditional social order based upon patronage and favour that subsisted as a substrata within the colonial state and its extractive economy based on primitive accumulation. After independence, in the absence of a truly developed industrial base, the state became the main channel for distributing (rather than producing) the wealth generated by the extractive industries, according to a logic of ‘allocation’ (Mbembe 2001: 39-48). When SAPs forced highly-indebted African states to slash state funding, a whole apparatus of wealth distribution was abolished. The shedding of state assets illegally flushed huge wealth into the pockets of the comprador elite while the eradication of civil service jobs Translating (or failing to translate) for the future 213 plunged a wide swathe of the post-independence educated middle classes into unemployment and poverty (Simone 2010: 20). The process by which global capital accumulation drove a widening of the gap between rich and poor in the 1980s in the Third World, compounded by post 1990s transformations of the global financial system (Mbembe 2001: 52-3) strongly resembles recent global trends spearheaded by the rapid transformation of the Eastern Block in the 1990s (Ther 2016) and the Southification of Greece in the 2010s (Flassbeck and Lapavistas 2015; Varoufakis 2017). The imposition of SAPs in the 1980s exacerbated tendencies already evident in the wake of the falling prices of Third World raw materials on world markets in the 1970s (Prashad 2012). What ensued, however, was the hollowing out of political legitimacy once guaranteed by the state’s role as a patronage-defined ‘allocator’ of wealth (Mbembe 2001: 56), the emergence of new political forms of populism and collective violence, the rise of new predatory economic structures, and the prevalence of war as a means of settling conflicts (ibid: 55). Whole swathes of the populace found themselves surviving within an increasingly large ‘informal’ economic sector (ibid: 56-7). A many-side lack of security has taken root: ‘forced inactivity, sudden loss of social standing for dismissed workers, workers taken back on low wages as temporary contract workers or graduates without jobs, exacerbated competition on an informal labour market saturated with a thousand petty activities in quest of customers who are just as broke and often poor payers, the vagaries of casual and temporary employment, dropping out of school, daily struggle to earn sufficient money to get through from one day to the next, pay the rent, buy medicines, pay school fees, instrumentalization and hardening of social relations in the grip of scarcity …’. (A. Marie qtd in Mbembe 2001: 55-6) Populations increasingly fell into rampant precarity, in which ‘the system of intra-community transfers’ no longer functioned, and ‘solutions’ such as witchcraft, Pentecostal religion and militant Islamic fundamentalism became increasingly predominant (ibid: 56). All these phenomena, long established in many African polities, are now making their appearance in Euro-America, albeit in as-yet less extreme forms; but the direction they point in is towards a net reality that has already been experienced for decades now in Africa, alleviated only partly by a patchy post-2000 upturn� It is worth repeating the caveat stated above: the notion that Africa may provide a glimpse of a Euro-America to come is too simplistically linear in the way it reverses the ‘civilizational’ and then the ‘developmental’ models that have always placed Africa ‘behind’ Europe. Since 2000, Africa has experienced a moderate turn away from the rampant disorder and externally-imposed misery 214 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 provoked by the draconian imposition of SAPs. The period around and after the turn of the century saw a reassessment of the role of the state, a return to retooled development agendas, and a gradual re-democratization of many African polities, at least in procedural terms (Mkandawire 2005: 44). Yet the traces of SAPs across many countries in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South remain. In the DRC, which has returned to a fragile semblance of peace despite ongoing tensions, the scars of extraction-driven wars of the 1990s and 2000s, which were structurally linked at a global level to the expansion of digitally-driven finance capital, are still present. At the time of writing (2019), conflicts and conflict-driven displacement and epidemics are on the rise in the DRC and elsewhere. This probably means, all in all, that there has been a momentary palliation, but not a fundamental transformation, of the social ravages seen in the 1980s and 1990s. The increasing effects of global climate change will most probably exacerbate these effects over the coming decades. The basic structures, both within Africa at the level of transnational effects, and at the level of global causation, remain the same� They manifest themselves, however, at various speeds in various places, thus displaying a post-modernist and economicallyrather than politically-driven version of Bloch’s (1962) ‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’ that resonates with Rincón’s (1995) retooling of the concept for the Third World as the ‘nonsynchronicity of the synchronous’� This means that an all-too simplistic notion of the sinister ‘futurity’ of Africa should be treated with some caution. Nonetheless, Africa is part of the same single but uneven global reality, so that its role as a partial harbinger of the direction trends could take us bears ongoing and careful attention. It is here that translation, as a ‘contact zone’, may possibly play a role in proposing alternative models of temporal existence in a global order of accumulating crisis� What says the clock? At this point, we can finally turn to the German translation of Tram 83 . I will focus merely on the translation of the insistently reiterated and thus structurally crucial interrogation, ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ As noted above, the expression is reiterated on fifty-two occasions in the course of the text. It occurs ten times in the space of chapter 2 alone (Mujila 2015: 17-27), and again and again through to the concluding paragraph of the novel (ibid: 200). This means that it has a central structural role within the explicitly indexed mapping-out of a novel Global South concept of temporal generativity� The German translators Katharina Meyer und Lena Müller have done Germanophone readers a great service in making Mujila accessible. However, in their efforts to bring the radically foreign What says the clock? 215 world of the warlord-dominated Ville-Pays into the orbit of wealthy Europeans, their translation also appears to ‘domesticate’ too generously the productive strangeness of Mujila’s conception of a ‘near’ future� The German translators render ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’ by the phrasing ‘Was sagt die Uhr? ’ (e.g. Mujila 2016: 8, 207, for the inaugural and closing instances). The translation is problematic in a number of ways. It strips the interrogation of its performative ‘addressivity’, diverting its thrust from an interlocutor who is already being engaged in the very act of interpellation in a creative interaction (‘Vous avez …’), towards the mechanical repository of ‘empty, homogenous time’ (‘the watch’). In so doing, the translators place it in the semantic vicinity of one of the protagonist’s repeated sneering rebuff to such solicitations: ‘L’horloge de ton père’ (Mujila 2014: 17, 20) [‘Go check your papa’s watch! ’ (Mujila 2015: 11, 14)]—which Meyer and Müller render inexplicably as as ‘Höchste Zeit …’ [roughly, ‘High time! ’, or ‘About time! ’] (Mujila 2016: 15, 18), thereby almost completely inverting the meaning of the snub� In Meyer and Müller’s rendition, the semantic marker of ‘time’ (‘Vous avez l’heure? ’/ ‘Do you have the time? ’) loses its imbrication in a positive, relational interpellation; it survives only in misplaced form in the negative rebuke (‘Höchste Zeit! ’/ ‘High time! About time! ’), in the process losing its jubilatory inflection. Conversely, the mechanical clock-time wielded by Requiem’s pithy snub (‘L’horloge de ton père’/ ‘your papa’s watch! ’) is transferred by Meyer and Müller from its role of negative deflection of connective desire towards a misguidedly, and simply incorrect, putatively positive expletive (‘About time! ’). Thus, Meyer and Müller exchange ‘time’ and ‘clock’ chiastically, in such a way as to doubly mute the temporal resonances of Mujila’s text� Their chiastic mis-translation undoes the temporal fabric that Mujila portrays his protagonists persistently weaving in their everyday interactions. It is quite possible that the translators’ intention is merely to render familiar a temporal conception they fear may be too radically foreign for their readers to comprehend. In so doing, however, Meyer and Müller risk a dangerous performative proximity to the imposed clock-time of colonial exploitation, indeed, of the slave trade that founded Euro-American industrial wealth (Atkins 1988; Johnson 2000; Reichardt 2000; Smith 2000). Even more, they reverse the numerical proportion of temporal positivity (52 instances of ‘Vous avez l’heure? ’/ ‘Do you have the time? ’) to mechanical negativity (2 instances of ‘L’horloge …’/ ‘your papa’s watch! ’), putting the numerical weight overwhelmingly onto the pole of mechanicity� Meyer and Müller thus translate Mujila’s central catchphrase, the fulcrum of a creative, non-linear time endowed with existential and ontological resilience, in such a way as to strip it of the pedagogical and therapeutic value it may transport towards the target culture of the Germanophone North. This is 216 Chapter 10: Jumping on Tram 83 an example of temporal translation gone sadly awry: where Mujila translates to the North (in the time and space of the writing of the French original) the hard-won existential lessons learnt in the ‘imploding’ societies of the South as they suffer the ‘explosive’ violence imposed, indirectly, by the North, the German translation vitiates that self-same project of temporal translation in its interlingual manifestation� Deborah Bird Rose (2012) has coined the term of ‘aeonicide’ to describe the destruction of the temporal fabric of Australian Indigenous belief (a seamless blend of ecological custodianship of the land and underpinning myths of the Dreaming) that went hand in hand with genocide and environmental destruction. This ‘aeonicide’ was tantamount, for Indigenous peoples, not merely to a loss of tradition, but also of futures, something like ‘the ending of the world’ for Colin Johnson/ Mudrooroo’s (1983) fictional elder Doctor Wooreddy. ‘Aeonicide’ is never complete, however; Wooreddy ‘endures’ the end of the world, and Indigenous culture has proved remarkably resilient and adaptable in the face of a two-hundred-year-long ‘war just for our very survival’ (Wright 2002: 18). This German translation of Tram 83 , despite the best intentions of its translators, might be deemed to stray perilously close to a form of ‘aeonicide’ that concerns our own immediate futures at a planetary scale. As the Global North (aided by some proxy BRICS-players) continues to run the global economy on an utterly unsustainable basis and the planetary environment slides towards an increasingly unstable aggregate state, models for survival become more and more pressingly relevant� Just such a possible model is proposed by Mujila’s Tram 83 . However, the German rendition of Tram 83 executes an almost-derailment of Mujila’s precarious collective vehicle that very nearly deprives the German ‘contact zone’ and its audiences of an idiosyncratic itinerary and a non-chronomatic timetable (‘nos trains ont perdu la notion de temps’ [‘our trains have lost all sense of time’] [Mujila 2014: 10; Mujila 2015: 1]) for negotiating the planetary aftermath of such a stalling of progressive time� But does Mujila’s temporality perhaps survive the ‘aeonicide’ that threatens it? A salutary ambiguity appears to save Meyer and Müller’s undertaking from total derailment. The German translation’s ‘Höchste Zeit! ’ (‘High time! About time! ’) (Mujila 2016: 15, 18) as a rendering of ‘L’horloge de ton père’ (Mujila 2014: 17, 20) [‘Go check your papa’s watch! ’ (Mujila 2015: 11, 14)] may be read as heavily larded with irony. Time as crisis or climax makes a salutary reemergence at the very site where Mujila locates a negatively-coded clock-time (‘L’horloge’). ‘High time’ welcomes the moment as long overdue but nonetheless arrived—but the expletive is endowed with a substrate of caustic sarcasm that undermines its own putatively positive explicit message� The German translation thus car- What says the clock? 217 ries out, at this apparent juncture of almost failed translation, a work of double-voiced irony that rejoins the inaugural image of the Gare du Nord, une gare dont la construction métallique est inachevée (Mujila 2014: 10) [a station whose metal construction is unfinished (Mujila 2015: 2)] as exemplifying the failures of Modernity to fulfil its own expectations. It might be possible, following the ever-so-discrete irony that the German translation inserts in its ‘Höchste Zeit! ’ (a definition of Modernity par excellence), to subvert the terms of the heuristic device with which I opened this chapter: that of a Modernity whose failed postcolonial manifestation lays bare the postcolony as the antipodes of Modernity. Perhaps the Gare du Nord figures the postcolony not merely as a space of failure, but a space that reveals that Northern Modernity itself is unfinished, that it can never be anything but unfinished—especially because the broken promises of Modernity were most obviously laid bare as such in the South, where the North never delivered the benefits of civilization it claimed would be the reward of subjection (Césaire 1973: 19; 2000: 42; Young 2001: 6). For Modernity, from this point of view, read ‘Modernity’ with oversize scare-quotes, or perhaps even Modernity sous rature � The Gare du Nord is for the Northern Modernity of my heuristic opposition what ‘Höchste Zeit’ is for the clock-time that Meyer and Müller gently lampoon via a not-quitemanqué translation� Following the lead of irony, however, one could plausibly push this cockeyed reading a step further. One could construe the Gare du Nord not merely as a structure marked by deficit—whether this is understood as residing on the side of the colonized or on the side of the colonizers—but rather, in the spirit of irony’s double meanings, as one that is marked by a sardonic positivity propelled by a grimly humorous energy� The ‘incomplete’ nature of the Gare du Nord would mark it as a place of fluid futurity, a state of incompletion that remains open to possibility and potential, a place of passages and meetings and promise. For, ‘tous les projets de … libération avaient germé à la gare, entre deux locomotives’ [‘the seeds of all … movements … of liberation, sprouted at the station, between two locomotives’]� This may be, as Mujila sardonically admits, ‘la légende, qui nous trompe souvent’ [‘the fickle but ever-recurring legend’] (Mujila 2014: 9; Mujila 2015: 2), but this deprives it of little of its promissory power. The Gare du Nord in the South shows the North a mode of temporal openness and virtuality, not without a generous dose of gallows humour, that it would do well to give its full attention� What says the clock? 219 PART 3: Translating Translation in Teaching Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott In the chapters above that make up the first part of this book, I lay down the lineaments of a theory of quantum translation according to which a ‘quantized’ German would function as a ‘contact zone’ at the interface with other languages and cultures. In the second part of this book I then ask what this notion of quantum translation might look like once translated into a translative practice in which German is the source language (Sebald, Hölderlin) or the target language (Mujila)—or in one case, both at once (Eich/ Vladislavić). The first part of this book is devoted to a theory of quantum translation that is in fact a practice: a practice of the translation of translation� The second part of the book seeks to translate that theory once again into the work of translation as it encounters and transforms literary texts� The chiastic intertwining that underlies the architecture of the first two parts of this this book (a theory of translation—a translation of theory) in fact already performs the underlying thesis of the book, namely that, to pillage Derrida’s infamous quip, il n’y a pas d’hors-traduction . There is no place outside of translation (understood, that is, as the most fundamental conceptual operator and the most fundamental principle of the living transformation of life). Translation is everywhere, and nothing happens without it� In order to give flesh to that notion, I now turn, in part three of the book, to a further example of the practice of translation, one that takes place in classrooms. Long banished from teaching practice as a putatively outmoded instrument of language teaching, translation may in fact have been present there all the time, often in a muted form—I topic I explore in more detail chapter 12 below� Today, where cultural exchange has become such a prominent subject in literature classrooms, classrooms in which the students themselves may be exemplars of cultural exchange, translation may be experiencing a secret comeback. The third part of the book thus has as its scene the classroom that most of us readers inhabit regularly in our everyday professional life� In the classroom, translation may transpire to be one salient manifestation of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1992: 299) calls ‘the transactions in the classroom’ as the core of teaching, which in turn she calls ‘that most practical aspect of our trade’. Speaking into the context of English Literature within Indian university institutions, she addresses explicitly the always already present question of translation that is elided by discplinary closure, and proposes that the 222 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott activist teacher of English can negotiate this only if she works to undo the divide between English and vernacular literatures laid down in our institutions. The teacher can use her own native language skills to draw on the multi-lingual skills of the students in class … I am not conflating British and colonial/ Commonwealth literatures. Nor am I suggesting a collapsing of boundaries. I am proposing that the complexity of their relationship, collaborative/ parasitical/ contrary/ resistant, be allowed to surface in literary pedagogy. They are different but complicit. (ibid: 284-5) Spivak’s comments can be generalized, albeit without forgetting the constraints and imperatives of local circumstances and specificities, to Global South (and Global North) classrooms where translation has never ceased to be an influential factor and a interstitial pedagogical practice—even though it may frequently be repressed within the pedagogical practices and politics of a national(ist) curriculum� In this chapter I address translative processes by scrutinizing a specific poetic genre in the classroom. I argue that the process of creativity that can be seen exemplified in the traditional European form of the sonnet, with its combination of invariance and variance, constraint and creativity—in other words, translation in the larger sense as used in this book—is also a manifestation of cosmic, material generativity� Such notions are illustrated in exemplary form in the core message of a poem by the Caribbean poet and Nobel Prize winner, Derek Walcott, ‘The Morning Moon’ (1986: 338), that I interpret in this chapter. Walcott’s sonnet evinces cosmic creativity in the translative variance/ invariance of the genre itself, and then thematically routes that creativity back to the environment whence it comes� This loop of creativity is further reinforced by the operation of translation, whose workings I scrutinize by reading Klaus Martens’ German translation of Walcott’s sonnet (Walcott 1993: 98). This doubling of creativity is given a third instantiation when the sonnett—and its translation—is taught in the classroom� Such a complex palimpsest of translative operations and their mutual entanglement stands as the opening gambit of the third part of the book. Translation or transformation is a ubiquitous process that is to found within the poem itself. The central line in Walcott’s sonnet ‘The Morning Moon’ (1986: 338; hereafter line numbers only) is the moment where it declares that ‘the earth is still changing’ (line 11). This notion is supported by the poem’s immediately preceding image of ‘December’s sundial’ (line 10), a synonym for the mountain whose shadows show this constant process of change� The poem instantiates, in its very generic participation in the variant/ invariant tradition of the sonnet, a notion of lively temporality that characterizes the entirety of the cosmos itself. Another name for this permanent transformation would be time, as became clear in the previous chapter (chapter 10). Time is a label for the mobility of Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott 223 being, ‘a continuous stream of occurrence’ (Whitehead 1920: 172), an ‘uncaused causality that ceaselessly generates new forms’ (Bennett 2010: 117). As I have written elsewhere (West-Pavlov 2013: 176), such immanent and embodied/ embedded temporalities are specific to the processes whose energy they are identical with, and to the particular site they inhabit� These temporalities are not abstracted from place, but provide the infinitely heterogeneous manifestations of what modern physics calls ‘spacetime’. At the very smallest scale of quantum gravity physics, in the words of Rovelli (2016: 150, 152, 154), Physical space is the fabric resulting from the ceaseless swarming of this web of relations … Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity … Time emerges, like space, from the quantum gravitational field … The passing of time is intrinsic to the world, is born in the world itself, out of the relations between quantum events which are the world and which themselves generate their own time� Poetry is one particular mode of intimately registering, no, better, participating in such change as it is inscribed in the very material of the poem itself. And, as I suggest in what follows, so too are the teaching and translation of poetry, as multipliers of the inherent multiplicity of the world borne out by poetry� In this chapter I propose a further instantiation of global south-based, quantum-derived translation that is no longer bound into a linear, forward-moving process in which a later poet imitates an earlier model� Rather, it will become evident that alternative temporal notions of translation based on the idea of creative generativity, such as those that I enumerated in part 1 of the book and then, in part 2, explored in greater detail with regard to translations of texts by Sebald, Vladislavić, Hölderlin and Mujila, is very emphatically evident in Walcott’s poetry� The narrowly linear, emulative tradition sees the earlier poem as a standard to be lived up to. In the postcolonial instantiation of this emulative structure, the belated colonial subject must catch up with or imitate the metropolitan ideal. Even when the ideal metropolitan model is usurped or outdone, the temporal priority of the model and its cultural authority remain the basic template for the subsequent work. The emulative or rebellious work can never be anything except secondary and subsidiary, however much its enunciative instance may profile itself, in Walcott’s own words in ‘North and South’, as ‘a colonial upstart at the end of an empire’ (1986: 405). Against the traps of emulation, I propose a model of translation that is beholden less to the discrete, isolated original it translates than to a much larger process of cosmic change in which its task is to participate by maximizing transformation as the principle of life itself—a task which will include an em- 224 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott ulation of the original only to the extent that the original also participates in that dynamic of ongoing creative transformation. It will become evident that the classroom can also be allowed to participate in such a process. It may become, via this notion of translation as ubiquitous transformation, a space in which place as generator of livelihoods is acknowledged, a realm in which knowledge is produced and transformed rather than merely consumed and emulated� Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’ Walcott’s poem tracks the rhetorical progress of a poetic speaker who appears, at first glance, to be slightly offside from the natural world and its life, as he is ‘racing full sail / past the crouched whale’s back of Morne Coco Mountain’ (lines 2-3). The sonnet takes us through a sequence of images of the natural world— the moon, the breeze, the sea, the shadows on the mountain—only to return to the speaker himself and the process of his aging, embodied in ‘the fine sprigs of white [that] are springing from my beard’ (line 14). The poem appears, seen in this way, to be solidly placed within the double tradition of the sonnet and of Romanticism. Within that tradition, the natural world provides a backdrop for an individual poetic speaker to display his distinctive poetic voice and glory in the (im)mortality that this speech conveys. Such is the impression that is initially given by the poet’s distanced, seaborne position at more than a keel’s length from the mountainous coast� But such an interpretation makes implicit assumptions about the discrete identity of the speaker over and against the natural world. In stark contrast, Caribbean—like Pacific—worldviews in fact see a ‘sea of islands’ rather than ‘islands’ (or individuals) in the sea. Rather than fragmenting the world, this Caribbean (or Pacific) vision depends upon an ‘holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships’, to quote the Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa (1994: 152-3). This, I argue, is how the poem in fact demands to be read� This is how the poem reads itself and its own activity of participation in transformation� The undulating continuity of transformation that is the ocean, of which islands and seafarers are outfoldings, is the fundamental base reality of the Caribbean world. The very outfolding that brings forth a mountain or a poetic speaker is an instantiation and evidence of the fact ‘that the earth is still changing’ rather than of individual existences cut out against a background world� The act of engaging with the poem, for instance when reading it, does not interrupt this process� On the contrary, reading is a further outfolding of the creative dynamic of the natural environment� Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’ 225 This point is of crucial importance for two reasons. The first reason is a located at the macro-level of global interconnectedness. The financial crisis of the mid-2000s onwards and the global solutions that in some cases staved off the worst consequnces showed that ‘we need to analyse the global economy not in terms of an “island model” of international economic interaction—national economy to national economy—but through the “interlocking matrix” of corporate balance sheets—bank to bank’ (Tooze 2018: 9). Similarly, the global climate crisis is increasingly showing that we are part of an interlocking planetary biosphere in which national borders have no relevance. In both these global contexts, ‘island thinking’ belongs to the past. This brief glimpse of a much br The second reason is located at a micro-level of the reading process in the classroom� Students are persistently convinced of the putative ‘subjectivity’ of poetic interpretations, fallaciously interpreting as a spurious individual freedom what is in fact a complex engagement with a network of literary ‘affordances’ (Hodder 2012: 48-52). Correspondingly, they often assume that their own subjective associations (‘That makes me think of ….’), that bring randomly chosen external frameworks to bear upon its fabric, or move away from its immediate presence, constitute valid readings of the poem. An engagement with the internal networks and dynamics of the poem is thereby lost to sight. In turn, the poem’s own referencing of its external networks of connections are obscured. By contrast, however, those networks are exactly the place where the poem offers information about its own preferred mode of connectivity. Within the context of the external networks identified by the poem, reading becomes a specific part of the ongoing dynamism of the Caribbean cosmos, as when, in another poem, ‘To Return to the Trees’, Walcott’s speaker says, ‘on windy, green mornings / I read the changes on Morne Coco Mountain’ (Walcott 1986: 339). Thus, via a closely related poem, Walcott’s immanent poetics actually celebrates the embeddedness of the reader, posing as an alter ego of the poetic speaker, within an immanent temporality of transformation� Within this panorama of change embracing the process of poetic creation, the second-order process of reading, and, as we shall see, the third-order process of translation, there is ample space for other participants who are willing to join the party. In this chapter, I focus on two in particular: the teacher/ learner in the classroom, and the translator in the translation bureau. Including their activity within the generous but rigorously networked purview of Walcott’s Caribbean cosmos, I interrogate the translation of the poem and its teaching in a classroom context and the ways these apparently separate activities perpetuate the infinitely extensive creative chain-reactions unleashed by the world the poem imagines� It may seem odd to place teaching and translation together as a pair in this chapter. It might seem that the discussion of a poem in a literary studies class- 226 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott room and its translation by a professional translator are two quite distinct activities. However, I would argue that both are interactive linguistic (verbal or written) encounters with a literary text in which the structural complexity and indeed agency of the literary text (its very presence and texture) enable the encounter to take place and guide its trajectory. Both encounters with the text give rise to something that is radically new (interpretations, understandings, a target-language version) that may in turn have knock-on transformative effects. Of course the verbal and written processes of transformation may be distinct, but their general contours and their transformative impetus have much in common� Indeed, at times, the two activities may converge in the literatureor translation-classroom. A separative analysis, parsing finer and finer distinctions, could of course easily unpick such a conflation, but I am more interested in the integrative potential of such comparisons, and the ways they may allow synergies and solidarities to be generated. Putting teaching and translation together, like any conjunction of dissimilarities, is a perlocutionary conceptual ‘speech act’ that intends to encourage and facilitate creative collaborations. It is offered as a counterweight to precisely the sort of easily-scored points that segregative critique can chalk up without making any contribution towards positive transformation. Here, by contrast, I am interested in a creative comparison—and perhaps even a copula that sketches out a ‘contact zone’—between teaching and translation that, on the threshold of the literary interpretations that busied us in part 2 of this book, launches the pedagogical meditations of part 3. The sonnet and creative constraint In what follows, I shall discuss briefly a notion of translation and teaching which sees the pedagogic and translational processes as locational ones, in which the teaching/ learning subject or the translating subject recognizes its place as a node on a network of interacting actants; and as a temporal one, in which this recognition segues into a creative process of working-with those other actants— for instance, the discovery/ recognition/ unleashing of the plethora of meanings latent within a literary text� This temporality is the texture of processes of creative translation embedded in materiality itself. The literary work is one of the manifold outfoldings of the creativity of being; to read and interpret (and, as a combination of the two, to translate) is to unfold the creative potential inherent in that particular pleat of generative space-time (Deleuze 1992). Both the translation of poetry and the teaching of poetry (not to mention the teaching of the translation of poetry), then, are cognate processes that flow out of a larger creative transformation of the world. Seeking to make these concepts The sonnet and creative constraint 227 concrete, the chapter turns to a specific example, Klaus Martens’ translation of ‘The Morning Moon’, titled ‘Der Morgenmond’ (Walcott 1993: 98). The chapter asks to what extent Martens’ translation does actually succeed in taking part in those processes of translative transformation, or whether it misses opportunities for creative coupling� This notion of interconnected cosmic creativity, literary creation, readerly response and interpretation, and translative re-creation is distinctly different from the one that, despite half a century of structuralist and post-structuralist theory, still reigns undisputed in most school and many university classrooms—and perhaps in some translation bureaux as well. There, the triad of author-character plot continue to determine most literary analysis. According to this conception of literary analysis, literature is an entity that ‘reflects’ or transparently conveys the writing self, its projections into fictional characters, their actions and the ensuing causalities. This reflection can then be re-reflected in various forms of commentary (Foucault 1988a: xii-xiii)—and in certain models of translation� By contrast, in the conception of literary (inter)action I propose here, literature consists of language as it is moulded (indeed, folded and re-folded) by form. This conception contrasts with a number of explanations of literary form that are currently in circulation� The question, What is the role and function of literary form? , is a significant one, indeed, lies at the core of interrogations about the literary humanities in today’s university� The question garners a range of responses, which it is useful to enumerate briefly. A first answer might see form as an ornamentation or embellishment of an authorial message. Here form is a mere superficial sheen overlaid upon a core of authorial intention and a clear meaning� A second would place such intentions within a wider social context: Eagleton (2007: 8-16) points out that poetic form is systematized by rhetoric, whose purpose was originally socio-discursive, serving the goal of political persuasion� Form was the affective, even manipulative body of an immaterial idea stemming from an authorial mind� More broadly, it could be seen as the body of ideological ideas embedded in social structures and conflicts (Eagleton 1976). In a third approach, the formalists severed form from both authorial intent and social issues, making form the site of literariness itself: form is where language advertises its autotelic difference as literature (Shklovsky 1990). The latter approach gave a huge boost to the analytical power of literary studies, but was also symptomatic of literature’s alienation from the mainstream of political discourse (Sartre 1948, 1967); indeed, it was cognate with a trend in literary 228 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott studies, powered by de Saussure’s separation of signifier and signified, to effect a rigorous separation between literary sign and social referent (During 2012: 74). The approach to form I wish to propose here in the twinned context of pedagogical interpretation and literary translation draws on several of these approaches while eschewing their limitations. It sees form as the way in which, within a broader environmental (and not merely social) context, material advertises and performs its own positive power of self-differentiation (Braidotti 2013: 158, 166), its inherent creative dynamic, its intrinsic tendency towards transform-ation. Language is material, as de Saussure and poststucturalist critics recognized (Fónagy 1983; Goux 1968; Saussure 1977: 66); they failed, however, to explore the full conceptual potential of that materiality (e.g. Kristeva 1981: 24, 36). Form is neither an ornamentation, nor an instrument, nor a symptom, nor an end in itself� Rather, form is that which integrates literature and all other structures into the fabric of all cosmic dynamism, because the essence of form is to be both materially structured and materially fungible. It is, to return to Serres’ notion of translation (see chapter 4 above), that which integrates literary productivity into the sum total of strategies of variance/ invariance� This is what constitutes, in common with all material, its difference-with-itself-as-temporality. Literature’s materiality is interactive and agential (Hodder 2012; Stengers 1997), each type of material (including conceptual material) within the work and outside it (rhyme, metre, sonorities and phonetics, stanza structure, rhetorical devices, semantics, intertextuality, readerly frames of reference, extant interpretations, performative strategies, translational ‘solutions’ [Pym 2016]) interacting with others in ways that are reciprocally transformative� Morphogenesis (Thom 1975) describes the infinite self-production of all material as it changes its formal structures in response to outside influences (‘strange attractors’). Teaching and translation are part of this process, as powerful ‘strange attractors’ drag a literary form across a cultural border, trans-forming already transformative materials (semantics, structures and inevitably form as well) yet again� Teaching and translation thus instantiate a transformative perpetuation of transformation that does not mimic the dynamic of the natural world so much as participate in its material dynamism� Mimetic reflection as an aesthetic agenda is impoverishing and reifying, not merely in its erasure of linguistic pasts, but also in its ‘impedance’ of aesthetic futures (Bloch 1977: 33). By extension, even notions of (secondary) modelling (Lotman 1977: 35), or of discourse analysis or analysis of ‘representations’ (which take realist ‘first-order’ observation to a meta-level of ‘second-order observation’; Luhmann 1984, 1995) are overhauled, if not entirely superseded, by a notion of ‘non-representational’ generative aesthetic interaction (Thrift The sonnet and creative constraint 229 2008). By contrast, in literary production, form is the site of conceptual and linguistic novelty resulting from its interactive and transformative capacities� In poetry, this interactive cooperation (between literary creator, literary reader and/ or translator and formed literary language) is evinced in its most intensely productive manner� The poem is one particularly pregnant site of a material creativity in the world in which humans and other actants all share� To write a poem is to participate in that creativity; to read or translate a poem with an eye to formal interaction and transformation is to participate in it again, perpetuating and extending that process of transformation, and to engage thereby in an endless chain of transformative encounters� In this context, it is not insignificant that the poem I discuss in more detail below, ‘The Morning Moon’, is a sonnet� The sonnet appears to be the ideal vehicle for exploring the transformative material potential of poetic form� The sonnet is remarkable for the manner in which an extremely rigid set of rules (14 lines; two basic stanza models—the Italian and the English—with the volta in one of a limited number of positions; a few fairly invariant rhyme schemes; and for much of its history in English, a single metrical pattern, that of iambic pentameter) have generated a hugely inventive range of creative possibilities (Fuller 1972). Over the more than 500 years since the sonnet emerged in Italy, these extremely rigid constraints appear to have unleashed creativity rather than hampered it� The generativity of the genre seems to be in almost exact inverse proportion to the restrictive parameters of its form� The sonnet’s nature, then, is fractal, evincing recursive generativity within a constrained space; the sonnet spills over its own constitutive constrictions, producing itself anew and differently. The secret of the sonnet’s astounding longevity, its sheer temporal durability, is formal constraint. Constraint, far from hampering creativity, is that which drives creativity by furnishing the de-limited spaces and thus the concrete materials for generating novelty. As Brian Massumi (2015: 72-3) notes, Nothing happens most where there are no constraints, because then anything goes, and anything goes is just nothing carried to the higher power … Our point of departure is what we call ‘enabling constraints’—sets of … constraints that … create specific conditions for creative interaction where something is set to happen, but here is no preconceived notion of what the outcome will be. No deliverables. All process. The English sonnet was a response to the dis-enabling constraints represented by the Petrarchan sonnet form when transferred into English. The paucity of rhymes in English became a problem, necessitating the shorter stanzas that permitted greater flexibility in rhyme combinations. These in turn propelled the volta towards its penultimate position before the closing rhyming couplet (typified for example by the Shakespearean sonnet), thereby generating a dif- 230 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott ferent poetic temporality� The accelerated, even staccato or syncopated rhythm of the English sonnet, and its frequently acidic or mordant conclusion embody the generic—and immensely generative—temporality of the ‘afterlife’ of the erstwhile Petrarchan form� The sonnet would appear to be a European form par excellence, intimately connected to the core European traditions from Petrarch via du Bellay and Shakespeare through to Wordsworth, Rilke, Hopkins, and so on. Yet it has been appropriated by poets all over the world—this has been partly so in a gesture of postcolonial rewriting or ‘cannibalism’ (de Campos 1986; Curtius 2016). However, as I will detail below, such appropriation has also laid bare a kindred spirit of deep cultural affiliation between the sonnet’s underlying principles and some philosophies or cosmologies of the Global South that see humans as custodians of the natural world that underpins their action as a set of enabling constraints� This cosmological kinship is hardly surprising: after all, the sonnet emerges in Europe in a pre-modern courtly context only on the cusp of the onset of modernity and individual humanity as the epitome of untrammelled emancipation from nature� The sonnet is part of that movement of emancipation, but it also bears residual traces of that which it overcomes� The postcolonial appropriation of the sonnet might appear, at first glance, to instantiate a rejection of the prior formal constraints, but at a deeper level it is profoundly in accord with the dynamic of enabling constraint. For instance, Brathwaite (1984: 10, 12) declares, The hurricane does not roar in pentameters. And that’s the problem: how do you get a rhythm that approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience? … we have been trying to break out of the entire pentametric model in the Caribbean and to move into a system that more closely and intimately approaches our own experience� But contrary to appearances, the discrepancy between the received sonnet form and the rhythms and resonances of the postcolonial environment, does not lead to the disappearance of formal constraints. Rather, as I show in my analysis of the sonnet by Walcott, an newly interactive form emerges out of the postcolonial nexus—a form in which constraint continues to underpin creativity. To anticipate on my argument below: the postcolonial sonnet indexes a broader system of constraints, as enabling environmental contexts with which a transformational interaction and thus translation ensues� The immediate poetic constraints of the material as they are evinced in the sonnet form are thus local manifestations of the larger global environment—to which Walcott’s sonnet very explicitly refers, thus making its landscape content an index of the material environment of its own formal materiality. In the process of translation, the The sonnet and creative constraint 231 enabling constraint within the environment that generates the poetic work is passed on via the poetic form itself to a subsequent text� The critical question thus becomes the following: Does the translated text prove to be equally richly endowed by the constraining-enabling matrix out of which it emerges via the encounter of two languages? Does the interlingual translation remain embedded within a broader fabric of cosmic translations whose creativity it is involved in as a generative co-actant? In other words, does it function in a manner that is truly fractal in nature? (see Eglash 1999: 199-202). Constraint, then, is not merely negative, nor is it simply a site that marks out possibilities for action (Bonhoeffer 1988: 247-9)—‘the power that each and every one of us exercises in the everyday network of social relations, at both the microand macro-levels’ (Braidotti 2013: 12). From the point of view of Actor Network Theory (Latour 2005), constraints describe objectively the enabling pressure exercised by our co-actants, our material companions, the ground under our feet, the co-actantial conditions of our life. Each co-actant is a ‘translator’ of the collaborative project (Callon 1986; Latour 1986) working within a transformative ‘contact zone’ at the interface between several constraining-enabling actants (on the synchronic axis) and between a prior and a later subsequent state (on the diachronic axis). Constraint, however much it appears to hamper our agency, is actually its enabling collaborative basis. From this perspective, a poetic form such as the sonnet may offer a paradigmatic model of creative enabling constraint� The sonnet’s constraining rules are the conditions of possibility of distributed co-agency, and the guarantors of collaborative creative generativity� The sonnet embodies, in its very rule-bound-being, the interactive encounters that provide the cosmic template for transformative translation� The translation of the sonnet, a fortiori, embodies the enabling creative constraint to the power of two—interlingual translation is, in this case, doubly imprisoned but also doubly empowered by the creative potential of the sonnet form and of the source-text sonnet itself� In broader terms, then, the sonnet, and its translation, may give us a model for a radically different way of thinking about our place in the world—as one part of a network of distributed embodied agencies, but emphatically not as its centre� The sonnet thus models and performatively instantiates an important posthuman pedagogical lesson: human centrality (anthropocentrism) has bought about the destruction of the world (anthropocene) (Chakrabarty 2009), and if alternatives to the grim future scenarios with which we are currently confronted are to be found, they must include a radical decentring of the human and a re-acceptance of a curtailed autonomy imposed by our environment� This also entails the acceptance of temporalities in which life goes on regardless of our own death and even that of ‘man’ itself (Braidotti 2013: 121; Foucault 2002: 422). 232 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott A first step on the way to drawing the consequences of this lesson is to recognize our place in the (translation) classroom with regard to the sonnet. The sonnet does not model something from which we have freed or distanced ourselves (‘reality’ or ‘nature’); it is not separate from the world, a reduced schematic figure of the world that models our own separation. This is a central recognition of quantum theory for which the observer and its conceptual scheme are part of the experiment (Barad 2007). The environment constrains the knowing subject, abolishing a spuriously ‘objectifying’ objectivity but thereby facilitating the co-production of knowledge. The same goes for time: time is an embedded process of creativity in which we are implicated, not a hypostatized measuring rod permitting the calibration and commodification of linear processes of production� The separation of time and space as one of the central epistemological drivers of modernity (Giddens 1990: 18-19) and the concomitant ‘purification’ of multiple and complex ‘knots’ of time (Rose 2010) were central tenets of the streamlining and optimizing of processes of capitalist production (Thompson 1967). Conversely, the mending or at least palliation of anthropocen(tric) damage, to the extent that it is possible, must go hand in hand with the re-embedding of the human subject in complex networks of generativity and the emergence of embedded temporalities of material creativity� This implies acceptance of our belonging to interactive networks in which each encounter means transformation� One such interactive nexus is the business of verbal interpretation. Another such nexus would be translation—an enabling constraint if ever there was one! What does this mean in the context of poetry? Henceforth, the sonnet, and we as readers, might be more truly understood as respective nodes on a network of interlinked and cooperating co-actants, co-producing and co-produced by temporalities of creative transformation. An anthropo-ex-centric approach to the entanglement of various co-actors and co-agencies can begin anywhere on the cosmic network. No site is an origin or a centre. All these comments could be repeated, verbatim, for literary translation, also no worse a place to start than anywhere else, and all the more so for the translation of a form such as the sonnet� The poem in translation is not an especially privileged place to begin (contrary to claims made by self-legitimizing theories of culture), but as we are students of literature and of translation it is no worse than anywhere else� (The main caveats about literary studies are double: first, like any disciplinary branch, it tends to fence itself off from the world in a process of self-constitution [Luhmann 1992]; and under the current conditions of multiple global crises, it is legitimate to ask whether resources should be invested in this ring-fenced domain of middle-class self-definition [Bourdieu 1979] when as much pedagogical energy as possible ought to be going into bundled cross-disciplinary The sonnet and creative constraint 233 collaboration to ensure planetary futures� Both these caveats will be dealt with by a notion of reading, interpretation and translation that sees all three as transformative interaction within the framework of enabling constraint.) Such a paradigm shift in the reading of a literary text demands, however, a radical dismantling of the most common classroom approaches to literary analysis. This approach to literary pedagogy seeks to strategically displace the hegemony of textual analysis in schools and universities anchored in the tired triad of author-character-plot. It is half a century since Barthes (1977) put the author to death. A couple of decades before, Sarraute (1956: 69-94) had put a nail in the coffin of the character by announcing the ‘era of suspicion’ in post-war France. Even earlier, Russian formalism had demolished both plot and character as the surface manifestations of narrative structures, whose function was autotelic rather than mimetic (Shklovsky 1990: 170). Poststructuralism recognized that to summarize or paraphrase a plot was to replicate the superficialities of the ‘phenotext’ while ignoring the productive character of the ‘genotext’ (Kristeva 1972). Each of these common-sense approaches (reading for the author, character or plot) is isolating and reifying, cutting the text out of its place in multiple generative networks and multiple generative genealogies. The authorand character-functions snare the reader in the perilous ‘lure of identification’ (Lacan 2006: 75-81) while obfuscating their historico-epistemic functioning within modernity (Foucault 1988c; Baucom 2005). Authorand character-functions merely amplify hegemonic consumer culture’s hypostatization of the individual as the lynchpin of surplus-value generation (Harvey 2006, 2010; Streeck 2014, 2017; Reckwitz 2017). It is not enough to reinstate the reader or the student-interpreter-writer as a site of productivity (Barthes 1977; Gilbert 1989), important though this act may be as a step towards creative reading; the reader (as teacher or student or translator) must be inserted within a constraining/ enabling network of other productive and creative actants beyond the purview of consumption. Finally, plot summary as a method hails back to simple comprehension and reformulation exercises, and merely teaches students reproductive textual skills rather than creative adaptation. It signals that narrative is little more than sequential causality, which suppresses the entirety panoply of narratological inventivity investigated by numerous theorists (e.g. Bal 1997; Genette 1972: 65-282; Genette 1980). All of these strategies of literary analysis suppress the creative interactions out of which literary productivity in fact springs� They reduce the participation of the student in the text’s own agential work to that of a ‘spectator’ (at the very most an narcissistically self-mirroring one) that does little more than ‘consume’ a docile and bland cultural commodity (Friere 1972: 49). The artistic text becomes entirely subsumed to the subject-objet polarization that sets in, 234 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott according to Descola (2005: 92-5), from the moment of emergence of geometrical linear perspective; it elides the multi-species perspectivalism in which all coagents possess personhood and interact with other co-agents and co-persons (Vivieros de Castro 2014, 2016). By the same token, these limiting approaches entrap the literary work within a temporal linearity of tradition and respectful reception (Bourdieu 1984: 153; 1990: 114-6), rather than allowing a cascading process of creative interactions to emerge as part of a field of co-actantial becoming. Within the pedagogical context where these strategies are implemented massively at a global level, they are part and parcel of a reifying and ‘stupidifying’ educational system that demands reproduction of pre-packaged skills rather than a critical and creative engagement with society and its terrifying contemporary trajectories (Illich 1971). All these strategies close down the interconnectivity intrinsic to the literary text as an ‘open work’ (Eco 1989) and curtail its effectiveness as a generator of creativity within the educational institution and beyond its bounds� Translation may become embroiled in similarly reifying strategies when it focuses too much upon the author of works it is translating. Arguably this is the case with Klaus Marten’s translation of Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’, included in the volume Erzählungen von den Inseln (1993). Martens translated a first selection of Walcott’s poems under the title Das Königreich des Sternapfels in 1989. In the wake of Walcott’s 1992 Nobel Prize, the sharp increase of public interest in Germany in Walcott’s work led Martens to translate a second collection, Erzählungen von den Inseln (1993). Martens explicitly acknowledges the role of the Nobel Prize in his translator’s postface (1993: 133). Thanks to the award of the Nobel Prize, Walcott became an identifiable artistic star for a German public until then largely ignorant of his work; Marten’s second translation initiative rode on the back of this abrupt visibility. As will become clearer below, when I come to a close reading of Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’ and its translation, this celebrity-like visibility was perhaps more of a bane than a boon for Martens’ translation initiative� Martens’ version of the poem runs the risk of perpetuating precisely the noxious individualizing impulses set in motion by the award of the Nobel Prize. It thus risks entrenching reifying and isolating strategies that obfuscate and even curtail the deep co-actantial impetus of the poem and disaggregate the distributed agency evinced in the formal structure of the poetry itself� How may one best combat these stultifying interpretative strategies? Here is a strategy that I myself have employed when teaching the sonnet form. In the classroom, one possible—and apparently paradoxical—route of action is to suggest to students that they submit themselves to a set of creative constraints that, by way of a sort of pedagogical thought-experiment, forbid absolutely any The sonnet and creative constraint 235 recourse to the above-mentioned triad of author-character-plot interpretative keys. In return, however, the students are asked to create their own catalogue of formal devices to aid them to detect and discern the text’s own resources for actively generating meanings. The experiences of formal constraint (which register initially as a perplexing restriction and limitation) transpire, after a very short while, to release a rich field of linguistically creative strategies that the text, in collaboration with the appropriately-equipped reader, can unfold in a surge of almost unlimited creativity� The same goes for literary translation, if it can avoid the temptations of individualizing hagiography. Translation of formal strategies should become the bridgehead into a fully-fledged participation within networks of co-actantial distributed agency� What this ‘lesson’ in reading should reveal is the creativity that arises out of the co-agency of texts, readers and their world. In order to exemplify how this might look in a concrete context, I turn now to a reading of Walcott’s sonnet ‘The Morning Moon’, paired with a close examination of the way it is translated by Klaus Martens as ‘Der Morgenmond’ (Walcott 1993: 98; hereafter line numbers only). Whereas Walcott’s poem resolutely sets the poetic speaker within a field of cosmic actants, Mertens’ translation restores the poetic speaker to the centre-stage familiar to European poetics since the Romantic era and thereby destroys the close-knit fabric of the natural world that Walcott’s verse acknowledges. In this sonnet, the enunciating instance focalizes upon the moon, still visible in the early morning, and then upon a number of other natural features of the Caribbean: ‘the crouched whale’s back of Morne Coco Mountain’ (line 3), ‘the skin of this earth, | the goose skin of water’ (lines 6-7), the ‘blue plunge | of shadows down Morne Coco Mountain’ (lines 8-9), ‘this bright foreday morning’ (line 13). The sonnet propagates a sense ‘that the earth is still changing’ (line 11); this ongoing transformation includes the enunciating instance itself, which acknowledges that ‘fine springs of white are springing from my beard’ (line 14). On the basis of this catalogue of environmental topoi, which include the enunciating instance as well, I propose, in what follows, two contradictory readings that the poem itself accommodates and imbricates with one another: on the one hand, the poem as an instance of postcolonial ‘writing back’; and on the other hand, the poem as a distinctive Global South productivity of an environmental matrix� 236 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott Postcolonial resistance? On the one hand, it is possible to make a strong case for a postcolonial revisionism, one in which the erstwhile colony ‘writes back’ to the empire and its literary traditions (to pirate Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s [1989] famous topos). Significantly, the enunciating instance is ‘[s]still haunted by the cycle of the moon’ (line 1)—a reference to any number of sonnet cycles reposing on seasonal cycles of rise and fall, birth and death, in which the moon, like the seasons, or the hours of the day, is press-ganged into a linear narrative of origin and telos� Stephen Burt (2010) makes a convincing case for the way in which Walcott mobilizes the different seasons of the Caribbean in order to disable Northern European tropes of linearity and teleological demise, so as to then recalibrate them in more productive forms. And certainly Walcott appears to very knowingly work within such a framework—at least initially. The first line of the poem, ‘Still haunted by the cycle of the moon’, is in perfect iambic pentameter, thus embodying, in easily recognizable form, the very tradition that ‘haunts’ the poet, and thereby enacting its cyclical, repeating (and self-confirming) nature. Valid as it may be, this reading locks Global South poetic production into a North-South axis of colonial action and postcolonial reaction. The South is subsidiary, and its time, however strongly asserted against the imported and exogamic temporalities of the North, remains a belated and derivative, ‘second-hand time’ (Alexievich 2016), confirming the debility of what Walcott, in his Nobel lecture (1992), describes as ‘our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary’� Burt’s argument is compelling, but its very self-evidence is proof of the superior weight of the North in all North-South aesthetic tussles, and thus provides an equally compelling counter-argument for the necessity of a fundamental conceptual recalibration—one that would, in the words of Elleke Boehmer (2002: 1), shift the analytical focus from ‘the relationship of European self and other; of colonizer and colonized’ so as to ‘swivel this conventional axis of interaction laterally’� The poem is perhaps all too aware of the traps of ‘writing back’. Maybe this is why the poem immediately relinquishes its initial iambic pentameter and switches to more sinuous and flexible rhythms. In this way it makes an inaugural gesture towards postcolonial poetic resistance, then turning, however, towards a more pressing task: that of a fundamental re-envisioning of the natural world and its rhythms in the Global South� On the other hand, then, it becomes possible to read the poem as undertaking a more constructive, and thus more radical interpretation of the environmental matrix out of which it emerges. If the ‘cyclical’ mode of natural temporality is always a binary marker of the primitive world as opposed to the linearity of Mo- Postcolonial resistance? 237 dernity (Fabian 1983: 30; see for instance Ricoeur, ed. 1975), then the shadowy ‘haunting’ by Northern time, in which the moon would stand for a melancholic, nocturnal benightedness, would be overhauled by something radically new: an elemental velocity, a vector of tempestuous ‘racing full sail’ (line 2) that stresses the ‘sane brightness’ of the moon (line 4): an elemental presence and agency of intellection that exceeds all stale binaries of primitive and modern, night and day, South and North, colonial and post-colonial. This fundamental re-orientation of the poetic task from resistant rewriting to rejuvenation through the immanent energy of the environment, from critique to creativity, is an illocutionary speech act, one that is embedded in the natural world it references. It is one, however, that Martens’ translation largely fails to convey, because, as will become evident in the analysis that follows, it does not affiliate itself and ally its material forces in a performative manner with the elemental work of the original. Martens’ translations have been criticized for being excessively academic (he is an emeritus professor of literary studies, so this is perhaps forgivable) and overloaded with archaic usages that do not correspond to Walcott’s frequently colloquial tone of voice or his use of creole. Conversely, however, Martens is often praised for his rigorous maintenance of Walcott’s metrical forms and adherence to the technical form of the poetry (Pfeffer 2016: 51-2). No sign of that here, though� Where Walcott ostentatiously parades a perfect iambic pentameter to open his poem, Martens misses the chance to replicate this in the first line of the translation. He compensates instead by inserting a trochaic trimeter in the short second line, but by then, Walcott has already transited to the more flexible metre that will be implemented for the rest of the poem� Martens’ timing is all wrong—literally. Where Walcott’s speaker is ‘haunted’ by the ‘cycle’, the body of the verse is inhabited by the residual tempo of the iambic pentameter, Martens’ verses drop both temporal markers. They replace the temporal persistence of ‘haunting’ by the magical bond of the ‘Bann’ (a spell or enchantment), and they replace the repeating (perhaps even traumatic) structure of cyclicity by the spatializing ‘Mondumlauf ’ (i.e. orbital path). Martens’ translation thus misses the chance to stress the creative non-linear trajectory of the natural world and its networks that is played out in the rest of the poem by contrasting it with inaugural but short-lived instantiation of the linear (at best cyclical) domination exercised by a European tradition—a ‘vision of progress [that] is the rational madness of history seen as sequential time’, which in turn produces ‘a dominated future’ as Walcott (1998: 41) wrote in his ‘Muse of History’. If the first line of Walcott’s sonnet rehearses, albeit only very briefly, a project of ‘writing back’, Martens’ translation cannot emulate this because it elides the metrical marker of the tradition against which the postcolonial riposte would ‘write back’. The 238 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott European form of the iambic pentameter makes a brief initial appearance in Walcott’s non-European sonnet, to be replaced almost immediately with more fluid rhythms informed by the sinuous transitions between various elements in the rest of the poem. By not marking metrically the temporal regime that is on the verge of being superseded, Martens weakens the alternative that his translation, in any case, does not really understand, as will becomes clear from further analysis below. Paradoxically, then, Martens is not faithful to the European tradition of which he is a part—as it is manifest in the first line of the poem—and thus cannot be faithful to its transformation within the environment of the Global South� Walcott has the ‘sane brightness’ of the moon (line 4) preside over a relentless intertwining of nature and culture: the earth and the water have a ‘skin’ (line 6); the speaker’s beard is vegetal. Nature and nature are equally intertwined: the mountain is a whale, the water is, after a fashion, a goose, and the mountain-island complex appears to merge with the sea, into which the blue shadows ‘plunge’. These transitions between the elements are highly significant because by the end of the poem they will encompass the poetic speaker as well. Embracing rhymes straddle separated lines and overdetermine the more prominent trans-elemental connections (morne/ moon, lines 1, 3; December/ water, lines 5, 7; changing/ morning, lines 8, 10; forehead/ beard, lines 12, 14). Similarly, run-over lines tend to blur the borders between the mainly three-line stanza units. Such rhymes and lines work to dramatize a merging of various elements and components of the natural landscape in a way that confounds the separatist principle of Western reason. Everything segues into everything else, according to what Descola (2005: 19-57) calls ‘figures du continu’ [‘figures of the continuous’]. Various African philosophies describe this phenomenon via the principle of ‘compositionality’, meaning com-position-ality or contiguity: ‘the other is not outside myself ’ (Membe 2013a: 13). In recent decades, the Southern African principle of Ubuntu , roughly summarized by the dictum, ‘A person is a person through other persons’ (on the problems of translation of the dictum see Sanders 2007: 27-30), has been celebrated as a contemporary paradigm for such ideas (see for instance Ogude, ed. 2018; Ogude, ed. 2019; Praeg 2014; Praeg and Magadla, eds 2014). Not dissimilarly, in Achebe’s (1999: 68) eminently metonymic expression, ‘Wherever Something stands, Something else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute.’ At a much larger scale of ontological being, as already mentioned above, the Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa (1994: 153) seeks to escape the isolating Western gaze that isolated hypostatized Pacific islands in a putative oceanic void. He does this by referring to a ‘sea of islands’, thereby binding islands and sea into an ecological network, an interfolded continuum of complementary elements. Walcott’s sonnet undertakes much the same task in its work of intertwining the manifold elements of the Caribbean world. Postcolonial resistance? 239 Unfortunately, Martens’ translation does not manage to convey much of this poetic project. He rescues two of the internal embracing rhymes that Walcott uses to ‘entangle’ the elements in the poem (morne/ moon, lines 1, 3→Morne/ Mond; December/ water, lines 5, 7→ Dezember/ Wasser) but loses the others. Indeed, the alliterative doubling ‘of Morne Coco Mountain’ (line 3) is cut down into the divergent ‘des Berges Morne Coco’. Martens discards the velocity of ‘racing’ in ‘racing full sail’ (line 2, rendered as ‘unter vollen Segeln’), which thus no longer ties the subject into the tempo of the ‘Wandel der Erde’ (line 11) while nonetheless retaining the disjunctive ‘ vorbei am geduckten Walrücken …’ (line 3, emphasis added). Where the Caribbean/ Pacific ethic would see the boat, like the sailor, as outformings of the sea itself, part of its restless mobility and movement, Martens leaves intact only the distal vector of remote passage� In this way he foregrounds the separateness of the poetic speaker, thereby correlating with the individualized celebrity-author figure produced by the Nobel Prize. He replaces the ‘plunge / of shadows down Morne Coco Mountain’ (lines 8-9) with a ‘Sturz / Von Schatten am Morne Coco hinab’, thus removing the connection between ‘plunge’ and the prior ‘water’ (line 7), and thereby scinding the physical continuity created by Walcott between mountain and sea� Such separative impulses are clearly systemic and not merely accidental� Pfeffer identifies a similar act of scission in Martens’ translation of ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’: where Walcott (1980: 390) writes, ‘One morning the Caribbean was cut up / by seven prime ministers who bought the sea in bolts,’ Martens translates, ‘Eines Morgens wurde die Karibik zerteilt durch sieben Premierminister / sie kauften sie in Posten’ (Walcott 1989: 39). Pfeffer (2016: 76) observes that Martens does not mention the sea in his translation, but merely speaks of the division of the Caribbean. Most German readers would be inclined to think of the different islands, perhaps also the mainland countries that make up the Caribbean. Walcott, on the other hand, even seems to exclude the landmasses in his poem altogether. In this way, he … conveys his understanding of the sea as landscape. Martens, by excising ‘the Sea’, eradicates just that continuous element of the oceanic medium that resists the separative nationalist activity against which the poem militates� One last example will serve to underline the impact of the separatist project upon which Martens’ translation appears to be embarked. In parallel to the continuum of the sea and the mountain, down whose slopes the shadows ‘plunge’, Walcott also creates a continuity between ‘the skin of this earth’ and ‘the gooseskin of water’ (lines 6-7). The second metaphor may appear to gloss the first, but in fact we are presented with two geophysical actants who share the same skin, thus making of them one multifarious and interfolded, continuous whole. 240 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott Martens by contrast shifts the genitive-connective ‘goose-skin of water’ to the disjunctive-constructivist ‘Gänsehaut aus Wasser’ (emphasis added), thereby reducing the water to the mere stuff of which this metaphorical skin of the earth is made� One of the actants thus disappears, diminished to inert material serving a now isolated earth-metaphor. In this specific case, Martens’ translation, by one subtle transformation of a conjunctive article, works a disjunction that leaves a gash in in the network of natural actants Walcott’s poetry imagines and with which it enters into collaboration� The magnitude of this alteration can be appreciated if we once again bring in other oceanic-insular perspectives from the Global South. Walcott’s vision of the Caribbean is very close to Hau’ofa’s (1994: 153-4) when the latter says of his native Oceania, There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’ The first emphasizes dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from the centers of power. Focusing in this way stresses the smallness and remoteness of the islands� The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships … Continental men, namely Europeans, on entering the Pacific after crossing huge expanses of ocean, introduced the view of ‘islands in a far sea.’ From this perspective the islands are tiny, isolated dots in a vast ocean. Martens’ perspective rehearses exactly this fragmenting, disjunctive view of geography. It reposes upon the hypostatization of natural features and reinforces the isolation of the poetic speaker among them, in accord with the hypostatizing Nobel Prize award that triggered the volume’s publication. Martens’ imposition of the European perspective thus scinds the undulating, variegated continuities that Walcott’s poetry joyfully celebrates—and instantiates. Martens’ translation is a divisive rather than an integrative operation� When Hau’ofa says of the Oceania (and one could say much the same of the Caribbean), ‘Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Niue, Rotuma, Tokelau, Tuvalu, Futuna, and Uvea formed a large exchange community in which wealth and people with their skills and arts circulated endlessly’ (ibid: 154) we are confronted with a translative space—but one that Martens, in the cognate archipelagic topography of the Caribbean, fails to translate. His translation interrupts the chain of ongoing transformative translations, cementing instead the ossified figure of the latter-day Romantic landscape poet� Genius supplants cosmic creativity as Walcott is assimilated to the European pantheon of poetic inspiration in the wake of the reifying Nobel Prize. I do not propose this reading of Martens’ translation merely in the spirit of critique, but rather, in the hope of repairing the damage his translations wreak upon an immanent, networked and self-perpetuating process of creativity. In Walcott’s sonnet, time as an immanent process is not separated from that which Postcolonial resistance? 241 it putatively measures: the mountain itself is ‘December’s sundial’, indistinguishable physically from the ‘shadows’ that register the passage of time (lines 9-10). The ‘earth is still changing’ so that such temporalities are embedded in natural processes—and therefore continue unabated in ways that resist the braking, immobilizing effect of practices such as Martens’ anti-translative translation. Walcott’s immanent poetics is akin to Brathwaite’s (1999: 226) notion of ‘tidalectics’ in its sensitivity to, and participation in the immanence of change and transformation in the physical world� The human observer, manifest here as the written trace of a voice, is caught up in this process, not separated from the natural phenomena it records. Thus, ‘I gasp at [the moon’s] sane brightness’ (line 4) registers an intake of breath that draws ‘the breeze’ (line 6) into the self. (Breath of course is a central element of an oral poetry open to the winds.) By contrast, Martens’ ‘hole ich Atem’ is much weaker and thus attenuates the implicit connection with the postcolonial sublime of ‘the full moon can blind me’ (line 12), a dazzling that segues into the specific whiteness in ‘fine sprigs of white are springing from my beard’ (line 14). Thus the translative pair ‘The Morning Moon’/ ‘Der Morgenmond’ can be seen as a highly conflicted ‘contact zone’ in which an ecology of continuity, productivity and lively dynamics is vitiated by a divisive, disjunctive notion of translation that restores the isolated solipsism of a putative star-artist in the wake of the Nobel Prize award. Further translations and the teaching context may however exert a dynamic counterweight to such deadening influences. They may becoming instances of a ‘reparative’ translation and re-translation economy that Bandia (2014) locates quintessentially in translation practices of the Global South� Such ‘reparative’ re-translations and re-readings would join the sonnet’s own specific generic historicity and internal dynamic, one of creativity under conditions of constraint, and of enabling interrelationship� The poet and the poem are rigorously constrained by the natural world, but because they are outfoldings generated by it, they are therefore part of its creativity. Thus, the final line (‘fine sprigs of white are springing from my beard’) may look like a confirmation of the sonnet’s enunciating instance (in the tradition of the Shakespearean final couplet)—or alternatively, it may announce the demise of that subject, now transformed by organic growth into a part of the world� More radically, however, the final line may mark a return to that which, even beyond language itself, has from the outset constrained/ enabled that subject in its brief appearance in the world: an entangled and creative space that is the immanence of time as creativity. Both teaching and translation have the task of integrating themselves into these networks of immanent material agency and continuing that work. 242 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott Landscape, teaching and translating Thus Walcott’s poem, I suggest, tells us how to teach it or translate it—perhaps even how to re-translate it—in the spirit of this temporality of immanent creativity� This is not merely a poem ‘about’ landscape that can, subsequently, be in turn taught as a curricular ‘unit’ or translated for yet another Euro-American packaging of exotic Global South literature (Huggan 2001). Rather, it is a poem that emerges out of a landscape which is intrinsically a dynamic process of ongoing interconnection, both spatial, and inevitably, temporal� Walcott’s poem does not merely report or depict this interconnection: it instantiates the processes out of which it emerges� Thus the poem-landscape carries its spatio-temporality with it, so to speak, transforming the classroom into an out-folding of that Caribbean spacetime—just as an Australian Indigenous pedagogue transforms the classroom into Indigenous ‘country’, the embodied presence of the ancestors, to which one owes respect, and which one can only enter after uttering the appropriate protocols (Muecke 2004: 69). According to the landscape-based principles of interconnectivity that the poem performs at the moment of its encounter with a reader, the classroom itself becomes ‘part of the landscape’, and part of a dynamic process of ongoing creativity. The same principle of infinite interconnectivity holds for the translator’s office; it too is part of the Caribbean landscape it transmutes from one linguistic medium to another� This is no mere metaphor: semantic fields are materially real fields of force. The Caribbean theory of the landscape that informs Walcott’s poem can thus be read, catachrestically, as a theory of teaching and translation as interconnective performativity or performative interconnectivity� Caribbean theories of space articulated by Anglophones Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris, Hispanophone Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and Francophone Édouard Glissant are always already theories of creativity and productivity. Speaking in terms of economic history, Benítez-Rojo (1992: 5) posits that without deliveries from the Caribbean womb Western capital accumulation would not have been sufficient to effect a move, within a little more than two centuries, from the so-called Mercantilist Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Against this active historical participation in the accumulation of Euro-American wealth, the historiography of the imposition of a ‘linear’ time of slavery-driven productivity, initially plantationist but seguing gradually into industrialist time (Atkins 1988; Johnson 2000), decisively erased traces of the prior temporalities of the Caribbean region and its indigenous inhabitants, producing ‘le néant d’une non-histoire imposée’ [‘the void of an imposed nonhistory’] (Glissant 1981a: 133; 1989: 65). Thus, for instance, the doubled ‘morne … mountain’ of Landscape, teaching and translating 243 Walcott’s sonnet (lines 3, 9) that Martens partly erases is ‘is a locus of entanglements where social cataclysms, ecological disturbances, land dispossession, political awareness, and cultural agency are constantly interrogated’ (Curtius 2016: 523); the doubling of the terms gestures towards the ‘multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement ’ that is inscribed in the landscape while being resolutely obliterated by capital’s amnesia (Mbembe 2001: 14). The Caribbean, like so many other once-colonized regions of the Global South, has been subjected to what Deborah Bird Rose (2012: 128), referring to the Australian Indigenous context, terms ‘aeonicide’, the annihilation of temporal diversity� Both translation and teaching, if pursued in the spirit of Walcott’s poem, inherently resist this ‘aeonicide’ by perpetuating the continuity of ongoing cosmic creativity� For Glissant (1981a: 133; 1989: 65), the task of the writer is to contribuer à rétablir sa chronologie tourmentée, c’est-á-dire à dévoiler la vivacité féconde d’une dialectique réamorcée entre nature et culture antillaises. [contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology: that is, to reveal the creative energy of a dialectic reestablished between nature and culture in the Caribbean.] This is a positive project of affirmation. Its manifestation, however, initially assumes the garb of negativity. Glissant (1981a: 254; 1989: 145) explains that ‘Confronter le temps, c’est donc nier ici la linéarité’ [‘To confront time is, therefore, for us to deny its linear structure’]� This project involves a head-on collision with Euro-American time that produces genuine shock-waves: Notre quête de la dimension temporelle ne sera donc ni harmonieuse ni linéaire. Elle cheminera dans une polyphonie de chocs dramatiques, au niveau du conscient comme de l’inconscient, entre des données, des ‘temps’ disparates, discontinues, dont le lié n’est pas évident. (Glissant 1981a: 199) [‘[o]ur quest for the dimension of time [which] will therefore be neither harmonious or linear. Its advance will be marked by a polyphony of dramatic shocks, at the level of the conscious as well as the unconscious, between incongruous phenomena or episodes so disparate that no link can be discerned. (Glissant 1989: 106-7)] At one level, this historical incongruity or disparity is the result of the dislocation of historical trajectories and the erasure of memory. Caribbean collective memory is a fractured memory because the Caribbean is a social space reposing upon the violent capture of African peoples from diverse cultures and regions and their forced transportation to a slave world. Yet there is another facet of this disparity whose import is more integrative� The fact that Walcott’s already tautological ‘morne … mountain’ (line 3, 9) is doubly doubled, for instance, is 244 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott no accident� To this extent, the mountain is symptomatic of an extraordinary project of cultural montage, collage or bricolage: the culturally-driven re-connection of the human and the natural, via a ‘Poétique de la Relation’ (Glissant 1990) [‘poetics of relation’ (Glissant 1998)] so as to restore ‘la durée’ [‘duration’] (Glissant 1981a: 254; 1989: 144), a spatio-temporal continuity of the human-natural world� This Caribbean world, a co-producer of a Euro-American modernity subjected to the violently coercive streamlining of a single history (what Harris [1983: 12] calls ‘ego-historical bias’), never ceases, despite the massive collective amnesia lamented by so many Caribbean critics, to be a matrix of autochtonous temporalities as well. Thus for Harris (ibid: 29) the Caribbean is a ‘womb of evolutionary space’; for him, the restorative work of the imagination is not so much prophetic as an intuitive capacity to secrete parallels into infinity, backward and forward, outward and inward, as it were, in the womb of space. (ibid: 116) Harris’ Caribbean ‘womb of space’, which is also a cultural bridge or arc, a sort of geophysical pelvic cavity, encompassing and persisting within the Amerindian zone (ibid: 6, 24), exactly describes the nexus of synchronic interconnection and diachronic generativity performed in Walcott’s sonnet� Similarly, Glisssant (1981a: 255; 1989: 145) notes that as a general rule that ‘l’élément formellement déterminant dans la production littéraire, c’est ce que j’appellerais la parole du paysage’ [‘the inescapable shaping force in our production of literature is what I would call the language of landscape’]. Speaking more personally, Glissant (1981a: 255; 1989: 146) states that ‘la parole de mon paysage est d’abord forêt, qui sans arrêt foisonne’ [‘the language of my landscape is primarily that of the forest, which unceasingly bursts with life’]� The forest is a synecdoche of a ‘Chaos-monde’, a ‘Chaos-world’ (Glissant 1997: 114-5), a natural generator of orderly-disorderly plenitude. For Benítez-Rojo (1992: 11), by contrast, it is the sea that epitomizes the Caribbean space: the culture of the Caribbean, at least in its most distinctive aspects, is not terrestrial but aquatic, a sinuous culture where time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar. The Caribbean is the natural and indispensable realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double-folds, of fluidity and sinuosity. It is, in the final analysis, a culture of the meta-archipelago: a chaos that returns, a detour without purpose, a continual flow of paradoxes; it is a feedback-machine with asymmetrical workings, like the sea, the wind, the clouds, the uncanny novel, the food chain, the music of Malaya, Gödel’s theorem and fractal mathematics� Landscape, teaching and translating 245 Sea and land and mountain, the morne of Suzanee and Aimé Césaire’s poetics (Curtius 2016) and the duplicated ‘Morne … Mountain’ of Walcott’s poem (lines 3, 9) are also interlinked facets of the ‘folds and double-folds’ of a single productive Caribbean world that recalls Brathwaite’s (1999: 34) idea of a ‘tidalectics’ constituted by ‘a ripple and a two tide movement’. The Caribbean world is not a totality, however, because it is not closed: as a meta-archipelago it has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a centre� Thus the Caribbean flows outward past the limits of its own sea with a vengeance. (Benítez-Rojo 1992: 4) This decentered and boundary-less space of productivity displays precisely that fluid topography because its origin, so to speak, is everywhere. At every site where a productive interaction between several entities takes place, transformation occurs: The balanced artifice of nature—stalemate sun, sail as pinned butterfly, butterfly as photogenic mask upon flesh-and-blood—may suddenly unfreeze into miraculous beauty within contrasting stillnesses that unsettle each other. (Harris 1983a: 134) The Caribbean is an endless realm of productivity and recursive, chaos-oriented, non-linear generativity—generativity both synchronic (via limitless connectivity) and diachronic (via the proliferating connectivities of strange attractors). What Glissant (1981a: 255; 1989: 146) calls the ‘structure mobile de ses paysages’ [‘mobile structure of one’s own landscape’] are topographically mobile because they are everywhere, and everywhere interconnected, and morphogenetically mobile because they are in themselves mutable, transformative by their very nature� Because the space of the Caribbean is so geographically hyperbolic— its ultima Thule may be found on the outskirts of Bombay, near the low and murmuring shores of Gambia, in a Cantonese tavern of circa 1850, at a Balinese temple, in an old Bristol pub, in a commercial warehouse in Bordeaux at the time of Colbert, in a windmill beside the Zuider Zee, at a café in a barrio of Manhattan, in the existential saudade of an old Portuguese lyric says Benítez-Rojo (1992: 5)—it also encompasses any classroom or any translator’s workshop where a sonnet arising out of its sea-forest-mountain topographies is being read or translated� Because this space is extensive, its productivity recursive, chaos-oriented and non-linear, generativity will also resurge in the space of teaching and translation� The spaces of the classroom or the translator’s bureau no longer function according to the ‘additive’ temporal logic of linear historicism (Benjamin 1991, I-2: 702; 1999: 254) that underpins the ‘accumula- 246 Chapter 11: Translating Transformation: Teaching and Translating Walcott tive’ ‘banking’ model of education derived from notions of linear ‘development’ (Friere 1972; Ferguson 2005). Rather, they function according to an embodied notion of participatory location in the world (Friere 1972: 49). That participation, which locates the teaching/ learning or translating subject at a node of the ‘womb’-like network of spacetime, ‘ne [permet] pas à un être humain de se comprendre et d’être soi-même’ [does not ‘allow a human being to understand himself and to be himself ’], as Glissant (1981a: 326; 1989: 171) observes in a note ‘Sur l’enseignement des littératures’ [‘On the teaching of literatures’]� This is the model of the genius-author-individual consecrated by the Nobel Prize that in turn underpins the separatist poetics embodied in Martens’ translation. On the contrary, the network of spacetime assimilates the human to a process of transformation that takes place at the connective nodes between multispecies human-nonhuman actantial entities. If, as Simondon (1964: 260) claims, ‘The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (qtd in Deleuze 1990: 103), then pedagogical and translative generativity takes place in ‘limit-situations’ that decentre the human, placing it at a transformative ‘edge’, but by the same token throws up planetary ‘generative themes’ (Friere 1972: 71-7). This pedagogy and translatology of a creative network of spacetime generativity does not forget the reality of separatist practices in Global South societies, as evinced in literal form by Brathwaite’s (1999: 251-2) gruesome tale of a woman whose arm is chopped off by hit-and-run thieves stealing her bracelet; nor does it ignore the ‘network of issues’ that continue to dog Global South societies and thus must be addressed by ‘teacherly texts’ (Garuba 2017). Rather, it does so by activating, in the classroom and the translator’s office themselves, the ‘animist materialism’ and its connective spirit that also pervades such texts (Garuba 2003). The space of pedagogy or translation, when assimilated to a generalized Caribbean topography of ceaseless interconnective transformation, takes on a temporality of transformative ‘durée’ [‘duration’] (Glissant 1981a: 254; 1989: 144). That ‘duration’ participates in the ceaseless productivity of the tropics’ ‘[s]aison unique … dont le lancinement’ [‘unvarying season … whose obsessive rhythm’], in Glissant’s (1981a: 199; 1989: 106) vision of Caribbean culture, ‘fonde une économie nouvelle des structures d’expression’ [‘creates a new economy of the expressive forms’]. Glissant contrasts this infinite network of transformation, manifest in productive ‘duration’, to the discontinuous temporalities of European ‘zones d’écriture neutre que viennent périodiquement traverser des fulgurances, des éclats qui transportent et “révèlent” ’ [‘neutral zones of narrative that are periodically crossed by explosive flashes that arouse the emotions and bring “revelation” ’] (1981a: 199; 1989: 106). It is significant for the pedagogical and translational theories sketched in this chapter, and exemplified by a sonnet Landscape, teaching and translating 247 by Walcott, that Glissant maliciously notes: ‘Un exemple probant de cette technique et le sonnet européen, avec sa pointe finale qui à la fois résume et dépasse le contenu manifeste du poème’ [‘A conclusive illustration of this technique is the European sonnet, with its final thrust that both summarizes and transcends the clear meaning of the poem’] (1981a: 199; 1989: 106). The pedagogic temporality corresponding to a European sonnet taught within the ‘additive’ temporality of linear progress would be that of a rhetoric of learning ‘goals’ and, ‘achievement levels’, that ‘sum up’ the material learnt and ‘transcend’ the context of learning� The same translative temporality would be bound up in an instrumental temporality of ‘delivery times’, ‘contractual obligations’ and ‘customer satisfaction’ with ‘outputs’ that then circulate smoothly through a (generally electronic) global marketplace. But Walcott’s sonnet, when implemented as a teaching text, neither ‘summarizes’ nor ‘transcends’, to reiterate Glissant’s reproach. The poem’s last line doesn’t summarize, looking over the prior discursive action from a distance, despite the deceptive stanza break that appears to leave it as an isolated coda. Granted, Walcott’s final line does rehearse a belated subordinating re-turn (literally, a volta ) to the speaking self, but it is one in which the self is in fact assimilated to the natural world� But the real volta , in its general function within the European sonnet as the site of an ironic caesura is difficult to locate in Walcott’s work. Certainly the last line, with its integrative rather than reifying force, does not do this work. Nor is there any other clear point at which a genuine volta might be situated� The reason for this is simple: instead of a caesura that produces a commodified product (whether that of the individual poetic subject or the reified ‘curricular unit’ or ‘assessable output’ on the global skills-market), Caribbean spacetime is structured as a fold or wave (the ‘goose-skin of the water’), and undulating continuity of interwoven creativities. Clearly, then, the sonnet does not ‘transcend’, to return to Glissant’s dismissive account of the European genre. For the self is merely one node, the least important perhaps, in a network of transformative interaction and crossings, whose task it is, in the literary classroom and the translator’s office, to instantiate moments of learning and transformation as interconnected generativity. It is high time we got back into the forgotten rhythms of this sort of class-time. And similarly, translation must rememorize its role as a participant in networks of transformative, translational transmutation that are coeval with the dynamism of the natural world itself� Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone Two anti-racism slogans caught my attention when, as an academic labour migrant to Germany, I took up my first job in a bilingual high-school in Münster in the green flatlands of Westphalia. The first slogan asserted: ‘Alle Menschen sind Ausländer—Fast überall’ [‘Everyone is a foreigner—almost everywhere’]. The second was a plea: ‘Ausländer—lasst uns mit den Deutschen nicht allein! ’ [‘Foreigners, please don’t leave us alone with the Germans! ’]. The first slogan asked any person who regarded heror himself as a native threatened by a flood of foreign invaders to imagine in how many other countries they would find themself in the place of the resented foreigner. The implication was: imagine you too live in a glasshouse and then you’ll have second thoughts about throwing stones� The second involves a more complex act of imagination. It stages an act of address by a subject that imagines itself separate from the Germans but apprehensive at the prospect of having to share an ethnically purified space with them. Yet that speaker, by virtue of the language it speaks (and by virtue of its interpellation of non-native speakers, ‘Ausländer’ [‘foreigners’]) is most probably German. The language itself, and the subject positions it inherently makes available for speech, becomes an actor in a drama of national ambivalence� The speaking subject dis/ identifies with (or from? ) its fellow compatriots while remaining tacitly joined to them by virtue of the language it speaks. The subject’s very condition of possibility of self-articulation—the language—is the site for a paradoxical articulation of disarticulation� The second slogan rehearses a complex set of processes of linguistic-ethnic subjectivation that eschew any simple compartmentalization into identification or disidentification—precisely because the site of the one is the condition of possibility of the other� Ausländisch für Deutsche—Foreignish for Germans Just such a complex linguistic playing-out of almost oxymoronic national selfhood and a counterpoised foreignness is staged in the title of a recent volume intended for language teachers in German schools, entitled Ausländisch für Deutsche (Colombo-Scheffold, Fenn, Jeuk and Schäfer 2008). Like the slogans 250 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone listed above, the title of this volume is also a provocation� The title chiastically reverses ‘Deutsch für Ausländer’ (‘German for foreigners’, an extremely old-fashioned term for what would now be called ‘Deutsch als Fremdsprache’ [German as a Foreign Language, usually abbreviated to ‘DaF’]) into the sparringly playful ‘Ausländisch für Deutsche’ [‘Foreignish for Germans’]. This provocation works in several ways. First, the ‘Ausländisch’ playfully transforms undifferentiated mass of ‘others’ (which under still-extant citizenship regulations may well include secondor even third-generation German-born holders of overseas passports) into a similarly undifferentiated linguistic block. In this way, the term gently pokes fun at the tendency to homogenize otherness in what is effectively the flip side of a homogenization of national selfhood. At the same time, however, via the jocular lack of differentiation within a putatively singular ‘Ausländisch’, these foreign languages paradoxically gain in visibility by receiving this homogenizing label. Homogeneity implies a degree of hegemony previously reserved for German alone� The volume then goes on, however, to deconstruct such homogeneity by detailing in its successive chapters a number of languages that are spoken by a large number of school children with a view to making their principle lineaments visible to German teachers� The intention of such information is that these languages be mobilized, at least implicitly, as teacherly knowledge and at the very least as a presence within the teacher’s cognitive ‘peripheral vision’, within the teaching of German. The book’s intention is to assist in the learning of German by pointing up, for example, structures immanent to the ‘ethnic’ or ‘community’ languages that may cause interferences in the learning process� By virtue of this double strategy, a new version of cross-cultural language teaching is thus brought to bear upon the pedagogy of German as national language� This is a not insignificant gesture, because it implies that German as a hegemonic national language is no longer a zone of homogenous native-speaker competence, but pervaded, at its core, by processes of Second Language Acquisition� To suggest as much is a radical move, because it muddies the once clear demarcation between, for instance, ‘Deutsch’ and ‘Deutsch as Fremdsprache’ (DaF) or ‘Deutsch als Zweitsprache’ (DaZ), with the quite distinct populations of speakers and/ or learners that were thus implied—and, via institutional practices, produced. German begins to emerge, in this vision, as a ‘contact zone’, as a domain of internal translation� Second, this chiastic inversion suggests that Germans need to learn a foreign language in their own country—thereby taking literally, albeit in a playful manner, the paranoid reactions on the part of those natives who feel they are being ‘überfremdet’ [‘overrun by foreignness’ or ‘foreigners’]. It implies, as Foreign languages in the German-language school 251 in some sort of bizarre imaginary scenario, that the Germans are new arrivals in a strange land, and that the foreign natives are offering beginners’ courses for the untutored Germans. This is, in effect, what the volume does. It offers a series of brief overviews of some of the principle languages that may be spoken by the roughly 30 per cent of children in a German primary school who do not speak German, or speak German and another language. (As the editors willingly acknowledge [ibid: 8], the list is by no means complete: the collection of twelve major languages neglects some important tongues such as Polish, Serbian, Kurdish and Portuguese, all of which are missing for reasons pertaining to the availability of lecturers in the series out of which the volume originally emerged; a decade after the volume’s publication, Arabic would also have to be named as a significant lacuna; Krifka et al. 2014 rectifies this.) The volume’s title thus shifts, and perhaps even inverts the relationship between (domestic, maternal-language) interior and (foreign, L2) exterior, placing itself on the border as a sort of facilitating instance, with teachers and school pupils figuring the co-translator-mediators that it seeks to assist in their own self-transformation. Here too, the volume begins to imagine Germany as a ‘contact zone’, a meeting place between many languages. More radically, it re-envisions the cultural and linguistic topography of the classroom itself� This is quite radical gesture, if one considers the current imaginaries of the classroom as a homogenous zone where foreign languages impinge only marginally upon an undisturbed native-speaker harmony. The once-homogenous German classroom begins to emerge as a space of translativity. In an educational environment in which ‘der monolinguale Habitus der multilingualen Schule’ [‘the monolingual mindset of the multilingual school’] has not significantly changed since Gogolin (1994) coined the term, Ausländisch für Deutsche is a daring but also pragmatic attempt to rethink the cultural and linguistic fabric of German classrooms (and German classes in German classrooms) in a radically new way on the basis of a de facto polylingualism and concomitant process of everyday translative activities� Foreign languages in the German-language school The volume’s introduction cautiously works out some of these ideas by incrementally inching forward from affirmations of common sense to successively more radical implications for the teaching of languages in German schools. It begins with the uncontroversial assertion of the growing importance of foreign languages within the German school curriculum, buttressed by the ‘Bildungsstandards der Kultusministerkonferenz’ [educational standards set by the com- 252 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone mittee of education ministries of the federal states] and the ‘Bildungspläne der Bundesländer’ [regional curricula set by the respective federal states] (Colombo-Scheffold, Fenn, Jeuk and Schäfer 2008: 7). From there, it goes on to assert the importance of pupils’ first languages as a foundation of learning a second language (without specifying whether German and another language are the respective L1 or L2); on the basis of this notion, it proposes language comparison as a teaching methodology: Zum Beispiel erhielte der Arbeitsbereich ‘Sprache untersuchen’ im Deutschunterricht eine ganz neue Qualität, wenn Schülerinnen und Schüler verschiedener Muttersprachen ihre Fähigkeiten in der Erstsprache mit einbringen und aufgrund eines sprachübergreifenden Vergleichs zu strukturellen Erkenntnissen in der Zweitsprache Deutsch und ggf. in ihren Erstsprachen gelangen. (ibid: 7) [For instance, the learning area ‘Understanding Language’ in the subject German would gain an entirely new quality if pupils with various L1s were to contribute their competencies in these L1s and on the basis of a cross-lingual comparison were to attain structural understandings of German as a Second Language and of their own first languages.] This is in fact a radical suggestion for three reasons� First, until very recently, foreign languages were more or less banned from German classrooms except as ‘subjects’ such as English, German, Spanish. Socalled ‘ethnic languages’ or ‘community languages’ had the status of ‘spoken’ rather than ‘written’, i�e� languages for everyday usage rather than as instruments of academic advancement, and had no place within the classroom� The implicit hierarchy between ‘written’ and ‘spoken’ languages does not merely reflect the status of such languages as official state languages of immediate EU neighbours as opposed to the languages of the erstwhile ‘Gastarbeiter’ and their descendants—languages employed in Germany on the street, in the home, or, say, on building sites� More damagingly, it contains residual traces of the distinction between ‘advanced civilizations’ and ‘primitive cultures’ of ‘people without writing’� On the basis of this multilayered mix of variously explicit pragmatic, hierarchical, and residual colonial assumptions, languages such as Turkish or Serbian/ Croatian/ Bosnian, Polish, or Greek were disqualified from usage in the classroom. (Russian, perhaps the largest language-other-than-German spoken currently in the Federal Republic, with an estimated 3 million speakers, has an ambivalent status. It is a quasi-world language, as suggested in the introduction to this book, consecrated for many years in the erstwhile GDR as the hegemonic lingua franca of the socialist bloc, and still often taught as a residual first foreign language in some of the eastern Bundesländer [federal states]. Yet it is also a ‘community language’ spoken by several generations of ‘Spätaussiedler’, Foreign languages in the German-language school 253 those ethnic Germans from Russia (primarily) who, on the basis of genealogical lineages honoured under the principle of jus sanguinis , were able to immigrate to Germany from the 1980s.) Such hierarchies are now broken up by the book as these banished languages abruptly acquire a structural relevance to the learning of German as a second language. The learning process becomes translational and cosmopolitan. Even more radically, subtle ambivalences within the formulation of the notion of ‘comparative language learning’ open up the possibility that such translational language teaching may even aid the learning of German as L1, that is as a hegemonic native language� Second, alongside an implicit hierarchy of languages that demotes some languages to the status of peripheral dialects within contemporary German society, there is also an internal reason for the banishment of particular languages from the classroom. It would appear that the hegemonic ‘monolingualism’ of the German school system (Gogolin 1994) is also to a large extent based on a principle of teacher control, that the presence of languages other than German (or the English/ French/ Spanish-teacher’s subject-language) would undermine. The streaming principle in the German school system de facto directs children from lower socio-economic strata and from migrant contexts away from university entrance, and thus towards towards non-graduate jobs—and by the same token, away from the teaching profession itself� Teacher training therefore remain, even today, after many decades of multiculturalism, primarily the reserve of middle-class non-migrant school leavers who are unlikely to have expertise in an ‘ethnic’ or ‘community’ language—though the requirements for university entrance will almost always give them reasonable competence in English and another Western European language. The same bias holds for the teaching profession� Under these conditions, how are teachers to maintain their pedagogic authority when pupils are communicating in languages outside their ken, or displaying linguistic competencies that exceed that of the teacher? (Luchtenberg 1999: 91). Admitting ‘ethnic’ or ‘community’ languages to the classroom as a tool of comparative language learning demands that the teacher cede a degree of authority to pupils whose mastery of such languages is superior to hers or his. It introduces the notion of a collaborative language-learning undertaking where competencies complement each other, rather than being concentrated in a single teacherly person. It opens up the possibility of creating a translative space in the classroom where overlapping fragments of linguistic competency butt up against each other, creating multiple contact zones. Such classroom contact zones necessitate constant translative negotiation skills—surely a demanding and strenuous process, but one that will enhance the overall learning experi- 254 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone ence and equip all participants for Germany’s migration future� The classroom becomes a microcosm of a multicultural society in the making, and a foretaste of the future polyglot society that cannot be avoided if the current demographic catastrophe is to be averted� Third, such comparative language learning would de facto give legitimacy to polylingualism as an existing societal qualification that to date possesses little socio-economic value within the hegemonic social imaginary in Germany� The banning of putatively non-academic languages from the classroom is intimately connected with a still largely prevalent refusal to accept the normality of plurilingualism in German schools, and indeed across the German society as a whole (Karakasoglu 2016: 39; Hinnenkamp 2010). While people with a ‘migration background’ (whose families may have lived in Germany for several generations) are expected to be fluent in German, there is little acknowledgement of the utility of ethnic languages on the labour market. Helmut Esser (2009: 84) claims that ‘In keinem Fall gibt es für die “multiple Inklusion” [i.e. multiple cultural affiliations or polylingualism] im Vergleich zur “Assimilation” eine Prämie auf dem Arbeitsmarkt … Die zur Zweitsprache zusätzliche Beherrschung der Muttersprache … bringt auf dem Arbeitsmarkt offenbar so gut wie nichts’ [‘There is absolutely no bonus on the labour market for “multiple inclusion” [i.e. multiple cultural affiliations or polylingualism] in comparison to “assimilation” … Competencies in addition to mastery of [German as] as Second Language are apparently worth next to nothing on the labour market’]. (An academic study from the same period [Meyer 2009] does stress the professional value of multilingualism, but clearly such perceptions filter from academia to everyday practice in the public sphere only very slowly.) The notion of bilingualism as a ‘Störfall’ [‘Problem’] continues to dominate discussions of multilingualism in schools, with one author (Tracy 2014) obviously feeling obliged, only a few years prior to the moment of writing, to demonstrate that multilingualism is not a handicap or a hindrance to social integration, but rather an enrichment and a resource. Despite the tenacity of such prejudices, multilingualism is nonetheless gradually gaining traction in the German educational landscape, at least in theory (BMBF 2015; Jakisch 2015a; 2015b; Krifka et al. 2014; Sauerborn 2017)— though to what extent this is filtering into teacher training and trickling down into (or up from? ) teacher practice in classrooms is another question altogether. Ausländisch für Deutsche accepts the normality of multilingualism in schools, suggesting that a plurality of languages that are de facto present in the classroom be accepted and put to good use. It resonates with other calls for the broader acceptance of ‘Vielfalt als Normalfall’ (Morris-Lange, Wagner and Altinay 2016) [‘Diversity as normal state of affairs’] in the German school system. The volume proposes that languages-other-than-German be introduced as an important part Foreign languages in the German-language school 255 of the learner’s linguistic and pedagogical apparatus, accepting their de facto presence and agency in ‘extracurricular’ or ‘natural’ language learning. In this way, the editors hope, teachers will be able to recognize ‘Fehler von Lernenden als Lernerhypothesen … die eventuell eine Übertragung von Strukturen der Erstsprache auf die Zweitsprache sein können’ (Colombo-Scheffold, Fenn, Jeuk and Schäfer 2008: 7) [‘faults among learners as learning hypotheses … that potentially can be transferred from structures of the L1 to the L2’]. In this way, the ‘broken German’ of the learners gains a linguistic legitimacy that it did not have before. Rather than being seen as a form of linguistic expression characterized merely by deficits, it emerges as a contact zone with its own simultaneously internal and external logic� In a curious but significant redundancy, the editors hasten to add that German itself may evince structures that create learner difficulties, regardless of the speaker’s first language: Der Blick soll nämlich auch dafür geschärft werden, dass es Eigenarten des Deutschen gibt, die allen Lernern, relative unabhängig von der jeweiligen Erstsprache, ähnliche oder vergleichbare Schwierigkeiten bereiten können. (ibid: 7) [The approach aims to give a stronger sense of the fact that there are specificities of the German language that, independent of the respective L1 of the learning, may present her or him with similar or comparable difficulties.] This additional sentence would seem to be entirely unnecessary, given the multivectoriality explicitly admitted within earlier statements and the neutrality of status of the respective languages that this assumes. Does this odd concern about repeating their point with regard to German reveal some sort of residual privilege of the national language within the classroom? Or does it suggest quite the opposite? Perhaps we are being taught to unlearn the idea that German constitutes a neutral, default language that is somehow extracted from the complications and interferences that necessarily plagues all other interlingual interactions. In this way, the authors prepare the ground for their more radical conclusion: Ferner könnte eine solche Lehrerkompetenz im Unterricht adäquat zur Geltung kommen, etwa dadurch, dass Lernende angeleitert werden, Deutsch als eine Sprache neben anderen zu sehen und sich so mit einer Außenperspektive auf das Deutsche vertraut zu machen. (ibid: 7) [Moreover, such teacher competencies [in the configuration of comparative language learning] can be given their full significance in the classroom, for instance in aiding learners to see German as one language among others, and thus to become familiar with an external perspective upon German�] 256 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone What is perhaps being suggested here is that the external perspective which belongs to the 20-30% of non-German-as-first-language speakers in Germany schools (Chlosta, Ostermann and Schroeder 2003; Chlosta and Ostermann 2008; Fürstenau, Gogolin and Yagmur 2003; Schroeder 2007; IT NRW 2012) be adopted by German first-language speakers. It suggests that German might become, at least momentarily, a foreign language for its own native speakers. Every speaker of German, regardless of whether her or his status is that of L1or L2-speaker, may find themselves shuttling between German as an utterly familiar ‘native’ language and a ‘foreign’ language full of traps, snags, obscurities and unexplored regions. Every speaker thus becomes a ‘translator in their own German ‘contact zone’. This impression is reinforced, on a broader scale, by an odd anomaly in the collection of languages treated in the volume� This anomaly arises in part from the volume’s double brief, as indicated by the subtitle ‘Sprachen der Kinder—Sprachen im Klassenzimmer’ [‘Children’s Languages—Languages in the Classroom’]. A chapter is devoted to ‘Deutsch als Fremdsprache’ [‘German as a Foreign Language’ or ‘DaF’] (Colombo-Scheffold 2008: 59-71). DaF bifurcates uneasily in this chapter into two linguistic objects� On the one hand, and most obviously, DaF is a mode of teaching the German language (thus falling under the category ‘Sprachen im Klassenzimmer’ [‘Languages in the Classroom’]). The thrust of the chapter is, in line with the other chapters in the volume, to set up an interlingual comparison that is designed to aid language teaching under the aegis of ‘language awareness’. Here the comparison is not between German and the respective foreign languages dealt with in the volume, but with generic characteristics of the German language that tend to give L2 learners across the board difficulties. German as a Foreign Language is not being compared with standard German, but rather, appears to be positioned tangentially to all the languages, including German. On the other hand, the inclusion of DaF points not merely to a mode of language teaching, but also a sort of variety . DaF also figures here as a version of German that represents a particular position on a sliding scale of competence (ranging from: no German competence→Deutsch als Fremdsprache [DaF], usually taught overseas→Deutsch als Zweitsprache, or second language, usually acquired by children with a migration background living in Germany→Deutsch als Muttersprache, or as hegemonic native and national language). Thus, in a strange way, Deutsch als Fremdsprache may also be a shadowy quasi-language that also constitutes one of many languages spoken by children in the classroom. It is closely related to ‘Deutsch als Zweitsprache’, thereby making up one of the ‘Sprachen der Kinder’ [‘Children’s Languages’]. Colombo-Scheffold confirms this odd bifurcation of DaF into mode and variety , and then concludes by noting that such a bifurcation is also a blurring, Translation in the classroom 257 which tends to contaminate the German language as whole, making it an irreducible ‘contact zone’. She stresses that DaF constitutes ‘der gesteuerte Erwerb der deutschen Sprache im Fremdsprachenunterricht (FU), der in einem Land stattfindet, in dem kein Deutsch—zumindest als L1—gesprochen wird’ [‘the coordinated acquisition of the German language in language foreign language teaching taking place in a country in which German is not spoken as an L1’] (Colombo-Scheffold 2008: 59). But almost immediately, she admits that, ‘Obschon eine solche Definition auf den ersten Blick sehr präzise und eindeutig ist, lässt sich bei den Lernerbiografien nicht immer eindeutig festlegen, ob es sich um DaF oder DaZ handelt’ [‘Although such a definition appears at first glance precise and unequivocal, learner biographies do not always allow one to distinguish between DaF or DaZ’] (Colombo-Scheffold 2008: 60). DaF may not be easily consigned to a space outside the national body politic, but tends to contaminate the majority, hegemonic national language in unexpected ways� In this way, paradoxically, German becomes a language that, in part at least, is foreign to itself, and each enunciator of that language a ‘translator’ in a micro-‘contact zone’. Translation in the classroom Any pedagogy that mobilizes linguistic comparison so as to facilitate language-learning by the establishment of a meta-linguistic discourse, however rudimentary and quotidian, is implicitly introducing translation into the language classroom� Translation has been pilloried for many decades now as a mode of language teaching that supposedly dominated language-teaching in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries but was succeeded from the 1960s onwards by language-teaching methods increasingly oriented towards everyday communication. In fact, as Anthony Pym (2018) has shown, none of these assumptions are unproblematic. Even nineteenth-century language-teaching methods also included communicative methodologies alongside the implementation of translation-based teaching; and contemporary communicative methodologies continue to employ varieties of translation in the language classroom, usually, however, without recognizing or acknowledging them as such: ‘The real surprise, though, was the extent to which teachers reported using translation in the classroom, in some way and in some places� That is, translation is being used but it is not being talked about very openly’ (Pym 2018: 212). When asked about the value of translation in the language classroom, languages teachers generally claim that they teach communicative skills, not translation� But upon closer examination, it becomes evident that what they 258 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone mean by ‘translation’ is ‘literal’ or ‘word for word’ translation (Pym 2016: x-xii). Translation is however a much more complex and variegated activity than this conception allows, leading Pym to give some support to the adoption of other terms for translation such as the German ‘Sprachmittlung’, or ‘linguistic mediation’, or ‘translanguaging’ (ibid: xii). Pym (2016: 24) employs a typology of ‘translation solutions’ that starts from a French-Canadian palette including ‘calque’, ‘transposition’, ‘adaptation’ etc. (Vinay and Darbelnet 1972: 55) but then embraces a number of other alternatives better suited to other languages� Pym’s usage of such typologies of ‘translation solutions’ widens the spectrum of what might be understood as translation, and thus opens up the possibility of recognizing a large number of translative activities that do in fact constantly take place in the classroom, including ‘gist’ versions and paraphrase-like explanations (Pym 2016: xii). Indeed, Pym suggests that one reason why German language learners are among the highest achievers in the EU is that despite the overt disavowal of ‘translation’ by German language teachers—who in fact mean by this ‘basically literal translation, as close to the foreign text as possible’ (ibid: xii)—they avail themselves freely of translation-related activities� Pym quotes them as saying ‘We don’t do translation activities. Not anymore. Now, we do mediation activities, Sprachmittlung ’ (2018: 212). Thus language teachers in German schools inculcate basic reading, writing and speaking skills, alongside ‘mediation’, which is defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001, qtd in Pym 2018: 211) in such a way as to make it synonym for a complex of translative activities: The learner does not simply acquire two distinct, unrelated ways of acting and communicating� The language learner becomes plurilingual and develops interculturality� The linguistic and cultural competences in respect of each language are modified by knowledge of the other and contribute to intercultural awareness, skills and knowhow� They enable the individual to develop an enriched, more complex personality and an enhanced capacity for further language learning and greater openness to new cultural experiences. Learners are also enabled to mediate, through interpretation and translation , between speakers of the two languages concerned who cannot communicate directly. (Pym’s emphasis) Glossing these definitions, Pym’s (2018: 213) concluding commentary extends the implications of translation in the classroom far beyond its immediate pedagogical context, well into the fabric of society at large: The Common Framework has as its aim the education of a polyglot intercultural citizen, someone is able to use more than one language and can move successfully Translation in the classroom 259 between them, both individually and for others� This is a sophisticated, humanist understanding of what language learning is all about. It is not a question of using translation because it can be fun; this deeply concerns what it means to live in a multilingual democracy� Pym makes an argument for translation as a variegated and multifarious activity in the classroom whose effects are contagious, contaminating the underlying structures of social interaction with their essentially dialogical paradigm� These comments, when applied to the German pedagogical situation from which some of Pym’s central examples are taken, sit uneasily with the widespread institutional rejection of linguistic plurality in Germany� This institutional rejection is itself a reflection of a broad conservative consensus that German should be the exclusive language of the public sphere (‘Deutsch ist bei uns die verbindliche Sprache im öffentlichen Leben—keine andere’ [‘German, and no other language, is the language of public life’] [CSU 2016])— and of the private, as the CSU demanded in 2014: ‘Wer dauerhaft hier leben will, soll dazu angehalten werden, im öffentlichen Raum und in der Familie Deutsch zu sprechen’ [‘Whoever wishes to live permanently in Germany should be obliged to speak German in public and at home in the family ’] (CSU 2014; emphasis added). This consensus, however, does not merely fly in the face of de facto social realities, it also contradicts the real practice of many teachers working within the institutions that refuse plurilingualism, just as a very large minority has no truck whatsoever with the xenophobic conceptions of right-wing conservatism, even though a broad band in the ‘liberale Mitte’ [liberal centre] may be more cautious in their allegiances� In fact, this highly contradictory picture regarding language matches up to a large extent with the wider context of immigration policies and multiculturalism in Germany� The state to a large extent denies that Germany is a multicultural polity, has no single body of immigration legislation or anything resembling a coherent immigration policy, and rejects dual nationality. At the same time, Germany is de facto a multicultural society with a reasonable degree of social harmony and the integration of migrants into mainstream society is not entirely unsuccessful, despite evidence for structural discrimination, lack of creative vision (Terkessidis 2017; Plamper 2019: 10), and, depending upon region, racist arson and violence; the somewhat ad hoc patchwork of federal legislation, corporate sponsorship, civil society and everyday coexistence appears to have created a flexible structure for immigration and integration which, if not as spectacularly successful as competing models from the Low Countries or Scandinavia, also appears to have avoided their recent setbacks (Münkler and Münkler 2016: 278-83). Dual nationality, while officially eschewed, is conceded 260 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone in more than half of all naturalizations, with the figures rising constantly, reaching almost 65 % in 2017 (Worbs 2008: 26; Bundesbeauftragte für Integration 2016: 433; Statistisches Bundesamt 2018: 126). The same differentiated and nuanced picture might be painted with regard to the even broader state of democratic institutions and traditions in Germany� The polity is not immune to the general trend towards ‘postdemocratization’ to be seen globally (Crouch 2003; Streeck 2013). At the same time, however, despite the passing of a large amount of quite repressive legislation in the Bundestag with regard to asylum and refugee rights in recent years (Welzer 2017: 41-5), and the passing of the most repressive policing laws since the end of the Nazi period in Bavaria in 2018, with expectation that they will set a precent for subsequent policing legislation in other federal states, democratic traditions remain robust� Right-wing parties, though growing in influence and represented in parliament, are still not in government—in heartening contrast to several European neighbours (Neumann 2017; Welzer 2017). This broader picture of a not entirely coherent, at times contradictory, but for precisely this reason remarkably flexible and indeed resilient cluster of immigration practices may offer a further hint as to why translation is present in the classroom despite all statements to the contrary� In the German context, translation would appear to be an activity that is condemned in the classroom from ‘above’ (or in the explicit statements of teachers rather than in their implicit practices). However, Pym’s comments about the broader societal scope and brief of these translative activities suggests an alternative view on translation in the classroom, as does the general picture of a patchwork of positive social agency across German society as a whole. If hidden and informal pedagogical modes of translation are tacitly implemented by teachers from ‘below’, it is it is also possible that cognate modes of translation, equally informal, may also emerge from ‘below’ in broader society and its everyday interactions, and then filter into the classroom. The ‘trickle-up’ principle at work in schools may, in an optimistic view of things, be complemented by a broader ‘trickle-in’ process from schools’ own immediate environment. One salient site where an infusion of translative activity that runs counter to official rhetoric may happen is bior plurilingualism. The German school system only reluctantly acknowledges the de facto plurilingualism that characterizes the 30 per cent (or perhaps more) of its members, and ignores shading of that in the rest of its pupils (i.e. those who are on the way to becoming to some extent multilingual). Some of these polyglot pupils will be ‘symmetric bilinguals’, ‘children brought up in bilingual situations [who] may have two language centers developing in their brains’ (Pym 2015: 7). However, the majority of plurilingual learners, wherever they may be located on the spectrum of competencies, will be ‘asymmetrical bilinguals’� Something resembling translation operations is Resonance as translation 261 central to heir language-learning: ‘it seems that from the rough evidence we have with regard to strongly asymmetric bilingualism that the second language is learned as an extension of the first … most cases of asymmetric bilingualism, where one language is stronger than the other, involve the use and learning of mapping operations going from L1 into L2. Those mapping operations are very similar to what translators and interpreters seem to use when they perform’ (Pym 2015: 7). Pym’s comments suggest that translation and language-learning may be profoundly coeval with each other, not merely in the classroom and reaching beyond, but in everyday contexts of ‘natural’ language-learning, extending, conversely, back into the classroom. Thus the border-work done by Ausländisch für Deutsche , which neatly inverts the inside-outside relationship of native speakers and foreigners, transpires to be an inversion (and subversion) that is at work in society from the outset. At this juncture it becomes possible to imagine an assemblage of variegated and multilocal translative structures that one could describe as ‘fractal’, embedded at a most intimate level of fundamental cognitive-linguistic structures of inherited language-learning, then reappearing at another stage up a hierarchy of social scales in the language classroom, and making a further appearance at a broader scale of social interactions as a whole. Such scalar conceptualization of translation dovetails with the scalar mosaic of contestation that I discussed at the close of chapter 8. The fractal imagery is probably deceptive, however, because these various instances of translative activity are located in different sites of the socius, some of them being transported between different social situations by speaking subjects (e.g. between family and school, two distinct contexts for language learning), and the broader social fabric of translative activities presumably being created by rather than suspended above individual subjects. It would be more realistic, then, to speak of overlapping and variously embedded or enveloping modes of translation that mutually influence and underpin one another� Resonance as translation Various modes of translation, then, do not merely create various ‘contact zones’; they themselves, taken together, constitute a broad ‘contact zone of contact zones’. Their ragged ‘fractal’ structure indexes a larger structure of universal translation. For a cognate view of what this might mean at the interface between pedagogic and social spaces, I turn to a contemporary developments in German social theory� 262 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone In a recent sketch of a ‘Soziologie der Weltbeziehungen’ [‘Sociology of worldly relationships’] Rosa (2016) has posited ‘resonance’ as the palliative to an increasingly alienated society in thrall to a relentless acceleration of socialand work-life. The acceleration diagnosed in Rosa’s earlier work (2005, 2010, 2013) reposes upon the reciprocal pressure that isolated individuals exert upon each other as they compete to produce or earn or achieve more than their fellows� Our contemporary capitalist ‘Leistungsgesellschaft’ [‘achievement society’ or meritocracy] promises glittering prizes, but only delivers them—if at all—in return for ever-increasing efforts, according to the law of diminishing returns. The ever-diminishing rewards for ever-increasing labour are the result of a global capitalist economy that must constantly increase profits in order to avoid stalling, while refusing to feed those profits back into its labour-base (Lanchester 2018). This upward spiral in performanceand output-pressure translates into a sense of acceleration as more must be achieved in the same amount of time (2016: 36-48). The temporal experience reposes, however, upon a social topography of mutual competitive opposition and consequent atomism and isolation� In the words of Adorno (1971: 101), ‘Die Gesellschaft in ihrer gegenwärtigen Gestalt … beruht nicht … auf Anziehung, auf Attraktion, sondern auf der Verfolgung des je eigenen Interesses gegen die Interessen aller anderen’ [‘Society in its contemporary form … does not repose … upon attraction but rather upon the pursuit of individual interest in opposition to the interests of all others’]� This competition of all against all reposes upon and generates what Adorno (1971: 100-2) calls ‘bürgerliche Kälte’ [‘bourgeois indifference’] (Rosa 2016: 580-1). The solution to this dilemma, Rosa suggests, is not to decelerate (that is, respond to the symptom) but rather, to restore the capped relationships (to fellow humans, to the world) whose antagonistic con-temporariness to oneself is the linchpin of competition (in other words, to respond to the cause of this societal malady) (ibid: 13). Rosa suggests a restoration of ‘resonance’ as the missing link that can provide other ‘goods’ than those promised by the late-capitalist meritocracy or ‘achievement society’ (Rosa 2016: 690-6). Such ‘goods’ are indeed truly other, escaping as they do the logic of commodification in the sense of what de Sousa Santos (2014) calls ‘buen vivir’, the good life, good living, or perhaps the fabric of life itself as a non-commodifiable ‘good’. Resonance, I posit, is Rosa’s name for what I have been calling in this book ‘transformative, translative encounters’. Resonance and/ or translation offers other ‘goods’ that those of our consumer-labour society—ones that contrast strikingly to the law of diminishing returns that dominates capitalist society. Resonance does not provide less and less for more and more work, for unlike capitalist acceleration, its connectivities are generative of other connectivities, producing cascading networks of creativity. The knock-on generativity of cre- Resonance as translation 263 ative connections function in ways that are in almost diametrically inverse proportion to the ever-shrinking profits that accrue to most members of the acceleration society� Rosa’s project is inspirational and quite revolutionary. It is hampered only by the fact that he has recourse to a plethora of metaphors for this connective transformative ‘resonance’ that he has difficulties in otherwise defining except as ‘relational terms’ (Rosa 2016: 281-298). Metaphor stands in here for a processural description that seems to elude him� One telling exception to this lacuna is Rosa’s description of the benefits of a guaranteed basic income, which separates wages and work, thereby restoring a creative relationship to work that in general has been crowded out by an alienating division of labour and steadily increasing performance pressures (ibid: 729-32). The lacuna in the analytic description of the functioning of ‘resonance’ can be filled, I would suggest, by replacing it with the notion of translative creativity� This is exactly the case with the guaranteed basic income. Work is restored to a dynamic, relational encounter between worker and material within a complex network of further relationships. The transactional commodification of labour itself into units of salary disappears from the equation, leaving only a transformational element in the interaction between worker and the work, almost in the sense of an oeuvre . The translative, transformational encounter itself is the reward of work, generating ever-more rewarding relationships of translative, transformational creativity; the wage secures a minimum existential framework for the work but is no longer the driver of the process. Here the dynamics of encounter, strange attraction, exchange, and mutual transformation—all the elements of the quantum theory of translation detailed above—describe exactly what occurs when ‘resonance’ ensues� This becomes all the more relevant in the context of the ‘resonance pedagogy’ that Rosa (2016: 402-20) has proposed in concert with Wolfgang Endres (Rosa and Endres 2016). Here, the notion of ‘knistern’ [literally ‘crackling’, best rendered by ‘buzzing’] replaces that of ‘resonance’, remaining evocative but vague. The relational metaphor only goes part of the way; what is needed is a processual, transformative description of the translative relationship� Once again, translation provides an accurate model for what occurs in the ‘crackling’, ‘buzzing’ classroom. In the encounter between students, teacher and text and/ or other teaching materials, the primary text is translated, in a transformative encounter in which numerous actants participate, into a new version differently accessible to the students, who themselves are transformed both by the encounter itself, and by the newly emergent text that they have appropriated via the act of translation� 264 Chapter 12: The German Classroom as a Contact Zone The processuality of these translative relationships is expansive in spatio-temporal terms (i.e. cascading translative encounters provoke other transformative encounters, and so on) and thus such translative relationships cannot but become political—even in the classroom. Rosa recognizes that the societal acceleration and the imperative to increase achievement and output has longue durée meta-systemic consequences such as landgrabbing and environmental depletion (Rosa 2016: 711). How does ‘resonance’ generate a politically cogent response to such large-scale ills? Unsurprisingly, Rosa is highly critical of privatized ‘Resonanzoasen’ [‘oases of resonance’]. To the extent that they individualize and commodify the ‘resonance axis’, they cap the scope of ‘resonance’ and thus are completely apolitical (ibid: 372). By merely palliating the ‘bürgerliche Kälte’ [‘bourgeois indifference’] (Adorno 1971: 100-2) and isolation brought about by competition via the panacea of equally isolated oases, they effectively reinforce its structures. What is needed instead are ‘[k]onkrete Möglichkeiten des Widerstands’ (ibid: 103) [‘concrete possibilities of resistance’] to this reifying, competitive isolation that do not merely work via critique, or via cognitive awareness-raising, but are embedded in the positive experience of transformative encounters between actants at many different levels and in many media. These instances of mutually translative connectivity would be multi-scalar (ranging from the nano-material, via the interpersonal, local, regional, national, continental, right through to the global, planetary) and multi-dimensional (including the forms of practice or activism ranging from the sensual-material, the corporeal-libinidinal, via the personal or intellectual, through to the explicitly political). The classroom, as one instantiation of such connectivities, would thus become an open-sided launching pad for a cascade of interlocking, resonating, translative encounters between languages, between the users of languages, and between the texts that encode languages� The classroom as a space of material-linguistic translative encounters becomes, in this way, a platform that would allows us to re-integrate the pedagogical-linguistic micro-analysis into the larger argument of the book, which posits that interlingual translation is a subset of cosmic transformation� Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2007: 281), a roofless classroom in the short-lived Biafra of the Nigerian civil war continues to function as a pedagogical space after a Nigerian Air Force raid: Olanna … looked up often at the clear sky to search for bomber jets … About a quarter of her class attended school. She taught them about the Biafran flag. They sat on wooden planks and the weak morning sun streamed into the roofless classroom as she unfurled Odenigbo’s cloth flag and told them what the symbols meant. The classroom is open to the sky, to the war, and to the larger fabric of global politics that leaves Biafra to its own devices as massacres and famine take their toll on the population� Primary school teaching is assimilated to the symbolic politics of racism (the Nigerian forces are referred to as ‘vandals’ [ibid: 281]), and will later cede altogether to the true business of war when the school doubles as a hospital. Adichie’s vignette of school-cum-civil-war anticipates upon the fraught place of the school in what, half a century later, has become a frequently evoked ‘global civil war’ (Berardi 2016) with children as the greatest sufferers (Graham et al. 2019). But it also imposes, in a gruesome manner, the imbrication of education and its symbolic logics within geopolitical conflicts that are generally excluded from the explicit agenda of teaching. Aidichie’s vignette offers an extreme version of an opening of the classroom that I explore, in this chapter, in a more benign and pedagogical form, albeit against the background of global violence and an accelerating climate crisis� Like theatres, classrooms have a fourth wall. The classical proscenium stage has a transparent boundary between the audience and the actors, which allows spectatorship but imposes a reality/ fiction demarcation vital to the theatrical illusion. Not dissimilarly, the classroom has a blackboard (or perhaps more frequently today, a whiteboard, or maybe even a smartboard). That surface of pedagogical inscription is where much teaching actually happens, rendering tangible the classroom’s functioning as a space of modelling� Modelling is crucial to teaching: in the classroom, learners practice at a safe distance from the real world skills that they will need later in real professional scenarios; the classroom, like the theatre, is a protected space of ‘modelling’ play (that is, its activities have the structure of real-world activities, say, maths or writing, but can be practiced without real-world consequences [Bateson 1974: 177-93]). Cu- 266 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation riously enough, however, the blackboard that enables pedagogical ‘modelling’ or educational ‘play’ by separating the classroom from the world, may also by the same token hinder just that pedagogical practice. The blackboard can have a ‘segregative’ effect, rendering the very real connections between pedagogy and the world so opaque as to reduce that teaching to a reified inculcation of mere ‘skills’. The transitive, translational, and ideally transformational interface that is the classroom and the world thereby becomes an atranslational frontier—across which skills may be transported much as one would transport reified, packaged commodities. When separation gets the upper hand and translation fails, I suggest in what follows, this paradoxical mixture of connection and separation becomes analogical to, as a bad black/ white(-board) pun might intimate, and perhaps structurally related to racism (Arndt 2012; Arndt, Thierl and Walther, eds 2001; Arndt and Ofuatey-Alazard, eds 2011). Racism can be defined as an artificially imposed differentiation, based upon arbitrary but easily identifiable (or imaginable) markers of difference, which occludes deeper socio-political connections. Racism is a rhetoric of difference that separates out populations that share the same spaces—populations that are all too often closely linked to each other by manifold connections: history, intermarriage, migration, competition for scarce resources. Discrimination seeks to occlude these connections, thereby aiding and at the same time obfuscating the complex functioning of contemporary global capitalism (Mbembe 2017). In this chapter, I wish to explore the ways in which, by reconnecting the often lost links between the classroom and the world, we may be able to contribute, at least indirectly, to laying bare the deeper global connections that are elided by the speciously differentiating structures of racism. My thesis is that a direct opposition to or contradiction of racism, while remaining a moral imperative and civil duty, can only go a limited way towards changing the underlying structures of racism. What is needed instead, I suggest, not in lieu of but alongside an oppositional condemnation, is a translative practice of connections—in the first place cognitive, then existential, and finally, what I will be calling ‘affective’. Translation, in this context, would take the elements of the world that we perceive in a fragmented, disconnected manner and put them together, just as translation links up apparently discrete linguistic realms. Translation is a fundamentally connective activity that produces a mutual transformation of the elements set in relation to one another and of the entire field that surrounds the translational nexus� This translational activity would thus transform the elements of knowledge themselves (an element-in-relation is necessarily different from the same element-in-isolation), as well as the position of the ‘translator’, by virtue of recalibrating the entire field and the relationships and its actants. In addition to a sturdy condemnation of racism in all its forms, a positive strategy, Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation 267 one that resists racism’s own separative impulses by operating a dynamic and translative reconnection of causes and effects, of identities and practices, may be the apposite epistemological or educational response to the current multi-crisis and the racist backlash that goes hand in hand with it. The increasingly acute nature of what is becoming evident as a contemporary global multi-crisis makes it imperative to pose such questions� My concern is how to mobilize the resources of a translative pedagogy to confront a global multi-crisis that I refract across the German context in which I write. This is a context marked by the rise of racist violence (Amnesty International 2016) and a deep-seated refusal of immigration (whether labour or forced; Emnid 2017; Mauk 2016; Terkessidis 2017: 27) that is only gradually ceding to reluctant acceptance (Faus and Storks 2019) in a country that—paradoxically— nonetheless has a reasonably pragmatic, if not perfect approach to migration policies (Münkler and Münkler 2016: 278-83), and welcomed a large number of refugees in 2015 (Bade 2016: 73, 76)—many of whom however have since been expelled under increasingly draconian anti-asylum legislation (Welzer 2017: 41-5); it is also marked by a widespread reluctance to admit that demographic transformations and structural weaknesses in the labour market cannot be solved without recourse to migration (Bonin 2014), and refusal to acknowledge the sheer dimensions of the future immigration waves that will have to be dealt with in coming decades (NIC 2017: 10, 39, 87; Nealon 2016: 121). All these phenomena are tolerated and perhaps even encouraged by the political elite� Germany is a nation whose political class shows little evidence of truly creative or innovative vision with regard to these imminent challenges (Bögeholz 2010); the coalition of CDU/ CSU and SPD—i.e. moderate, centrist right and left—under the leadership of Angela Merkel appears to have sacrificed innovative policies for business-as-usual in order to resolve its own differences and in order not to unsettle electorates (Hassel 2017; Meaney 2017). All this has real effects in terms of racism in everyday life, as often artificial and contingent differences are exacerbated rather than social solidarity being reinforced� In the light of this variegated situation within Germany, itself driven by geopolitical multi-crises, I focus on the educational sector to analyse both problems and solutions. I take the university and senior high school classrooms, central hubs of adolescent socialization and citizen education and suggest one possible response to an immensely complex and intractable raft of problems that expresses itself in a spike of racist attitudes and actions. This chapter, like much of his book, is primarily conceptual and exploratory, even experimental, in its tenor; I make no pretences to offer rigorous empirical or historical research, but rather, present these ideas in the spirit of a manifesto in a time and place that is urgently in need of ‘ Neue Ideen für die Einwanderungsgesellschaft ’ [‘new ideas 268 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation for a society of immigration’] (Terkessidis 2017). For, ‘ “Das Deutsche” ist immer noch eine Leerstelle, es fehlt immer noch an Elementaren—an neuen Begriffen, Konzepten und Geschichten’ (Plamper 2019: 10) [‘ “Germanness” is still a gap, we still lack the most basic elements—new terms, concepts and histories’]. In this chapter, I consider the ways a tactic of diagnostic reconnection may be carried out in the university classroom where future high school language teachers are trained. I build on the model of transformative translation that I have explored in the theoretical chapters of part 1, the text analytical case studies of part 2, and the two previous chapters of part 3 that have sketched a translational pedagogy. In this chapter, I move away from the interlingual notion of translation that has underpinned my reflections in chapters 11 and 12, towards a notion of translation as transformative encounter and interrelationship that I posited as the fundamental dynamic of the cosmos in part 1. Translation thus appears less in the specific interlingual guise it donned in part 2 of this book, rejoining the more general notion of fundamental, cosmic translation posited in part 1, though the latter notion is now concretized in pedagogical techniques, in particular the pedagogy of ‘resonance’ evoked in the final section of the previous chapter� This chapter proposes we seize an opportune chance to rethink the axiology of our pedagogical practices in the contemporary moment around the notion of transformative translation—precisely in order to avoid perpetuating an all-tocommon pedagogical separation that, structurally, is uncannily isomorphic with that of racism. Thus, I propose, the contribution of the teaching profession to anti-racist education should not be merely a punctual moral condemnation of racism (a ‘saying’ or ‘telling’ in Wittgenstein’s sense; qtd in Rabinow 2007: 2) rather, it should more properly be a diagnostic practice which lays bare the connections and causalities which underpin the disconnecting dynamic of racism (a ‘doing’ of non-separatism somewhat akin to Wittgenstein’s ‘showing’; ibid: 2). Such translative connectivity would, in its very substance and form, combat the disconnective force of the racism it seeks to combat. I suggest that the classroom should become a forum in which ‘racism’ as a local phenomenon (manifest in the current German system by an increasing level of racist-motivated violence and arson and a disturbing rise in antisemitism) should be put in a larger network of global crises. To that extent, it would become a performative act of self-inclusion that would equip students for locating themselves and their own practices within those networked practices. The purpose of such a diagnostic pedagogy would not be to dictate the stance(s) that students should take, but to lay bare the simultaneously destructive dynamic of racism and the increasingly dichotomized economic structures that make up racism on a global scale. Once students have located themselves in the broader context, it may become possi- Racism as a global phenomenon 269 ble for them to decide how their own activist or professional practices within clearly circumscribed but networked contexts might constitute a reaction and a riposte to racism. The very fact of making connections is not merely a cognitive exercise, but one that establishes lines of ‘affective’ connection—that is, not merely an emotional ‘tie’, but also a linkage that empowers ‘enactive’ engagement (Massumi 2015). It becomes a mode of ‘resonance’ (Rosa 2016). My argument runs as follows: (1) I begin by suggesting that racism is symptom of larger structures of disconnectivity: it separates causes and effects, thereby making it easy to blame outsiders rather than identify systemic factors; (2) a solution to this obfuscation of connections is to reintroduce the making of connections at a systemic level; this is all the more important in an environment where racism on the rise in the wake of increasingly acute and evident global multi-crises and the desire to find scapegoats for the collective malaise; (3) connectivity thus restores translational causalities between opaque global complexes, between students and the world, and between the educational process and the world; exercises in connection, alongside frontal confrontation with racism, may enable students to gain a sense of connectivity and agency that presents possibilities of engagement that also allow one to ‘tinker’, at a micro-level, with single aspects of those relationships; (4) one site where this important work can be done is the classroom—usually, in the German context, a highly reified location that can, however, be opened up to the outside world via translative processes of interrogative critical assemblage and cognitive mapping� Racism as a global phenomenon This chapter posits that racism depends upon a polarization and a freezing of essentially fluid identities, provoked, exacerbated or legitimized by increasingly mercurial economic landscapes and unpredictable political climates� Racism itself is not only a corrosive power to reduce identities to a differentiated essence, a divisive view that needs to replaced by a sense of all that connects people; it also needs to be reconnected, as a phenomenon, to a multitude of other phenomena that do not excuse it, nor explain it away, but rather, explicate it and render explicit the causal networks within which it functions. In the closing pages of Il faut défendre la société [ Society Must be Defended ], Foucault (1997: 228-9; 2003: 257-9) counter-intuitively suggests that the origin of racism lies in colonial genocide� Racism, he posited, was not the driving force of genocide, but its retrospective legitimization, the fabricated rationale that justified and legalized a biopolitical regime of lawlessness that could unleash itself far from the juridical limitations imposed by the European nation-state; it 270 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation was from the genocide in the colonies that the racist war on European territory would subsequently develop� Recent German commentators have suggested, very much in parallel to Foucault, that colonialism and the slave trade were the global projects of primitive accumulation and predatory labour/ resource extraction that needed retrospective legitimization via racism (Arndt 2017). This means, then, that racism is not a phenomenon which should be examined and confronted only in its own right. Rather, it is a reflexive epiphenomenon that refracts a large number of other broader phenomena that could be gathered up under a meta-category of biopolitics and its close connection to war (Mbembe 2016), which produces, when fully fledged, what Mbembe (2003) terms ‘necropolitics’. Within this larger framework of exploitative bio/ necropolitics, Mbembe (2017) identifies the phenomenon ‘becoming black’ as a global process of longue durée racist dehumanization. But as Mbembe’s notion of a creeping, ever-more-encompassing global category of racist ‘thingification’ suggests, such reification is part of a long-term global politics of planetary destruction whose effects are slowly—but ever faster—catching up on us (Mbembe 2013c, 2017). In other words, when we speak about racism, we should place it within a global network of other political issues that may have to do with employment and labour exploitation, slavery (ancient and modern), rising economic inequity, immigration and border regimes, landgrabbing, access to water, food and mineral resources and concomitant conflicts, social unrest, violence, terrorism and the war on terrorism, and so on. Such contextualization is a translative task. It is no easy task, but I posit that it is a vital undertaking for the contemporary humanities, and a central plank in a new universityand school-based pedagogy of planetary awareness and citizenship education that, at least within the German context in which I work, is currently largely absent. This translative activity places reified elements of knowledge in connective relationship to one another so as to change the entire fabric of knowledge and, by the same token, the broader social field all around—a field which will inevitably include everyday processes of racism� To establish an initial framework for starting this process of contextualizing diagnosis, I suggest that the North-South divide is the meta-racism within which all other localized racisms of today (from those afflicting the reviled asylum seekers of Europe, or the Muslim targets of European Islamophobia [Fassin 2016], to the threatened ‘black lives’ of the contemporary US crisis [Denby 2016], or the ‘intra-African’ racism that bedevils the post-apartheid democracy of South Africa) have their over-determined, often indirect, but ultimate causality; recent research on the history of international relations (Vitalis 2015) suggests that in the first half of the twentieth-century this notion was widely recognized by conservative political theorists. The question of racism is a global Racism as a global phenomenon 271 one, and connectivity is central to understanding and combating it. In general, resource extraction under inhuman conditions, or commodity production without social protection occurs in the Global South, because those populations are seen as not needing or deserving dignity or protection� Racism as we usually consider it in the European context (see Fekete 2017), that is, as a domestic phenomenon, is the Northern tip of the iceberg. That is not to say that it is not worthy of attention, nor that it needs to be combatted less, but simply that it can only be genuinely understood when it is placed within a global perspective� That global perspective is essentially one that views the predative extractive industries at work in the South so that profits can be siphoned off in the North (Wenzel 2006). This is not to say that local interventions against racism, especially in an educational context, have lost their relevance� There are many excellent approaches to anti-racism and anti-discrimination training in schools (e.g. for the German context, Liebscher and Fritzsche 2010; for the UK context, Epstein 1992). This chapter does not suggest that this sort of pedagogical work is irrelevant, overhauled or out of date; on the contrary, such work would appear even more acutely necessary than ever before. Rather, however, I posit that alongside such direct pedagogical practices, a structural approach to racism and its broader systemic logic is necessary to complement—and finally link up with and reinforce—punctual and local interventions. Patently, racism itself reposes upon a chimera, the notion of a substantial difference between social groups—usually buttressed by easily visible, or easily imagined, but generally superficial differences: skin colour, dress, social customs. It is absolutely necessary, but also absolutely inadequate to deconstruct this chimera, as the critical social sciences have been doing for a good half-century (see Paulson 2001; Latour 2004). The reason for this is that, quite apart from the self-confirming nature of racist stereotypes (Taguieff 1987), and the deep embedding of racism in habitus and affective structures, the driving rationale of racism in fact lies in a multiplicity of other factors� What must be reconstructed, then, are the networks within which racism is one highly visible, even spectacular phenomenon, that plays various ideological roles within wider and more complex networks of causalities. But how are we to seize this moment of reconnection and transform it into an opportunity to combat racism, that is, to reconnect, on an equal basis, hierarchically differentiated groups within society where the principle of discrimination (in the sense of both differentiation and exclusion) is delineated according to some form of racism? Once again, the response is a translative cognition coupled with a connective activism. I would suggest that the moment is apposite for developing a stronger sense of the multiple causal entanglements of ‘a world that is as interconnected as it is divided’ (García Canclini 2014: xii). The current 272 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation multi-crises besetting the planetary community make it imperative to address these issues; but they also make it easier to do so, because the issues at hand are becoming more and more flagrantly salient. Systemic connections A solution to this obfuscation of connections is to reintroduce the making of connections at systemic level. In mid-2016, the German left-liberal Die Zeit , registered a sense of an ‘epochal shift’ in world politics in the ‘week of madness’ in which the Brexit referendum, reciprocal black-white violence in the US, and several IS-sponsored attacks in Nice and Würzburg, took place (Ulrich 2016). Doubtless such rhetoric was overblown. And of course it was parochial: what registers as crisis for populations in the Global North may be crisis-as-norm for peoples elsewhere, as Benjamin (1991, I-2: 697; 1999: 248-9) knew: ‘Die Tradition der Unterdrückten belehrt uns darüber, daß der “Ausnahmezustand”, in dem wir leben, die Regel ist’ [‘[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’]. We here in Europe have been largely protected from the sustained havoc wreaked, for instance, by the 1970s debt crisis and 1980-90s structural adjustment programmes upon many countries in the Global South (Greece, however, has been subjected to such treatment since the early 2010s). As Stephen Morton (2013: 14) notes, ‘from the standpoint of the oppressed, the state of emergency is a permanent historical condition, rather than an aberration in a liberal narrative of historical progress’� Nonetheless, there are many symptoms of an increasingly strong sense of what can be identified as a complex of interrelated and increasingly acute multi-crises that currently beset the global population—including the North. It may be objected that the notion of a multi-crisis is too imprecise and too broad to serve a rigorously analytical purpose� That, however, is precisely my point: we are confronted by a bewildering concatenation of looming catastrophes of global proportions whose dimensions make them what Timothy Morton (2013) calls ‘hyper-objects’ that defy comprehension, let alone the formulation of solutions. Listing them is a first step, however, towards beginning to tease out their constitutive interconnections, and with that, our own precise location and concomitant opportunities for agential intervention� First and foremost among these respective crises is of course the increasingly evident global climate crisis, whose results are multiply overdetermined in the most extraordinarily dense fashion, thus driving an accelerating spiral of interlocking causes and effects (for instance, global warming cause the ice-caps Systemic connections 273 to melt, which reduces the area of heat-reflecting ice and increases the area of dark, heat-absorbing water, also causing the underwater Artic coastal-shelf permafrost to melt, releasing methane pluming, and reducing the ice cap pressure on Antarctic volcanoes, allows increased volcanic activity at the Southern ice cap, both of which propel global warming, thereby causing the ice-caps to melt even faster …) (Friedrich et.al. 2016; Scheffers et.al. 2016; Van Wyk de Fries et al 2017; Wadhams 2017). The effects of global warming include rising water levels (Goodell 2017; WMO 2019: 16) and concomitant land-scarcity; desertification, drought, food scarcity (FSIN 2017), with famine also being used as a weapon of war (de Waal 2017), resource conflicts (‘Herders against Farmers’ 2017), forced migration (Missirian and Schlenker 2017; UNCHR 2016); increased fire danger (Davis 2017); and increased seismic activity ( Jones 2017), with the risk of tsunamis, resulting in catastrophes such as Fukushima (Crist 2018: 12). Other global crises include the widening gap between rich and poor driven by the neoliberal economy (Milanovic 2016; Sassen 2014; Streeck 2017), with evidence of poverty in many bastions of social-democratic Euro-America (for the UK see Armstrong 2017; for Germany see Paritätischer Gesamtverband 2017); the prevalence of widespread forms of modern slavery (Kara 2017); looming food scarcity (Ambler-Edwards et al. 2009), and the rise of landgrabbing as a predatory response (Allan et al. eds 2013; Engelert and Gärber, eds 2014); the imposition of Structural Adjustment Policies and regimes of austerity even within Europe, in the wake of the Greek debt crisis (Flassbeck and Lapavistas 2015; Varoufakis 2017); the looming threat of further global financial crises (Richards 2017); a rise of populism, with a concomitant victimization of immigrants and asylum seekers; the retreat of democracy evinced everywhere, even in Euro-American heartlands of parliamentary democracy, especially in the UK and the US (Crouch 2004; Kurlantzick 2013; Runciman 2018; Streeck 2013, 2014), and the disturbing rise of autocracy in Hungary, Poland and Turkey; the rise of conflicts, with long-running wars in Ukraine, Syria, etc (Münkler 2004a; 2004b), with the real danger of nuclear conflicts in Asia and in the Middle East, and concomitant catastrophic results for world food supplies (Toon, Robock and Turco 2008); an increase in global armaments expenditures from year to year, generating in their wake the increased danger of armed conflicts (Tian et al. 2018); and so on. Some German commentators suggest that the currently acute sense of crisis is endemic to modernity: a basic characteristic of modernity—so goes the story—is the formation of autonomous social systems, each of which has its own logic and language and way of looking at the world; each system (the economy, academia, the law) offers a perspective which is consistent and coherent from its own point of view, but incompatible with that of the others (Luhmann 1984). The absence of any form of synthesis, and thus of a narrative which would give 274 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation subjects the sense of mastery of an ungovernable world, is the cause of a sense of ‘crisis’ which, according to this systems theory account, besets modernity from the outset (Nassehi 2015). This sociological account is neat and doubtless not without an element of diagnostic accuracy, but harbours a number of problems when it comes therapy� The first is its tendency simply to reinscribe in the analysis precisely the problem we are trying to address here� Systems theory accepts the reciprocal opacity of societal systems to one another, thus replicating the essentially monadic, isolating processes of modernity identified for instance by Adorno (1971: 88-104) or Rosa (2016: 36-48) at the level of sociological theory, without being able to offer any riposte to it. Despite the ‘system of systems’ that systems theory aims to offer (Luhmann 1997), there are no resources within systems theory for escaping a fundamental systemic solipsism and for making larger connections between systems. (This is not merely, however, a functionalist question of systemic solipsism, because, on the one hand, such systemic separatism is structurally related to racist segregationism, and on the other, related to an obfuscation of connections that is one aspect of contemporary ideology.) Thus, and this is the second problem, this sort of diagnosis engenders a mindset inclined to ignore contemporary realities� By suggesting that crisis is endemic to modernity, this theory works in a deflationary direction. Certainly in some cases this may be salutary, especially where ‘end times’ or ‘catastrophe’ rhetoric serves obviously manipulative political purposes (see Titlestad 2013 for the South African context of ‘catastrophism’). The current global circumstances are however a different case. Today’s over-deteremined multi-crises are becoming genuinely more acute, measured, for instance by the increasingly evident effects of global warming, which is impacting climate unpredictability (e.g. more severe storms, fires, seismic activity etc), food scarcity, land loss, resource-based conflicts, and increasing flows of forced migration in empirically measurable ways. Relegating the ambient sense of crisis to an epistemological effect of reciprocal sub-systemic opacity merely reveals the dangerous poverty of theory in the fact of genuinely accelerating and escalating chains of economic, climate-driven and geopolitical causes/ effects. Such deflationary rhetoric suggests that though our times may be ones of immense change, the basic contours of the world remain reassuringly familiar, even if the familiar is not always very palatable. A striking example of this sort of anti-alarmism is Rödder’s very successful 21.0: Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart [ 21.0: A Short History of the Present ] (2015), which caters to the public’s appetite for apocalypse-voyeurism while offering reassurance that pillars of petit bourgeois values such as the family remain intact: Systemic connections 275 Überall wollen die Menschen zusammenleben, und sie übernehmen Verantwortung füreinander. Formen wandeln sich, aber die Sehnsucht nach Liebe und Bereitschaft zur Solidarität zwischen Menschen sind ununterbrochen— good news aus der Geschichte der Gegenwart. (Rödder 2015: 384) [Everywhere, people wish to live together and assume responsibility for one another. The forms change, but the desire for love and the willingness for solidarity between humans remain unbroken—good news from the history of the present.] A more historically-attuned view of shifting social parameters in the early twenty-first century might give a rather different view of the stability of marriage. Speaking of the ‘millenial’ generation as seen from a crop of recent memoirs, Doherty (2018: 26) notes that ‘[f]inancial precarity can also explain their enthusiasm for marriage: it makes a lot of sense when you need to get on your spouse’s health insurance, or when you need two incomes to buy an apartment in most major cities.’ Casting the explanatory net a somewhat broader, she goes on to observe that [t]en years after the economic crash, the gap between good jobs and bad jobs is still growing, and even supposedly good jobs—such as management consulting—are insecure. From 1973 until 2015, productivity in the US increased by 73.4 per cent, while hourly pay rose by just 11.1 per cent. (Harris rightly calls this disjuncture the defining factor of millennial life.) No wonder, then, that young people seek stable jobs when and where they can, and that they aim to improve the place where they work or study rather than abandon these imperfect institutions entirely (ibid: 26) —and the same could easily be said for social institutions such as marriage and the family and way the stability and support they offer become increasingly important in the face of rising ambient precarity (broader evidence for this trend in Germany is provided by Hagelücken 2017). For the African context since the turn of the century, Mbembe (2000: 269) notes ‘a generalized loss of control over sexuality by families, churches and the state’ and suggests that a ‘generalized crisis of masculinity is occurring, while the number of female heads of families steadily increases.’ In contrast to these more sobering and multiply contextualized perspectives, atomizing views of social phenomena exploit a happily solipsistic myopia to reassure us that our sense of change is partial and superficial and that the bedrock of global society remains stable. In contrast to such myopia, we need to create more complex fabrics of information so as to take careful stock of a very real situation of threat and uncontrolled, reciprocally reinforcing and accelerating transformation whose dynamic is destructive rather than self-regulating� 276 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation Thus, the increasing acute awareness of global multi-crisis culminates in an imperative to map the current complex and over-determined situation� Though the systems theory approach suggests that the respective languages of the subsystems are mutually incompatible and thus resist any construction of a master narrative capable of synthesizing them, I would object that this, though appealing in intellectual terms, is empirically unfounded� Translation between disparate systemic languages is possible not despite, but because of their disparity and mutual unintelligibility. It is true that the number of systemic crises to be understood is daunting, and that the connections between them are extremely complex. However, though these systems manifestly function according to distinct logics, it is entirely possible, by dint of hard work, to gradually establish the connections between the different phenomena. This practice of ‘diagnostic’ mapping (Nealon 2016: 121) or global epistemological multi-translation would create chains of connections—a selection of which I seek to present here in a very schematic and deceptively linear fashion� Here, then, is an example of how one might proceed in reconstructing such translative connectivities: Climate change→desertification across the Sahel band (Weizman and Sheikh 2015)→food scarcity, resource-based conflicts (e.g. herders, Fulani conflicts)→rising levels of forced migration on the South-South axis, and on the South-North axis (McAdam 2014, McLeman 2013, Wennersten and Robbins 2017)→part of the growing pressure on the Mediterranean migrant route→increasing closure of borders in Europe, etc→moral obligation upon Germany to keep its borders open in 2015 order to compensate for its bad press over the imposition of SAPs on Greece (Flassbeck and Lapavistas 2015; Varoufakis 2017)→global dynamic of capital transfer towards a small elite and away from the larger population of any given state (Piketty 2014; Milanovic 2016)→ in Germany, a drop in employees’ real wages since the 1990s, a rise in precarious employment and poverty (Bosch and Kalina 2016; Hagelüken 2017; Böckler-Impulse 2017), which fuel the increasing influence of populist discourses of ‘homeland’ (Heimat) (Schüle 2017) at one end of the spectrum, via a retreat from a putatively democratic politics plainly not interested in the plight of the lower middle-classes and the unemployed underclasses (Streeck 2013) and the concomitant rise of populist parties such as the AfD, and an alarming rise in anti-immigrant violence (Amnesty 2016), through to the mobilization of a ubiquitous ressentiment that results, in extreme forms, in terrorist activities (Mishra 2017), etc … These are rudimentary chains of connection (not always of direct causality), but they can be extended ad infinitum , because the globe is a single interconnected whole, and its crises are interconnected� Such framings of interconnected causalities can be staged, not easily by any means, but with some intellectual Connections: Performatives, Affect and Agency 277 effort and with a modicum of fairly straightforward research. Such diagnosis demands little more than the willingness to translate between planetary geopolitical and socio-economic incommensurables� One exemplary gesture of such connective contextualization might be an avowedly polemical article by Naomi Klein (2016) in which she connects fossil fuels, global warming, American wars in the Middle East, the emergence of ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes and their morphing into contemporary Islamophobic racism, and Europe’s willingness to condone the tens of thousands of ongoing refugee deaths in the Mediterranean� Connections: Performatives, Affect and Agency With my teacher-trainee students, I have tried to construct such visual concept maps of networked causality so as to militate against the ‘segregation’ of the classroom. This is a tried-and-tested method of visualization of complex contents, often used under the rubric of ‘mind mapping’ as a brainstorming technique, or as a means of organizing pedagogical material (Novak 2012; Wittkower 2011). My implementation of such techniques aims less to organize student-produced material than to reconstruct in schematic form multiple and overlapping connections between global issues� The exact content or nature of those connections (e.g. the relationship between desertification and forced migration) is itself complex and defies squeezing into such schematic network-like diagrams: at this point, the classroom activity needs to transit to discussion, and must refer to scholarly sources. The benefit of the visual networking technique is quite simply to create a framework where connections become evident, even if their precise nature needs to be elaborated separately� Given the multiply over-determined natures of these global causalities, the pedagogical results of such conceptual maps are predictably messy and of course open-ended and contingent. This translative work, in concert with the economies of translation and re-translation that have been evoked in the above chapters (for instance in chapter 9), is an unending task, and one that may follow many possible paths and create many other translative connections in its wake. The translative, connective, networking pedagogy I am proposing here means that knowledge must be constructed precisely by making connections, across disciplines, across ‘subjects’, and above all across the restrictive frontiers of the classroom, and indeed of the nation and of ‘Fortress Europe’. Paul Rabinow (2007: 5) suggests that the contemporary moment itself may appear to us as a mode of ‘assemblage’, constructed in ways that are not definitive or closed off. It is perceived as a collage of events and sites that do not immediately form a whole, but rather, reach us as a fluid, shifting configuration that includes our 278 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation own place of participatory observation (see Barad 2007). A networking mode of learning would accept the disparate and fragmented nature of the contemporary world as it presents itself to us, and would set about trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle in multiple translative operations. It would be a constructivist work of assembly. Unsurprisingly, a provisional ‘bricolage’-mode of learning, or what the Canadian performance artist and theoretician Kapwani Kiwanga (2016: 93) calls a practice of ‘critical assemblage’—connecting things with one another in a way that defies their reciprocal opacity and the resulting ideology that downplays crisis—may then be the most apposite way of making sense of the contemporary in the classroom� It is worth stressing that the results produced by such a critical pedagogical assemblage practice cannot be foretold in advance: ‘Refusing to assume ahead of time that it knows the appropriate knowledge, language, or skills … a contextual practice … is willing to take the risk of making connections, drawing lines, mapping articulations, between different domains, discourses and practices’ (Grossberg 1994: 18). Such an exploratory, experimental, speculative pedagogy cannot be pre-programmed� This is a quantum translative pedagogy whose nature is by definition ‘probabilistic’ (see chapter 5 above). Such pedagogical strategies thus repose upon performative speech acts rather than being merely descriptive exercises (though of course they also contain much descriptive activity). The pedagogical gain of such ‘acts of cognition, not transferrals of information’ (Friere 1972: 53) is clear. Students acquire a sense of the bewildering complexity of global interconnections that is perhaps initially discouraging; at the same time, however, they glimpse the possibility of ascertaining that there are connections; this is a distinct cognitive/ affective/ agential advance on the visceral sense of excessive complexity and resultant opacity and the concomitant loss of agency that is experienced� The sense of the impossibility of translation cedes to the recognition that translation is always possible, at least to some extent, and generates in turn its own sense of exhilarating necessity. The usage of translative conceptual maps offers the potential to locate oneself on the map� This provides a sense of situatedness within a world that is otherwise opaque and resists any sense of synthesis or overview: here I am, in a classroom that is part of a network of complex webs of causality. Such a recognition of connectedness finally offers a fabric for agency, however limited or local that may be (there is no scale of effectiveness or of responsibility or of relevance for political action: this is something that must be decided by the individual; of more importance is to recognize oneself as a political agent within a network of interconnections). The history of scientific progress over the last century or so has been that of the successive rediscovery of the unsuspected connectedness and entanglement Connections: Performatives, Affect and Agency 279 of things that the Enlightenment assumed were unconnected with each other: time and space, gravity and light (relativity), body and mind (psychosomatic medicine), and the entirety of planetary processes (radioactivity, pollution, global warming). The global system is an interconnected whole (Capra and Luisi 2014). Affect theory (Clough and Halley, eds 2007; Massumi 2002; Gregg and Seigworth eds 2010) in particular explores the multiple connections that enable entities to exert agency and to take effect upon one another, to make something happen� Affect theory is particularly apt to take stock of this rising alertness to multiple interconnections. Affect theory is far more than a theory of the ‘emotions’, although the ways in which subjects are connected to each other by non-cognitive processes (whence the double meaning of ‘feeling’) (Damasio 2000 [1994]; 2003) is one part of that theory. The connections identified by affect theory extend well beyond humans and their cognates (e.g. domestic animals), enveloping all beings, thus producing a theory of interlinked agency in which non-human and non-sentient entities feel, think, speak and act in social networks (Cruikshank 2005; Latour 1986; 2005; Ingold 2011). Affect theory restores connections between entities and acknowledges that these connections are vital to distributed agency (Hodder 2012). The classroom is also a place of such affective connectedness and agency. The classroom is connected to the outside world, not separated from it. Learning takes place in ways that are driven by affect (e.g. ‘classroom atmosphere or climate’), but in a much broader sense than is currently acknowledged (e.g. Arnold 1999). As described in the previous chapter, Harmut Rosa and Wolfgang Endres (Rosa 2016; Rosa and Endres 2016) use the image of of ‘resonance’ to describe an enhanced sense of connectedness within the classroom. What I am proposing here would integrate such ‘pedagogy of resonance’, but would extend it to go beyond the classroom walls into the world of the natural environment and the world of politics and crisis. Rosa’s (2016) sociology of ‘Weltbeziehungen’ (‘relations to the world’) tends to privatize such resonances (even though he is explicitly aware of the dangers of such privatization [ibid: 372]), rather than politicizing and globalizing them. Making connections in a pedagogical context is a translative speech act: it doesn’t merely describe those connections (as a locutionary speech act); it situates the self (via an illocutive speech act) within those connections, and by making them, it makes something else happen (thus making it a perlocutionary speech act) (Austin 1962). The making of pedagogical connections is not merely cognitive, but has real effects, partly at the emotional level, but more significantly to the extent that a connection recognized is a connection endowed with an enhanced form of multi-directional and multi-actantial agency (Hickey-Moody 280 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation and Page 2016; Sedgwick 2003). Michel Serres (2008: 124) claims: ‘To perceive beings fills them with being. Simply by their perceptions, human beings—living things—in this case, women, fabricate negentropy, produce information, and thereby oppose the irreversible degradation of things�’ Perception is an active process that is always already intentional, interventionist, and interactive—and susceptible of creating, not just registering change and transformation (Bohm and Peat 2011: 53-96). The making of cognitive connections thus has two interrelated effects: it opens up connections in places where separation was previously assumed to be the governing factor; and its introduces new co-actors where agency was presumed to be absent; in this way, it extends the scope and form of political agency (Massumi 2015). It thus militates inherently against the underlying structures of racism, both in re-establishing connectivity where racism imposes putatively essentialist divisions, and in acknowledging personhood of all beings (Viveiros de Castro 2014; 2016) where racism reduces the other to the status of non-person, in the most extreme version to the status of animal (Mbembe 2001: 27) or to that of thing (Mbembe 2017). The Classroom in the World Having sketched the way a translative-connective practice might work, and what effects it might have, I now return to the classrooms where I currently work. I am a trainer of future teachers within a German university English department: my students qualify as high school teachers who will mainly work in the senior secondary sector, where they will be teaching adolescents with a reasonably-well developed palette of academic literacies and a fair grasp of contemporary socio-political issues—less perhaps of economic issues. Paradoxically, however, there is little sense, within German schools seen as institutions (individual teachers are always a different case) that a number of basic givens upon which educational philosophies and practices are built have fundamentally shifted� The world outside has changed, but the institution is so disconnected from it that these changes have not registered within educational policy and institutional practice. Several interconnected examples will suffice. For instance, the seismic effects of transformations of the nature of work as a result of computerization (Frey and Osborne 2013; Job-Futuromat 2016), and the massive effects of global warming on human population displacement (Nealon 2016: 121; NIC 2017: 21, 32-3, 39), are still largely off the horizon for the German ‘Gymnasium’ system (i.e. the sector of a streamed, stratified education system that qualifies students for university entrance), whose frames of reference, it The Classroom in the World 281 would seem, are those of the 1970s and 1980s, with close to full employment in classical middle-class professions in a sector of an employment market closed to immigrants� With regard to migration, the German school system across the board remains predominantly monolingual in approach (Gogolin 1994), largely disavowing the thirty-per cent of multilingual learners in its classrooms (Chlosta et al. 2003; Fürstenau et al 2003; Schroeder 2007), using textbooks that present children with a ‘migrant background’ in discriminatory terms (Niehaus et.al. 2015), and streaming pupils with such a ‘migration background’ away from university entrance towards manual professions (e.g. Agarwala, Schenk and Spiewak 2016: 61; Freidooni 2016; OECD/ EU 2015). Despite long-standing calls for a ‘pedagogy of diversity’ (‘Pädagogik der Vielfalt’ [Prengel 1993]), recalling perhaps Brazilian models of a performative ‘pedagogy of difference’ (Silva 2000), the German school system remains persistently inured to its own social complexity. In this way, the school system stubbornly ignores the realities of world outside its walls—and de facto inside: in many cases, refugee children now sit alongside permanent residents and citizens in German primary or secondary schools, if they are not kept at arm’s length in in specially segregated classes (‘Mehr als …’ 2016), not to mention children with a firstor second-generation ‘migration background’ (now more than a third of the school population and rising [Statistisches Bundesamt 2016: 37; 2018b: 41). Teacher-training perpetuates this systemic ossification and isolation, offering teacher-trainee students very little preparation for the diversity that will confront them in their professional practice (Morris-Lange et al. 2016). The systemic ‘racism’ (in the sense of institutionally embedded segregationism) that is endemic all across the German school system and enforced by its stratified and dichotomizing structures is thus closely linked to the educational system’s hermetic isolation from broader social realities—even when those realities have long since invaded the school at the level of the ‘real existing’ classroom� The school system itself, an integral part of German bourgeois society, is thus structurally moulded by what Adorno (1971: 100-2), once called ‘bürgerliche Kälte’ [‘bourgeois indifference’]. Such ‘indifference’ is evinced, for instance, in a lack of empathetic imagination on the part of youth workers that prevents them from appreciating the effects of trauma and the long-term psychic stress imposed by the constantly looming threat of deportation on their young refugee and asylum-seeker clients (Terkessidis 2017: 62). Or it is evinced in blanket self-fulfilling prophecy that predicts the non-achievement of newly arrived refugee learners in the face of their immense determination to succeed and often astoundingly rapid achievements (see for instance Agarwala, Schenk and Spiewak 2016: 61). The school system is fundamentally disconnective, and negatively reproductive—of reified knowledge and of exclusionary white middle-class social structures� These are the separativist 282 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation tendencies that the translative practices I am discussing here must begin by combating� How would such a practice of translative (re)connective pedagogy look concretely? Let me imagine, in what follows, how such a cognitive-mapping or -networking in the classroom might be inaugurated. Once again, my proposals repose upon experimental discussions with my own teacher-trainee students� Rather than taking on the raft of global issues that were addressed in section 2 above, it might be worth beginning with a more local problematic, namely, the reification of the classroom itself. If translation by definition, once allowed to unfurl its full epistemological scope and creative productivity in the classroom, tends to cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries, then once it is allowed to even begin to unleash it generative power, the limits that potentially rein in that productivity will rapidly become visible� Those boundaries will appear in negative, as it were, marked out by the absent networks of knowledge that a translative interrogation will lay bare. The construction of the absent networks could be launched by asking a number of questions about the connections customarily elided by discourses subtending classroom practices� Let me re-imagine my opening blackboard/ fourth-wall as a site upon which incessant question-marks are inscribed, each one demanding that the learner-questioner traverse the blackboard-barrier to see what lies on the other side. In the English-teacher-trainee (or German-teacher-trainee) classroom, these questions might include the following: What language is studied in this classroom, and what language is the medium of study? Is that language a medium of exclusion or inclusion? What languages are spoken by the learners in the classroom, in particular when they are outside the classroom? Do those languages have droit de cité in the classroom? How do those language-zones (those of the classroom, those of the street or the home, those of the languages themselves) interact? What histories of migration or interculturality are indexed by those languages? What sort of material (epoch, topic, genre, complexity) is studied in the classroom, in which language and what sort of language? What context does it emerge from? What does it presuppose about us as learners? Why is this material being taught? Is it felt to be relevant to the learners’ life-worlds? Which contemporary issues does it address, however tangentially, or not address? Is this question asked, explicitly, in the classroom? If not, why? How is the material relevant to the learners’ possible professional fields? What might those fields be? Do those possible fields assume about the (class, gender, ethnic, religious) identity? What can we say about the broader economic conditions they index (security, precarity, mobility, etc.)? What do they assume about the identity of the audiences that will be the recipients of those professional practices? Do they exclude some audiences? What mechanisms of exclusion may be The Classroom in the World 283 at work beyond the classroom that are already implicit in the material and how it is learnt? Who selects or assigns the material, who has the right to change it? Who has the power to make decisions at the other interfaces discussed, and why? And so on … It will be clear that this set of questions works by successive translative apposition, starting from any one of many possible points, and following routes of possible inquiry, ‘making connections, drawing lines, mapping articulations, between different domains, discourses and practices’ to quote Grossberg (1994: 18) again. Such questions follow the rhizomatic pattern of translation genealogies, and of networked cognitive diagnosis. There is no ultimate point of arrival or arrest, for each connection provokes further questions. Indeed, in such an exercise, the question is the mode of connection� The question questions the specious segregation of the classroom. Such networks of question constitute ‘critical assemblages’ (Kiwanga 2016) because they link diverse domains by asking not about the ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of the domain (i.e. confirming and reinforcing its operative assumptions) but by asking about its ‘outside’, the surfaces where it meets other domains. Such networked questions interrogate the ragged edges where a domain demands translation at the interface with other domains� Such questions do not merely interrogate, they provoke answer/ questions by which the learners ‘assemble’ knowledge, creating mosaics of interrelated understandings of interrelationships� Such assemblage as practice is a translative practice. Asking about the ‘outside’ of a practice—its underlying but unsaid exclusive mechanisms, and the effects that flow productively from those unsaids—constitutes a critical translative ‘edge’. ‘Edge’ is meant literally as a frontier that apposes two zones to one another. The ‘black-‘ or ‘whiteboard’ I spoke of above becomes just such an edge: a border that is visible as such precisely because it adjoins a world beyond. This produces a ‘border pedagogy’ (Giroux 1991) in the most literal sense of the term. Such a form of ‘critical’ thinking is not merely negative: conceptually at least, it brings populations back together by making explicit the lines of demarcation that in fact join them� Thus, for instance, the border ‘native speaker of German’/ ‘non-native speaker of German’, may be presupposed and enacted by the material taught in the classroom, the teacher’s ethnic identity, the teacher training inscribed in her/ his person, the systems of prohibition that bear upon languages other than German in the classroom and in society, the role of German as a gatekeeper in grading, in access to higher education, in access to jobs, in future professional trajectories, in citizenship rights and acquisition procedures … and so on. Such a discussion is not merely conceptual, but has material effects, transforming the dynamics of a class group, and its own multiple relationships to its respective life-worlds� Such discussion 284 Chapter 13: Blackboard as Fourth Wall: classrooms, racism, translation mobilizes connective affect, which in turn has the power to effect entities and their interrelationships� Thus the nexus of the topography of the classroom and that of the world may present a way of entering into an engagement, both critical and constructive, with the immensely complex and over-determined terrain of the contemporary multi-crisis within which we find ourselves. Racism is a domain of specious segregation that provides a site for a humanities that is both critical, analytical, but also conducive to considerations of the nexus of identity and agency: this is so because racism focalizes and bundles issues of nationalism, identity, employment, exploitation, immigration, economics, futurities, violence, and terror� To approach racism and its disaggregating, segregating effects at the social and the epistemological levels, at the local and the global scales, we need to mobilize an aesthetics of translation and a ‘pedagogical arts of the contact zone’ (Pratt 1991: 40). If this exercise is successful, and translative connectivity gets into full swing in the classroom, we may be able to make the ‘blackboard’ become a desegregating ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992: 6-7), thereby facilitating the incremental, never-final, never-assured, never-teleologically-preordained translative transformation of the fabric of their immediate, always politicized, environments: what García Canclini (2014) names a process of ‘ immi nence’ which makes itself ‘ imma nent’ in the classroom. If not there, where? And if not now, when? Johannesburg, Maboneng precinct, 2013 © Tatjana Pavlov-West The Classroom in the World 287 Conclusion: Before I die We are in Johannesburg. In front of us is a blackboard. It’s not in a classroom. The classroom has gone, and the fourth wall is genuinely open to the world� The blackboard is a wall, on the street, in the Maboneng precinct, standing on the corner of Fox and Kruger, near Arts on Main. The blackboard is a mural covering the complete side of a warehouse. It will be gone soon, it’s an ephemeral piece of participatory street art. My wife Tatjana takes a photo—you can see it on the opposite page. In the left field of the mural, framed by a tree and a marginal painting, is a column of print with the following words: Before I die Phambi kokuthingife Voor ek sterf B4 I Di ☺ To the right of these half-phrases in English, Zulu, Afrikaans and Textese (Crystal 2009; Steyn and Evans 2015) are columns of identical lines reading ‘Before I die I want to______________’. The whole wall is painted black so that passers-by can chalk in their wishes. The jocular thought enters my mind that this might be a sort of open-air classroom in the school of hard knocks. In the right field of the photograph, a man with a bucket and mop is cleaning off the chalked responses to make room for new inscriptions; to the left, a young woman and a boy are busy adding their thoughts and aspirations� The wall mural is one of many similar street art projects initiated by the American art activist Candy Chang around the world (Chang 2013). Its reach is global—3000 such walls have been created in over seventy countries (Chang n.d.)—but utterly local at the same time, because the aspirations expressed are formed within the context of specific socio-economic and historical conditions: the Johannesburg wall cannot but be read within the context, for instance, of the HIV/ AIDS complex that has hit Africa particularly hard. Likewise, responding to the undeniable reality of multilingualism in South Africa, the Johannesburg wall-mural translates its slogan into three of the nation’s eleven official languages, with a wink at a further language ‘spoken’ by the inhabitants of a continent with the lowest internet access but the highest density of mobile phone users in the world� German is not among these three-plus-one languages, though Afrikaans will be instantly intelligible for any speaker of a Germanic language via numerous 288 Conclusion: Before I die cognate structures: ‘Voor ek sterf ’ is not too far distant from ‘Bevor ich sterbe’. (Historically, German and Afrikaans nestled close to each other during the German colonial occupation of South-West Africa, next door to the Afrikaner-populated but British-dominated Cape Colony, and well into the period of South African occupation and administration from 1915 to 1990 [Kleinz 1984]; even today, 30 per cent of the white community speaks German and 60 per cent English. The German population remains significant in both Nambia and South Africa.) Any German speaker will thus be obliquely interpellated by the Afrikaans stub. That moment of interpellation is inherently a moment of tacit, perhaps even unnoticed translation. The linguistic presence of German in South Africa and Namibia forms a porous ‘contact zone’ with Afrikaans. The Johannesburg wall mural can thus be read as instantiating an outer periphery of a extensive and at times distinctly ragged fabric of ‘pluricentric’ German(ic) languages studded with such ‘contact zones’, even at the moments when the fringes of the language appear to fray into absence. In this respect, the Johannesburg mural resembles Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda in the way it gestures implicitly towards German in the very moment of having it appear as a lacuna. Indeed, an unsuspected and of course entirely unintended intertextual resonance emerges between Sissako’s mute visual text ‘Walkuriestraße’—the street of the Valkyries that bridges the battlefield and afterlife—and the forward looking, mortality-defying ‘Before I die’ of the Johannesburg mural. At this immense distance, a translative encounter takes place—powered not merely by human intentionality (the configuration assembled by my introductory and concluding texts) but by the sheer inventivity of quantum languaging as part of the continuum of life’s infinite connectivity across a myriad of translative interfaces� On the Johannesburg wall, interlingual translation intersects with the generativity of a list of aspirations that is potentially infinite because it can be always erased to make space for more. At first glance, ‘Before I die …’ might resonate with a Heideggerian ‘Sein zum Tode’ (1979: 237-67) [’Being unto death’], and certainly this appears to have been—albeit in a more quotidian form—one of the original motivations of the project. And the limits of the wall mural could easily be taken for a concrete metaphor for the limits of human life as a trajectory towards its own expiry date. But this artwork has no truck with entropy (Arnheim 1979). Such an understanding of death as forming the constitutive entropic telos of the existential texture of life, however, is contradicted by the terminal smiley in the Textese slogan ‘B4 I DiJ.’ Nor does such a thanatolgical telos ring true within the African philosophies that might be assumed, at least in some tangential fashion, to inform this specific, local instantiation of a transnational street art project. In most African philosophies, it would appear, life is understood as an exuberant plenitude, not an entropic process. In these worldviews, Conclusion: Before I die 289 time is not a scarce resource, but something to be created performatively out of social interactions (Mbiti 1969: 19). And so it is with the Johannesburg mural. To write one’s aspirations is to create time as plenitude, not to fill its emptiness. The gaps to be filled on the black background are not empty so much as open , spaces of promise , not of lack . If life is limited, its constraints, like the poetic forms examined in the course of this book, are enabling. The hint at fractal creativity (the list of stub-sentences replicates, in smaller print, but ad infinitum, the initial English stub) instantated Afriacn fractals as indices of infinity generativity within a restrained space and with the resources at hand, for ‘the scope of agency within limited conditions’ (Gilroy qtd in Eglash 1999: 200). The proximity of others, which for Sartre in Huis clos (1981) was a sign of one’s own inexorably looming demise, becomes here the nexus of dynamic entities’ potential to generate life as they interact with one another. The infinite generativity of performative time is the message of this mural, performed at the interface between languages and their translations, subjects, and the material world with its actants—and we do well to remind ourselves that from the point of view of actor-network-theory (Latour 2005) or animist materialism (Garuba 2003) there are at least five persons in this photo, among them, from right to left: a man, a boy, a young woman, an urban tree and the wall itself� Each of these elements is an event: an encounter between dynamic entities that triggers transformation, between the four languages (at the level of interlingual translation), between extant text and text-to-be-written, between humans and material, or between the organic and non-organic actors of the urban environment� Out of these events, further encounters ensue, each one involving an exchange of information in which new information is generated: for instance, the encounter between the street-mural complex and my wife and her camera, and then with myself as distant spectator, which has triggered a transformation of my own internal intellectual and affective topography; the encounter with the reader with the text will trigger a further transformation. Although, given the size of their letters, the interlingual translations of the four languages are the most prominent semantic element of the mural, they are dwarfed by the sheer expanse of the apparently repetitive columns of anaphoric gap-texts� Moreover, their sameness is deceptive� The transformative potential that is signalled by the invitingly open spaces with their white underlining by far exceeds the four options proposed by the interlingual translations. And the embodied translations that are present in the form of three human persons and the one arboreal person, not to mention other participant spectators outside the moment the photo was taken, including those non-participant spectators now reading this book, may multiply these generative possibilities beyond all comprehension. 290 Conclusion: Before I die The Johannesburg mural gives concrete form to the notions expounded by the Johannesburg theorist Achille Mbembe (2016: 11-12), speaking of Fanon: En tant que vivant, le sujet était d’emblée ouvert au monde. C’est en comprenant la vie des autres vivants et non-vivants qu’il comprenait la sienne; qu’il existait lui-même comme forme vivante; et qu’il pouvait dès lors corriger l’asymétrie de la relation, y introduisant une dimension de réciprocité. [As a living being, the subject was by extension open to the world. It was by understanding the life of other living and non-living beings that he understood his own life; that he existed as a living entity; and that we could correct the asymmetry of relationships, introducing into those asymmetrical relationships a dimension of reciprocity�] To live is to be open to the world, which means to be open to change and thus to be caught up in ceaseless generativity. These linked notions almost form a tautological repetition of a single basic ontological and morphogenetic truth� These notions are borne out at multiple points on and around the mural; each of these points interacts with the others, thus sketching the local matrix and anchor of a fabric of transformative relationships whose reaches are potentially infinite. Here interlingual translation figures as a mere subset, diminutive but productive and relationally connected, of a larger network of translative, transformational encounters whose reach is vastly encompassing—as all-embracing as the great network of life itself, where in the broader view of things death appears as a relatively insignificant factor. What counts is the ‘Before’, which is as capacious, in its anticipatory imagination, as its generative potential is infinite. That promissory ‘Before’, already generating its cognates ‘Phambi’, ‘Voor’ and ‘B4’, is the linguistic tip of an ontological and morphogenetic iceberg called life, one that has no negative term� The Johannesburg mural epitomizes, in verbal, visual, concrete form the four argumentative strands that run through his book. The book works with the four terms found in the book’s title, each of which forms the fulcrum for one of the intertwined conceptual threads: 1� ‘Translation’ is understood as a generalized procedure that far exceeds and cannot be contained by the realm of interlingual transformation� Translation in the ‘proper sense’ (i.e. interlingual translation) is understood as one subset of broader cosmic processes of translation, a process that in turn can best be accounted for by Quantum Gravity Theory� 2� ‘Quantum Theory’ provides a way of understanding what this generalized mode of translation would be. To articulate this generalized notion of translation, the book has recourse to Quantum Gravity Theory, which imagines the smallest building-blocks of the material world as packets of gravity that exert an attractive force upon each other, out of which dynamic transform- Conclusion: Before I die 291 ative encounters emerge. These encounters of events are the stuff of which ‘material is made’� These encounters are transformative exchanges of information between ‘strange attractors’—translations, in fact—that drive the constant dynamic transformation of matter—what we call life. 3� A ‘Contact Zone’ offers an image of the points of articulation in such a transformative fabric. Any site of a transformative encounter is a ‘contact zone’. The entirety of material life is a contact zone of contact zones. Cultural or linguistic contact zones—including texts is translation as well as their contexts—are merely local manifestations of this immense network of transformative interfaces. A language such as German is not a centripetal system, but is in fact a cluster of contact zones, always oriented ‘outwards’ towards other systems and engaged in similarly translative and transformative encounters. The centrifugal nature of a language brings it finally towards its ultimate beyond, the real of material life—returning, it, in other words, to the material matrix of life out of which it actually springs� 4. The ‘Global South’ is a descriptor for a fluid cultural zone (see West-Pavlov 2018b) whose double characteristics have always been the interactive agency of dialogical and translative cultural formations, and transformative conceptions of material reality� Such cultural, epistemological and ontological formations remained and continue to remain active despite the predations of colonialism and neo-colonialism, so that the Global South functions as a receptacle and archive of alternative versions of reality endowed with a part-subaltern, part-emergent validity and agency� The Global South is therefore a matrix of notions of cultural and material translativity that can renew cultural theory and axiological principles within a planetary project of rehabilitated connectivity� Let me now unpack in more detail the four interlocking conceptual strands, indexed by these four constitutive terms, that run through the book. The first strand of the argument suggests that the translation as a general linguistic operation, which the book situates at the core of the German language rather than merely at its borders, is itself a subset of a broader cosmic process of material information exchange and ensuing reciprocal transformation that is coeval with the dynamic of life itself� This is an argument that can best be located within an ongoing investigation of reality in a tradition going back to Bergson (1907), Whitehead (1920) and Deleuze/ Guattari (1980/ 1987). Most recently, this investigation has been taken up by a large number of theorists such as Barad (2007), Bennett (2010), Braidotti (2013), Grosz (2011), Haraway (2016), Ingold (2011), Latour (2005), Massumi (2002; 2015), Povinelli (2016), Prigogine and Stengers (1984), and Stengers (1997), 292 Conclusion: Before I die to mention only a few of the most prominent names� This tradition straddles the emergent fields of New Materialisms and New Vitalism, as well as the more established fields of Ecopoetics and -criticism, Science Studies and Indigenous Studies� The second argument involves my specific contribution to this tradition of new materialist or vitalist thought. I draw upon quantum gravity theory to lodge translation at the micro-level of the very building blocks of material physical reality� The underlying notion of quantum gravity theory: namely, the basal relationality of the most elemental building blocks of physical materiality, which are not blocks at all, but bundles of gravitational attraction. Such bundles connect, disconnect and reconnect with one another, forming the vibrant dynamism of what, at a larger scale, looks like stable matter. The constant interaction of these packets or quanta of gravitational energy is isomorphic, in my reading, with the fundamental operation of interlingual translation, in which two cultural-linguistic zones are drawn towards each other and connect briefly in a transformative event of translation� Such a translative event can never be definitive but must necessarily call forth subsequent encounters and events of translation. My argument posits that interlingual translation is a figure—concretely, via its spatial embeddeness in the fabric of transformative being—of the basal ontological translation described by quantum gravity theory. Every basal quantum event is thus a ‘contact zone’ out of which the stuff of material reality emerges. Cultural or linguistic ‘contact zones’ are merely the specific outworking, in the domain of human communication and cultural production, of a nano-level structure of fundamental encounters that produce our world as it is, or better, as it becomes� The third strand of the argument then returns to a macro-level lodged above the respective microor nano-scale of quantum events and the mezzo-scale of interlingual translation events. That macro-level is the domain of the national language itself, which ceases, once regarded from the perspective of quantum events and translation event, to be a stable space of linguistic identities, but also emerges as a field of constant material transformation. Once German, the immediate zone in which I happen to be working, is seen as a ‘pluricentric language’ (Muhr, Marley, Kretzenbacher and Bissoonauth, eds 2015), it begins to take on the contours of an ‘extroverted’ language. It appears as a linguistic network that is formed not from the centre but rather from its peripheries, or one in which the centre is always already peripheral� The German language thus comes to be conceptualized not as a centripetal linguistic ‘Heimat’, but as a centrifugal meeting place, a ‘contact zone’ whose tentacular expanse inevitably colours its putatively core regions (once said to be located somewhere in the Conclusion: Before I die 293 vicinity of Hannover). This argument reconceptualizes the national language (as once was) as a zone of translation and negotiation. This argument can be located within debates around the polycultural constitution of erstwhile national languages. It appropriates the notion of national hybridity (once proposed by Nietzsche, for instance, for the German case [see Borchmeyer 2017: 373-85], but then elided by National Socialism and the centripetal forces of the postwar period), and then turns it upon the language itself. The idea is not new for English, for example, which is now generally considered as a pluralized global entity (Crystal 2003; Kachru 1986), but it has yet to be given serious consideration for German. Even then, such pluralism may be reined in, as in Kachru’s model, by conceiving it as hierarchical system of concentric circles, in which the European continental version provides an anchor for progressively deviating varieties and dialects. What I am suggesting here is a more insistently pluricentric structure that destabilizes the very idea of a linguistic norm� Such a pluricentric structure foregrounds the relationships between differing varieties, placing translation as an intra-linguistic operation at the heart of linguistic production, and at the core linguistic pedagogy, rather than relegating it to the margins between discrete national languages� German thus becomes a ‘contact zone’ at its many cores, as well as on its peripheries. The fourth strand of the argument acknowledges that although many theoretical components to be found in the areas sketched above draw upon Euro-American conceptual sources, they often conceal a debt to the diverse thought of many zones of the Global South. Structuralism for instance relied upon de Saussure’s notions of binaries but was also powered by the immense creativity and resourcefulness of the ‘pensée suavage’ [‘savage thought’] that Lévi-Strauss rehabilitated in his anthropological work (1962). Contemporary fractal theory has discovered unexpected precusors in the infinitely creative patterns of African art and architecture (Eglash 1999). The Global South thus functions as an archive for residual, even quasi-hegemonic notions of translative connectedness because many of its reaches have proved more resistant to the inroads of a corrosive ‘modernity’ than much of the Global North. Such a statement does not essentialize or homogenize Global South theories, but rather, reposes upon the historical evidence for the frequently only partial infiltration of Global South lifeworlds by encroaching imperial, colonial and neo-colonial modernity upon the colonized world. Indeed, many of the restrictive economies of translation and translation theory against which this book militates may have emerged in the confrontation between colonial translation and the alternative versions of transformation-translation embodied in the texts, artefacts and practices that were appropriated by the machinery of colonial knowledge production. Part of the epistemological 294 Conclusion: Before I die violence wielded by the colonial system may have been to close down a fundamentally translative-transformative ontology, thereby forming a European theory of translation ‘proper’ ignorant of its own genealogies. It is fitting therefore that countervailing theories of translation as cognate with the dynamic force of cosmic life itself are now emerging as part of the resurgence thought of the Global South (e.g. de Sousa Santos, ed. 2007; de Sousa Santos 2014). It is equally apposite that such translative ontologies come to the fore again in that realm of the globe that is most affected by the havoc wreaked by Euro-American ‘modernity’ and its epistemologies of scission and separation� Taken together, the four strands of my argument place language within the realm of the natural� The argument thus provides a ‘natural’ rationale for heterogeneity, dialogicity, and ‘translativity’ of language as the very ‘nature’ of language� This does not constitute a return to the sort of ‘biological’ arguments for social conformity that drove, for instance, nineteenth-century racism or twentieth-century gender-conformism. For the nature of ‘nature’, to pillage Morin’s (2008) turn of phrase, that is presented here is relentlessly inventive, transformative, instable, and chaotic. It is in no way ‘organicist’, but presents on the contrary a system that is open-ended and constantly responsive to otherness� In other words, this perspective stresses complexity and emergence. But such an argument does not merely serve a rhetorical legitimizing purpose, drawing cynically upon the domain of the natural sciences because they possess, today, by far the most cultural capital within the public sphere of academic discourse� Rather, the purpose of making such an argument is to take the discussion of translation out of the closed realm of the literary critical subsystem within the academic humanities, and lodge it within the larger context, not merely of contemporary social reality, but within the crucial domain of the current transformation of the planet itself—in particular that of resource depletion, escalating conflicts, and global climate change. Thus this argument appeals to an increasingly coherent set of networked knowledge-domains that recognizes the complexity of the cosmos and in that way establishes an epistemological framework for a non-destructive practice in the world. This of course is a crucial task at a moment when the catastrophic consequences of human practice since the Enlightenment are becoming irrevocably clear around the globe. The ecology of the cosmos thus provides a real-existing ontological and causal framework for an ‘ecology of languages’ (Leitner and Malcolm eds 2007) at the heart of which lies the operation of translation� The essence of a language is at its border, on its edge, and this is so because languages are part of a larger ecology of translation� This science-related argument is not offered in the spirit of scholarly self-legitimization, nor is it offered according to a logic of empirical verifiability, where ‘science’ stands for ‘hard facts’, and language can regain a firm foothold Conclusion: Before I die 295 on the safe terrain of referentiality� The essential argument that language is a translative-transformative variety within a total ecology of translative-transformative processes means that the language of literary criticism does not have to have recourse to description to justify itself once it leaves the realm of the literary and ventures into the world� On the contrary, the creative nature of language, of literary language, and of language talking about literature, is seen to be something that doesn’t mark it out as different from the real world, pace Shklovsky (1990) and his fellow Formalists, but rather, becomes a shared attribute with all other processes in the world. Literary writing, literary critical writing, like translation and translation criticism (Berman 1995, 2009) is thus a form of translative-transformative work within a ‘contact zone’. This book, then, does not merely set out to describe a set of translative operations within the German language, which can then be seen to be part of a larger fabric of cosmic processes. Rather, it seeks to participate, with various degrees of proximity and affinity (West-Pavlov 2018a), within that cosmic process. This may appear to be a rather grandiose and transcendentalist claim. It is, however, merely a logical outcome of the arguments that are made in the book that posit language as part of broader translative-transformational process within a network of overlapping material processes. To that extent, then, the book understands itself as a performative illustration of its own underlying premises. Implicit in the book’s project are a set of claims for its own agency that do not depend upon a representational project (the second-degree literary critical representation of literary representations) but upon a non-representational project in which modes of transformative translation are retranslated in ways that become transformative in their turn (Thrift 2008; Vannini, ed. 2015). Moreover, these arguments register a significant shift in underlying paradigms, away from the notion of linguistic difference that has driven structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory for much of the twentieth century and into our twenty-first. These arguments participate in a paradigm shift towards a notion of difference that is not primarily linguistic (and binary) in nature, but rather material (and non-binary). The Saussurean paradigm of binary linguistic difference was underpinned by a hidden binary of nature-culture difference. This difference was crucial, for instance, to Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology (e.g. 1964). Powered by the difference between the word and the world, between sign and signifier, it allowed poststructuralist theory to undertake two immensely important tasks. On the one hand, it permitted theory to explain the creative dynamic of literary creation itself, supposedly cut loose from the constraints of the real. On the other hand, it facilitated theory’s conceptualization of the critical potential of its own work—in particular, the way ideology, masquerading as hard facts, could be laid bare as mere discourse. In the current 296 Conclusion: Before I die project, however, these negative differences sited within language itself give way to another sort of difference that is firmly planted in the productivity of the material world. Whereas difference was spirited off into the realm of langue rather than parole , in this theory it is emphatically embedded in utterances, but not only there—it resides in the very flesh of the uttering apparatus, itself in turn part of a differentiated continuum of living networks of distributed agency and ubiquitous generativity� Such a paradigm shift in modes of understanding and registering difference are not just merely a matter of the ebb and flow of intellectual fads. They are far more signs of the time, as we enter an era in which the fabric of planetary existence in many ways seems to be unravelling. At an historical juncture in which climate scientists imply a ten-year window of opportunity to mitigate climate change (IPCC 2018), the relations of generative difference that constitute the planetary environment are crucial to the future of life on earth. Abandoning traditional anthropocentric hierarchies and notions of human supremacy, one of which assigns a secondary place to translation but also marginalizes non-linguistic translation, thereby containing and even desecrating the difference of the world itself, is a task long overdue. Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom [This text is included as an appendix to German as Contact Zone as it makes a tangential but complementary contribution to the book’s argument. The substantial core of the text started life as my input, written in English, to a funding bid for a research project still in the offing. It thus constitutes, in some way, a utopian desire not dissimilar to the one to which I referred in the acknowledgements that opened this volume. Subsequently, I reworked that rather dry text in Applicationese into a German-language article, which then received a thorough polishing from my colleagues Anya Heise-von der Lippe and Lukas Müsel (see West-Pavlov, Heise-von der Lippe and Müsel 2020 forthcoming). The current version is my free and substantially expanded rendering of those ideas back into English. The text is thus a curious example of multiple transpositions (if not literal translations) of a core text from English into German and then into English again. And though the subject of the piece is teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), German certainly constitutes here a translative textual contact zone sandwiched between two meditations on the meaning of English-teaching in a German multilingual context�] The most recent books by the migration researchers Betts and Collier, Refuge (2017), and by Betts, Bloom, Kaplan and Omata, Refugee Economies (2014, 2017), propose an interesting approach to the problem of global forced migration� Betts and his colleagues suggest that rather than simply ‘storing’ refugees in camps for indefinite periods of time, it would make more sense to allow them to work. Very much in the spirit of Anglo-Celtic utilitarianism, but no less in the mode of Global South ‘informal’ ingenuity and making-do, they work from a pragmatic economic perspective (see also Collier 2013). The current arrangement reigning almost everywhere around the world is to see refugees as mere passing visitors who should be seen on their way as soon as possible� But in fact, as Betts and his colleagues point out, this misses the mark by a long way, because the reality of forced migration is quite different. The great majority of today’s refugees stay in the host country for much longer than planned, often being caught in a sort of limbo for years. In order to prevent refugees from becoming anything resembling permanent residents, and to stop them from causing putative damage to the employment prospects of the natives, most host countries forbid refugees from working. In this way, the time of forced expatriation becomes an empty period of pointless waiting and forced inactivity� Par- 298 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom adoxically, far from removing pressure from the host country, these unlimited stays mean that refugees becoming a significant burden for the host country, not to mention for the international donor community� Betts and his colleagues suggest instead that the labour power of refugees should be unleashed by giving them the right to work in the host country. Such a concession would have two important results: refugees would not become a burden to the host country or the international community of aid donors; and it would allow the refugees to become a motor of economic growth (as immigrants are in fact everywhere: see Bonin 2016; Boubtane, Dumont and Rault 2106; Milanovic 2016: 262n41, who notes that in Europe, immigrants contribute on average 2000 € more in taxes per annum than they receive in benefits). Furthermore, the right to work would allow refugees to take up their status as agency-wielding social actors, less via the recognition of abstract human rights, whose purchase in the Global South of today is fragile to say the least (Baxi 2002, 2007), than via the concrete right to societal and economic participation by virtue of work. In other words, they would assert their right to contribute to society and the common weal through creativity and productivity, whether it be the production of goods, services, further employment opportunities (21 per cent of refugees in Kampala, Uganda have started their own businesses; these businesses draw 40 per cent of their employees from the local population [Betts, Bloom, Kaplan, and Omata 2014: 19]), knowledge, or quite simply social relationships. Starting from a similar set of assumptions, this chapter seeks to shift customary perceptions of the so-called contemporary ‘refugee crisis’ with the aim of viewing it as an opportunity for German society at the present moment—as an opportunity for the economic well-being of the country, and for the social common weal in the broader sense� The decision to embed this chapter’s attempt at epistemic transformation in the raw economic interests of the nation is not meant as a capitulation to the cynical logic of neoliberalism, which reduces all social actors to commodities, human ‘resources’ more or less on a par with the objects and services they produce (Mbembe 2017). Rather, the aim is to offer a pragmatic approach that mediates between the enthusiastic idealism of the short-lived ‘Willkommenskultur’ (‘Culture of welcome’) of Summer 2015 on the one hand, and nationalist demands for assimilation or exclusion on the other (Ott 2016). This pragmatic approach proceeds from the assumption that economic productivity in its true sense is the result of work, and that work, even when it is alienated work, is a socially meaningful activity in which society itself is produced in a creative manner (Volf 1988). To regard migrants and in particular refugees primarily as workers is to open up the possibility of them being understood not merely as ‘foreign bodies’ and as a burden to society susceptible of expulsion (Mbembe 2006: 306; Sassen 2014), but potentially as con- Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom 299 tributors to the ongoing business of socio-economic production, and thereby as co-producers of the fabric of society. Such an admittedly idealized view of work, bracketing as it does the ubiquitous facts of exploitation and exclusion, nonetheless harbours a possible shift of attitudes that might recalibrate the current parameters of debates about ‘belonging’ and especially ‘integration’ that dominate public discourses at the current time in Germany� The currently hegemonic criteria of ‘integration’ and ‘inclusion’ are based upon vague notions of ‘values’ and ‘cultural difference’ that primarily serve the purpose of exclusion. The ever-recurring euphemism of ‘Leitkultur’ (‘defining’, ‘dominant’, or ‘lead culture) constitutes an imaginary list of attributes to which migrants are expected to ostentatiously display their allegiance (the latter paradoxically meaning that, ideally, they become invisible as migrants). The main purpose of the rhetoric of ‘Leitkulture’ is, in fact, to intimate the impossibility of full integration. By contrast, the notion of ‘constitutional patriotism’ (‘Verfassungspatriotismus’) has the advantage of political neutrality, as it merely describes a set of basic democratic tenets underpinning the Federal Republic in its post-1949 form, but these in turn are too abstract to have much purchase in the context of everyday life: what does it mean, for instance, to conform to the inaugural constitutional mandate of the inviolability of human dignity (‘Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar’ [Bundesministerium der Justiz 2014: Article 1])? By contrast, work is both a concrete value and a basic quotidian reality that offers the possibility of combining a real manifestation of one of the elemental forms of human identity and a fundamental mode of social participation. Work has been a powerful motor of integration of migrants at several historical junctures in post-war Germany: two salient examples are the ‘Verbtriebenen’ (the immediate postwar refugees from the erstwhile German-speaking Eastern provinces that were annexed by Russia and Poland [Streeck 2017: 26]) in the 1950s; the ‘Gastarbeiter’ or migrant workers from Turkey, Italy and Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 70s, for whom work became a path of remarkable inclusion and upward social mobility, especially in successful multicultural cities such as Stuttgart (Schenk 2012). As Münkler and Münkler (2016: 287) suggest, work may be able to take up a heavily symbolic role of social and subsequently national belonging: Als Deutscher soll hier … ein jeder verstanden werden, der davon überzeugt ist, dass er für sich und seine Familie durch Arbeit … selbst sorgen kann und nur in Not- und Ausnahmefällen auf Unterstützung durch die Solidargemeinschaft angewiesen ist. Für diesen Deutschen gilt weiterhin, dass er Grund hat, davon auszugehen, dass er durch eigene Anstrengung die angestrebte persönliche Anerkennung und einen gewissen sozialen Aufstieg erreichen kann. 300 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom [We regard as German every person who is convinced that he [or she] can provide for his [or her] family an occupation and only in exceptional siatuations might have to fall back upon the support of the community. Such Germans can assume furthermore that by their own efforts they can achieve the social recognition to which they aspire, as well as a certain degree of upward mobility�] In this chapter, refugees’ capacity to work serves as a metaphor for their general abilities (and not as a narrow criterium that may exclude those unable or only partly able to work, above all in a society of changing, even shrinking employment conditions [see Plamper 2019: 319])—general abilities all too often underestimated or ignored by the host society, according to the thesis proposed here, while in fact that ought to be seen as a vital resource for that society� School in particular can be seen as a potential site of the activation of ability-as-resource among migrants (and by this I mean not only refugees but also all persons with a so-called ‘migration background’) with a view to producing a diverse citizenry for the future. At stake here is not only the possibility of regarding refugees as potential social actors but also of seeing the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ as an opportunity for radically re-envisioning the general societal situation in Germany. In the following, I will be examining the all-too-seldom idea that migration constitutes an opportunity and a valuable resource within the specific context of schooling, and in particular in the context of the training of future EFL school teachers. The chapter thus addresses a perceived need for measures that will aid contemporary German society in dealing adequately with the challenges of the increasingly rapid transformations resulting from rising levels of migration� The chapter’s starting point is the assumption that the primary and secondary school systems are one of the central sites in which the two-way process of integration of newcomers and the adaptation of established residents may be facilitated. It focusses upon EFL, the dominant foreign-language teaching sector within the German educational system, a subject through which virtually every school pupil between the age of 10 and 15 transits. It assumes that EFL may provide a vital platform, far beyond the mere acquisition of language competencies, for the development of a complex set of transcultural cognitive, relational and civil-societal skills. These skills may be inculcated as much by the form or medium of EFL teaching as by its content. There have been some attempts to introduce multilingual approaches to the teaching of German (Marx 2014). However, the EFL classroom offers a better docking-on point for such approaches as it already functions explicitly within the paradigms of applied linguistics, rather than presenting the pedagogically ‘unmarked’ facade of the majority ‘native language’ (German). Thus, EFL gains the widest coverage of Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom 301 German school learners, close to that of German as a core subject, yet is already equipped for explicit language-acquisition processes and more importantly, for a meta-reflection upon linguistic and cultural diversity, in ways that German is not� The chapter takes into account that fact that that the configuration of English as a school subject is already caught up in an ongoing process of transformation, triggered in the specifically German context, by two factors: first, the average student of English is no longer necessarily a monocultural or monolingual learner, but often brings multiple linguistic capacities and cultural backgrounds into the language-learning process; second, the English-speaking world (understood as the interaction of language, culture and social institutions) is no longer hierarchically arranged according to (Euro-American) centre and periphery (White settler Commonwealth, followed by the African/ Asian Commonwealth), but increasingly functions, in the wake of the emergence of such transformative factors as the BRICS-group, as a multipolar system. The chapter weighs up two approaches to the training of English teachers with a view to facilitating the larger process of social transformation� On the one hand, one might ‘add’ the transformative factors mentioned above to an extant conception of learner profiles and content profiles (Karakasolglu 2016: 39-40). This, however, would merely cement Eurocentric hierarches regarding both the types of learners and the view of the English-speaking world to be taught, thereby hindering the process of transformation because of a fatal mismatch with the reality of German classrooms; it would moreover reinforce rampant forms of structural discrimination within the German school system� On the other hand, a second approach is becoming increasingly imperative: what is really needed is a fundamental reorientation of the teacher-training system itself� This urgently needed reorientation would presuppose a diversity without hierarchies as the starting point for the elaboration of teaching methods and curricular contents� (The inevitable debate about ‘standards’ is unhelpful in this context, because it merely reintroduces a new hierarchy rather than asking what competencies may be present in such diverse student populations, and how that potential can be released so as to be made available for the common weal.) This latter starting point concurs with all social theories that stress identity as inherently multiple, fluid and dynamic, rather than centred on an essentialized and stable core� To a large extent, this dynamic process is already underway on the ‘shopfloor’: schools with very diverse bodies of students have had, of necessity, to develop new teaching methods and materials, and thus are pioneering, albeit in an decentralized manner, the transformation of EFL in a multicultural and polylingual Germany� This chapter responds to transformations from within 302 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom individual schools and seeks to translate them into a coherent programme for systemic reform� The fate of the Federal Republic in the twenty-first century There are genuine socio-economic imperatives for doing so. Economists such as Piketty (2014) or Milanovic (2016) draw attention to a globally growing chasm between rich and poor� This tendency that is accelerating constantly, and is accompanied by a rise, after several decades of improvement, in acute poverty (Lawson et al. 2019). Paradoxically, the increasing distance between rich and poor within individual nations does not go hand in hand with a corresponding gap between rich nations and poor nations� On the contrary, the gap between nations is shrinking, and is shrinking to such an extent that it is quite possible that the countries of the wealthy North Atlantic domain may lose their economically privileged position in the coming decades. China’s contribution to the global economy, for instance, will have tripled that of the US by 2020 (Tooze 2018). Any chance the countries of the North Atlantic arc have of maintaining their current high standards of living depends on their preparedness to bolster their growth by expanding their workforces so as to counter their accelerating population shrinkage. Münkler and Münkler (2016: 30) note soberly: ‘Der Norden kann ohne eine kontinuierliche Zuwanderung von Arbeitskräften nicht auskommen’ [‘The Global North cannot get by economically without continuous immigration’]� This general trend applies no less to Germany, all the more so by virtue of its particular situation in the world economy: Der demographische Wandel ist einer der zentralen Einflussfaktoren, der den deutschen Arbeitsmarkt in Zukunft nachhaltig verändern wird. Bis heute unterschätzen viele jedoch das Ausmaß dieser Veränderung: Nach einer aktuellen Umfrage glauben immerhin 28 Prozent, dass Deutschland in den kommenden Jahrzehnten ohne Einwanderer gar nicht oder um maximal eine Million Menschen schrumpfen wird. Ohne Zuwanderung wird aber das Erwerbspersonenpotenzial in Deutschland bei konstanten Erwerbsquoten bis zum Jahr 2050 um rund 16 Millionen Menschen und damit um 36 Prozent zurückgehen … Wenn dieser nicht ausgeglichen werden kann, drohen vielfältige volkswirtschaftliche Konsequenzen. Unternehmen, die nicht genug Arbeitskräfte finden, werden ihr Gewerbe einschränken, im internationalen Vergleich erheblich höhere Gehälter zahlen oder Arbeitsplätze ins Ausland verlagern müssen. Gleichzeitig verteilen sich die Kosten für soziale Sicherungssysteme und sonstige staatliche Ausgaben (z. B. Infrastruktur) auf weniger Schultern. Vor allem stark The fate of the Federal Republic in the twenty-first century 303 steigende Sozialversicherungsbeiträge wären die Folge. (Fuchs, Kubis and Schneider 2015: 1) [Demographic change is one of the central factors that will permanently transform the German employment sector. Despite this, many people still underestimate the sheer scope of this transformation: according to a recent [i.e. 2014-15] survey, 28 per cent of those interviewed believed that without migration, in the coming decades, Germany’s population would not shrink at all, or at the most by a million. In reality, without migration, and assuming stable employment rates, Germany’s labour potential will fall by about 16 million persons, in other words by about 36 per cent … If this loss of labour is not compensated for, the consequences will be dramatic. Companies that cannot find enough employees will have to scale down their production, pay higher wages in comparison to competitors overseas, or shift their production abroad. At the same time, the costs of social security systems and other state expenditures (e.g. infrastructure) will weigh more and more heavily upon ever fewer shoulders. The most immediately noticeable result of such a situation will be a rapid rise in social security wage deductions�] These simultaneously global and national scenarios make a sober, well-informed discussion about the best ways of integrating present and future immigrants into society—above all with a view to establishing a solid employment base—an absolute imperative. No less imperative to the latter task is the job of ensuring the optimal economic participation of the current generations and their descendants. Education has a central role to play here. Those of the population who have what is euphemistically referred to as a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ (persons born abroad or having at least one parent born abroad) often underperform from primary-school age on as a result of systematic neglect by educational institutions. In concrete terms, pupils with a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ fall foul to a multiplicity of mechanisms of selection that work to exclude them from access to senior high school and qualifications that lead to university entrance (as opposed to schools that specifically qualify pupils for ‘trades’) and as a consequence, from better-paid professions. This form of social reproduction of socio-economic inequality is detrimental, in the long term, to all stakeholders in society. Social inequality arguably impacts negatively on economic productivity; significantly, social inequality is currently rising in Germany along with a number of other developed countries (Cinganoi/ OECD 2014). Concretely, social inequality effectively reduces the taxation income accruing to the state and thus contributes to the shrinkage of the social welfare state—and, significantly, to sinking levels of pension payments for a large sector of the population� Because the latter problem is becoming an increasingly prominent topic of public discussion, and of electoral debates, the 304 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom socioeconomic role of migration, both today and in the future, is also coming into focus as a central issue for the common weal (see Faus and Storks 2019). The educational system has a significant role in securing social equity and thus the economic security of a society� As things stand, however, the main function of the German school system with regard to the approximately one third of school pupils with a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ is less to qualify them for maximum participation in the future employment sector, than to dis qualify them with a view to keeping them in lower-qualified and lower-paying professions. (The intention imputed to the system itself would be denied by proponents of the system, who by contrast habitually ascribe structural discrimination to the supposed inabilities of certain groups of learners.) The current school system has thus perpetuated for more than half a century the underlying dynamic of the ‘Gastarbeiter’ system, which facilitated a rapid upward social mobility among the German working classes of the early 1960s by having the incoming unskilled labour from the sending countries (Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece) take up employment in the lowest-paying reaches of the labour market; the school system was responsible for maintaining an unequal distribution of upward mobility� Upward mobility via educational access within the broad group of Turkish and (erstwhile) Yugoslavian and other German-born immigrant populations has risen slightly but not significantly over successive generations (Davoli and Entorf 2018; Diel and Granato 2018). Within this remarkably tenacious systemic reinforcement of social inequality, school subjects such as mathematics and in particular German play an important gatekeeper role, filtering out pupils from lower socioeconomic groups and those whose home language is not German—often one and the same given the self-perpetuating nature of this apparatus for the preservation of social inequity (Gomolla and Radtke 2009). Such pupils are filtered ‘down’ into the ‘Haupt-‘ and ‘Realschulen’ (approximating to technical and trades high schools), often with a demonstrable knock-on correlation to a capped salary ceiling. In summary, the German school system has for many years done little to improve the educational levels of people from lower socioeconomic sectors and from a migrant background. This is clearly not the fault of migrants and pupils with a migration background themselves, but of the school system’s inability— or reluctance—to shift its own tendency to reinforce social origin. Similarly, the German school system allows the home language to play a more detrimental role in scholastic performance than other educational systems around the world (Solga and Dombrowski 2009: 26). Solga and Dombrowski (ibid: 27) wonder ‘ob Benachteiligungen aufgrund von Sprachschwierigkeiten wirklich ein “Defizit” der Schülerinnen und Schüler oder nicht eher ein Defizit der deutschen Schule sind’ [‘whether disadvantages because of linguistic difficulties really represent a The fate of the Federal Republic in the twenty-first century 305 “deficit” on the part of pupils, or whether they do not in fact represent a deficit of the German school system itself ’], going on to contrast a school system such as Qatar, where students with a second language outperform those of the native speakers (OECD 2007, qtd in Solga and Dombrowski 2009: 26). They conclude (ibid: 28) that ‘das deutsche Schulsystem ist nicht in der Lage, das Bildungspotenzial dieser Bevölkerungsgruppen angemessen zu fördern. Andere Länder und deren Bildungssysteme schaffen es besser, ihren Schülerinnen und Schülern mit Migrationshintergrund gute Bildungschancen zu eröffnen’ [‘the German school system is not in a position to appropriately foster the educational potential of these groups in society� Other educational systems in other countries are more successful at opening up enhanced educational opportunities for their pupils with a migrant background’]. Given these structural characteristsics of the German educational system, what is needed, one critic (Dietz 2011: 104) suggests, is a process of transformation consisting of three stages: ‘problematization’, ‘empowerment’ and finally, ‘recognition’. The later stage implies, ‘schließlich die Wahrnehmung dieser Diversität und Heterogenität als eine Ressource , die pädagogisch genutzt werden kann und soll, um interkulturelle Kompetenzen nicht nur der Angehörigen von Minderheiten, sondern aller Schülerinnen und Schüler zu entwickeln’ [‘finally, the perception and recognition of diversity and heterogeneity as a resource that can and should be utilized in pedagogy in order to develop the intercultural competencies not only of the members of minorities but of all school pupils’]� In changing the extant system, it is not merely a matter of inculcating a better knowledge of German for second-language speakers (DaZ), though this is important (as BMBF 2016 recognizes). Retooling German-teaching as a facilitator to educational access rather than as a discriminatory gatekeeper is necessary, but would not significantly change the underlying assumptions of the majority educational system as a hegemonic and homogeneous cultural side into which ‘outsiders’ are inducted in an assimilative, one way process� What is necessary is a fundamental transformation of the system itself, which makes linguistic and cultural heterogeneity a central element of its logic, rather than a problematic element to be filtered out of those relatively few individuals that are admitted to the core from ‘outside’. Here, German would have to function in a manner that involves ‘translation’ as an underlying operation, one of whose effects would be to render the native language foreign to itself, a ‘contact zone’ of the sort studied in this volume. At the current time, however, German, even in an enhanced inductive capacity, would most likely remain the guardian of a homogeneous culture to which it is assumed incomers need to adapt in order to find their rightful place in the employment sector. This chapter recognizes that, as they stand, current calls for a more effective and more comprehensive 306 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom teaching of German as second language (DaZ) will not establish that language as a ‘contact zone’. That particular task has been considered in a speculative and conceptually experimental manner elsewhere in this volume (see chapter 12). By contrast, this chapter aims to re-envisage English as a Foreign Language (EFL) or ‘Fach Englisch’ as a potentially transformative ‘contact zone’ in the German school system� In the following, the focus lies upon English as the most frequently studied ‘first foreign language’ within the German educational system. English is taken as a subject by almost all pupils in the important 10-16 year-old age-group. The chapter stresses the potential inherent in EFL as a site for developing diversity competencies. Alone the fact that for around a good third of all school English-learners English is not the ‘first’ foreign language, but often the second or third, goes to the heart of the matter: the learning of English within the field of foreign-language teaching represents a polylingual and multicultural space to which many learners bring already extant, highly developed and subtly nuanced diversity competencies. The space of EFL is not merely one in which pupils with German as a home language are confronted with linguistic otherness for the first time. Nor is a space in which they develop L2-acquistion skills against the background of heir L1 competencies. Rather, it is a space in which, for a large minority, indeed in many schools the majority of learners, L2-navigational skills are already available and will be intuitively mobilized and implemented by them. In other words, the EFL classroom is often a space inhabited by subjects who are already experts in L2-negotiation and navigation, and for whom EFL is an L2+-subject with all the cognitive differences hat his implies. Teachers in the German school system do increasingly find themselves working in classroom spaces replete with linguistic and cultural diversity, and they often do take this into account in their teaching practice. Teachers’ reactions are spontaneous, creative and innovative, but largely constitute ‘shop-floor’ strategies ‘from below’� Their responses are often ad hoc, local and constrained by situational conditions, which means that despite their manifest inventiveness and imaginativeness, they are unable to exert much transformative influence upon the system as a whole� Teaching training in Germany on the whole tends to pay little attention to the realities of teaching polycultural and polylingual groups of pupils (Morris-Lange et al. 2016). For this reason, it is high time to develop new approaches to teacher training, approaches that acknowledge the polylingualism and multiculturalism of the classroom and explicitly view and implement these de facto resource as the starting point (and not a mere peripheral phenomenon to be ‘factored into’ existing structures) for a diversity-based teaching methodology� Polylingual schools and a pluricultural society 307 Polylingual schools and a pluricultural society For a number of years now, the German school system has been becoming increasingly multilingual and polycultural� The percentage of children in German schools with the status of ‘Ausländer’ (holders of non-German passports, which may not preclude several generations of residence in Germany) rose from 7.7 per cent in 2014-15 to 9.5 per cent in 2015-16 (Statistisches Bundesamt 2016a). The BMBF presents a rise of school pupils with a ‘Zuwanderungshintergrund’ from 19.9 per cent in 2006 auf 27.9 per cent in 2015, noting also a expansion of the palette of countries of origin (BMBF 2016). Of more relevance to this chapter, whose focus is on EFL as the single school language subject that ‘captures’ virtually the entirety of the 10to 16-year-olds, the group with absolutely comprehensive school attendance, are the figures for the 10to 15-year-old sector of the population. The 2015 ‘Microcensus’ revealed that the percentage of 10to 15-year olds with a ‘Migrationshintergrund’, was 32.2 per cent (Statistisches Bundesamt 2016b: 37). This age-group figure rose to to 34.1 per cent by 2016 (Statistisches Bundesamt 2017b: 38), and 35.9 per cent in 2017 (Statistisches Bundesamt 2018: 41). Clearly there is currently a rising curve with a roughly 2 per cent-increase per year. In some cities such as Bremen, more than half of all school beginners have a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ (Karakasoglu 2016: 40). Data from the early 2000s (Chlosta 2003; Fürstenau et al 2003; Schroeder 2007) gave figures for polylingualism among primary school children hovering around 30 per cent; a decade and a half later, the figures are probably higher rather than lower� The fact, however, that it is virtually impossible to obtain any reliable figures on plurilingualism in schools (a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ is usually used as a direct correlation to plurilingualism) is indicative of the continuing institutional indifference to such matters as a site of learning resources. The peak influx of refugee children into German schools in 2015 was relatively brief, but served to highlight less acute but longer-term trends already present. Despite the persistently rising degree of cultural diversity in German schools, the system is only moderately successful in keeping these children within the higher-performing tiers of the educational system. Long-entrenched forms of institutional discrimination mean that in particular learners from a non-German-native-language-background tend to be disadvantaged within the German educational system (Luchtenberger 1999: 78-9; Solga and Dombrowski 2009: 26-8). This means that, from the perspective of human resources, the system is wasting one of its most precious assets: namely, that sector of the population of young learners and later educationally qualified employees upon which the nation will be dependent to supplement a failing demographic, and 308 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom by extension, a slackening economy (Luchtenberg 1999: 196-97; Milanovic 2016: 164, 204-5). The migration phenomenon of 2015 was a wake-up call to Germany society about its own neglect of duty. The inflow of immigrants in 2015 was experienced as a crisis, but in fact, in the long term, such phenomena may be the norm. As Terkessidis (2017: 19) notes, we are living in a ‘post-migration’ society, because ‘die Migration hat schon längst stattgefunden, und die Fluchtbewegungen von 2015 und 2016 sind Teil einer Normalität’ [‘migration has already taken place and the refugee movements of 2015 and 2016 are merely part of the normal state of affairs’]. This new normality is due, on the one hand because international conflicts and the results of global warming will create increasingly forceful human movements, some of which inevitably will spill over into Europe (Gemenne, Ionesco and Mokhnacheva 2016; Nealon 2016: 121); on the other hand to brutal economic realities that will force the German government, sooner or later, to accept the necessity of levels of immigration above what is currently taken as feasible (Münkler/ Münkler 2016; Bade 2016). At the time of publication such a recognition seems to be already seeping, albeint slowly, through into the broad majority of the population (Faus and Storks 2019); it remains to be seen how long it will take for policy, which is not entirely independent of electoral pressures, to follow suit� German schools will need, if the state is to successfully integrate higher levels of migration and exploit the economic resources of that migration, to offer significant components of a transformed social policy on migration (not to speak of a not-yet existent migration politics still in abeyance despite a reluctant attempt to legislate in this direction in late 2018 [Stalinski 2018 ]), to revamp their approach to multilingualism, pluriculturalism, curriculum design, classroom teaching practices, teacher training and teacher recruitment. In particular, a teacher training oriented towards diversity and pluriculturism (in other words, a diversity-pedagogy, a ‘Pädagogik der Vielfalt’ proposed by Prengel 1993) will need to be implemented so as to work to the benefit of the one-third of learners who come from a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ rather than to their detriment, in order to keep them in the education system with a view to enhancing their educational qualification, skills acquisition and later economic output. EFL as a model for diversity learning Recent research as begun to realize that one salient site where such a transformation can most sensibly implemented is the teacher training of English teachers. English is the most-studied foreign language in German schools. The EFL as a model for diversity learning 309 majority of learners have some degree of contact with English, however intensive their encounter may be and whatever level of competence they may reach� As Jakisch (2014: 205-6) notes, ‘über [den Englischunterrich] [wird] in der Regel die erste schulische Begegnung mit einer Fremdsprache angeregt’ [‘it’s as a rule via English in school that the first contact with a foreign language is stimulated’]. Not only is EFL the broadest-based foreign-language-learning platform for German learners; it inherently offers a plethora of possibilities for modes of teaching in which cultural and linguistic diversity is the starting point and defining framework (Christ 2008; Jakisch 2015a). EFL teaching thus needs to be seen as a platform for a transformed teaching and learning of linguistic and cultural diversity skills not merely from the perspective of pedagogical content, but more radically as a pedagogical form . In the formulation of Wittgenstein (1990: 32-3) it is less a matter of the didactic ‘saying’ than pedagogical the ‘showing’ of the potential inherent in a body of pupils marked by cultural diversity and linguistic multiplicity, whose already extant diversity competencies deserve to be recognized, integrated and allowed to become productive in the classroom: ‘[D]er Englischunterricht kann sich diesen Gegebenheiten und Forderungen nicht verschließen’ [‘EFL can no longer avoid opening up to these facts and the imperative they pose’] ( Jakisch 2014: 205-6). As noted above, the role of German as a gate-keeper and criteria of exclusion has long been recognized (Gomolla and Radtke 2009). Demands to enhance German-language assistance for learners with a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ are praiseworthy and vitally important for their future professional development (BMBF 2016; Gamper and Schroeder 2016). The enhancement of German-language tuition may run the risk, however, of cementing the ‘monlingual habitus’ of the German school system (Gogolin 1994) rather than opening it up the the de facto reality of multilingualism� Ultimately, moves to expand and improve German-language tuition for immigrants, laudable as they may be, resonate with monolingual notions of the ‘normativity’ of a single language mental structure and a single-language learning environment, and even with right-wing notions of linguistic exclusivity such as those recently enunciated by the conservative CSU: ‘Deutsch ist bei uns die verbindliche Sprache im öffentlichen Leben—keine andere’ [‘German, and no other language, is the mandatory linguistic medium of public life’] (CSU 2016). In contrast, EFL in schools, as the most accessible platform for access to a foreign language, offers a site where language-learning as a project, and thus linguistic diversity per se, is built into the very subject itself. For most English learners, English presents the primary and most frequent school-based contact and engagement with linguistic alterity, an engagement that itself must become the central ‘core’ of the subject of EFL. 310 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom Especially since the refugee crisis of 2015, but also well before that, EFL teachers in multilingual classrooms have created pragmatic, creative on-the-ground strategies to deal with their changing clientele (Agarwala, Schenk and Spiewak 2016; Luchtenberg 1999: 85-135; Schule-BW 2017). These strategies remain, to a large extent, undocumented� Their impact is thus limited to the immediate school contexts in which they are invented and implemented. The first signs of transfer of ground-level methodologies are beginning to appear in research publications (see for instance the various contributions in Doff, ed. 2016). However, and most problematically, they have yet to filter across the educational system into teacher-training theories and programmes (Giesler, Schuett and Wolter 2016: 65). Teacher-training in Germany has yet to discover the ‘normality’ of a migration-influenced multicultural and multilingual classroom (Karaksoglu 2016: 39), just as German society in general has yet to recognize the normativity of polylingualism and to regard it as a relevant social or economic resources (Hinnenkamp 2010). Ambivalent evidence from textbooks Evidence for this reluctance to adapt to changing conditions can be found in recent German textbooks implemented in the early phases of undergraduate EFL teacher-training programmes (for instance, Grimm, Meyer and Volkmann 2015; Haß, ed. 2006: 21-22, 70-71, 140-6; Volkmann 2010). Such textbooks, tightly correlated with a state qualifying and accreditation system (the two-tier ‘Staatsexamen’) as they are, can be taken as an accessible index of the extent to which diversity is a central element of the fundamental knowledge that is to be acquired by future state-employed EFL teachers. Although such textbooks pay attention to issues such as ‘inclusion’ and ‘heterogeneity as opportunity’ (Haß, ed. 2006: 37-8), these texts make no reference to, or at best only fleeing mention of the polylingual and polycultural diversity of the learners who are the ultimate concern of teacher-training� These texts tend to assume that the intercultural competencies to be acquired by students in the EFL classroom are directed at an ‘elsewhere’, that is, in so-called ‘target cultures’ (Grimm, Meyer and Volkmann 2015: 167) located in the English-speaking world (for a critique of this attitude, see also Doff and Schulze-Engler 2011). Such attitudes reflect the basic assumption, for instance, of the curriculum plan (‘Bildungsplan’) for the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, which deems that the preconditions ‘um Schülerinnen und Schüler zu befähigen, in vielfältigen Kommunikationssituationen erfolgreich zu agieren’ are ‘fundierte Kenntnisse über verschiedene englischsprachige Länder’ [‘for school pupils being able to act in a successful Ambivalent evidence from textbooks 311 manner in a multiplicity of communicative situations’ are ‘solid knowledge of various English-speaking countries’] (Schule-BW 2017: 7). In real terms of pragmatic skills acquisition, such knowledge is undoubtedly relevant—but primarily to the prosperous 5 per cent of German secondary students that go abroad as exchange students (with the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Ireland making up the most popular destination, in that order) and the similar number of apprentices that go abroad during their apprenticeship (Gerland 2016; Weltweiser 2016). Two aspects of this attitude are problematic here. The first is that cultural diversity is assumed to be an attribute of the ‘target’ culture in the English speaking world, rather than the ‘source’ culture where the German classroom is situated. The second is that the version of the English-speaking world imagined by these textbooks is very partial: it is, effectively, the English-speaking Global North and its corresponding, putatively hegemonic versions of the English language� Both aspects neglect the very real cultural and linguistic resources for transformation already present in the majority of German EFL classrooms. In what follows I unpack these two caveats at greater length. The first issue concerns the perceptions of the learner groups implicit in these texts. These textbooks are culturally hypermetropic: they are focussed upon a distant English-speaking multicultural world, although there is another English-speaking world simultaneously even further away and very close at hand they cannot see; such texts are blind to the multicultural world directly before them� There is little hint in such programmatic declarations about the aims and goals of state-sanctioned EFL teaching that interculturality occurs within the German EFL context itself (compare Luchtenberg 1999: 129). Polyculturalism is to be found in ‘target cultures’; the German ‘source culture’ is tacitly positioned as monolcultural and homogeneous� These textbooks leave intact implicit deep-seated assumptions about the ‘average student’—despite explicit acknowledgement that such a creature does not exist (Grimm, Meyer and Volkmann 2015: 141). This imagined average student is culturally ‘unmarked’, and thus presumably a representative of hegemonic, establishment ‘source’ culture whose identity is unproblematic enough to remain unmentioned: ‘Denn noch immer dominiert das Bild eines monolingual ausgerichteten, von deutschen MuttersprachlerInnen ausgehenden Unterrichts [ ] und das, obwohl Sprachenvielfalt und Plurikulturalität längst der Normalfall in vielen Lerngruppen sind’ [‘For, the image of monolingually-oriented teaching, assuming a group of German native speakers, remains dominant, even though multilingualism and polyculturalism have long become the norm in many learner groups’] ( Jakisch 2014: 205-6). Despite a declared focus on learner identity and an acknowledgement of ‘students’ expertise regarding other 312 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom cultures’ (Grimm, Meyer and Volkmann 2015: 168-9) even progressive and upto-date teaching texts in fact assume a monocultural and monolingual learning environment that is no longer the exclusive reality in German schools� Such textbooks depend heavily upon a British model of intercultural competence already two decades old (Byram 1997, qtd in Haß, ed. 2006: 142-6) and display a similar spatio-temporal distance to German classrooms of today, where the statistical realities on the ground display levels of heterogeneity far greater than these texts acknowledge. Similarly, such texts pay lip-service to ‘multiliteracies’ (another British-born concept from two decades ago; see Cazden et al. 1996; and Cope and Kalantzis 2009, and Cope, Kalantzis and Smith 2018, for a measure of the subsequent changes to their field and its concept). However, they fail to translate into a German context that concept’s intent to ‘expand the idea and scope of literacy pedagogies to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies’ (Cazden et al. 1996: 61, qtd in Grimm Meyer and Volkmann 2015: 200). Even recent work directly concerned with linguistic diversity such as Jakisch’s (2015a) comprehensive study of English as platform for polylingualism assumes German as a default language, and polylingualism as a something that must be ‘developed’� The fact that Jakisch’s sample of pupils includes 15 per cent who are already polylingual (with competencies in 4 languages) ( Jakisch 2015a: 157-60) is treated as virtually irrelevant to her project. It is worth noting that her study is located at ‘Gymnasium’ level, a school format that customarily has a smaller proportion of pupils with a polycultural and polylinguistic background; her results would need to be amplified considerably to expand their validity to the larger context of the entire school system. But the field-work context of the Gynmasium itself, a privileged locus of middle-class ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ [‘bourgeois cultured classes’] whose aspirational identity founded nascent German cultural nationalism in the nineteenth century, bring in its wake a set of linguistic assumptions that contaminate even the most progressive and experimental work on polylingualism. Thus the size of the polyingual sector of her sample, a direct result of the successively narrowing proportion of students with a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ as one rises ‘up’ the hierarchy of school forms (‘Hauptschule’, ‘Realschule’, ‘Gymnasium’), translates into a methodological marginalization of the polylingual skills already possessed by those students. Where such ground-breaking work on polylingualism does tangentially acknowledge students’ competencies in negotiating polylingualism, such skills are implicitly regarded in a manner analogous to their ‘community’ languages (for instance, Turkish, Croatian, Polish, Greek). Such languages do not figure among the standard repertoire of ‘academic’ language subjects (French, Spanish, Latin and Greek), and are seen as a sort of ‘informal’ knowledge. To that extent, the diversity expertise embedded in fluency in those Ambivalent evidence from textbooks 313 languages remains invisible, allowing polylingualism in the learner population be seen as an ‘underdeveloped’ potential still to be ‘processed’ and ‘refined’ by a pedagogical apparatus that in fact is lagging far behind reality� From the point of view of pedagogical resources, however, the apparently trivial proportion of Jakisch’s polylingual pupils is a significant majority (one out of six) and its neglect as an important element of a ‘networked’ language-teaching programme constitutes a bizarre and inexplicable lacuna in an otherwise pioneering study. In contrast, as the figures given above show, in the age-band 10-16 years, where almost all pupils in the German secondary school system are exposed to EFL in some form or another, around one in three pupils (and rising) has some form of polylingual or polycultural background (Statistisches Bundesamt 2016b: 37; 2017b: 38; 2018: 41). To the extent that they remain unacknowledged, or dismissed as ‘informal’ knowledge in current textbooks and studies, such expertise and competencies cannot be harnessed by the pedagogical undertaking (classroom teaching practice on the ‘shop-floor’ may be a different matter) so as to infuse the business of teaching to the benefit of all the pupils in the group, and indeed, to the very conceptualization of EFL teaching as a whole� The second issues concerns the perception of the English-speaking world embedded these these pedagogical texts. These textbooks are in general dominated by an implicit, and thus all the more tenacious, set of Eurocentric conceptions of the English-speaking world. As noted above, the declared brief of German EFL is ‘Schülerinnen und Schüler zu befähigen, in vielfältigen Kommunikationssituationen erfolgreich zu agieren’ [aufgrund von] ‘fundierte[n] Kenntnisse[n] über verschiedene englischsprachige Länder’ [to enable ‘school pupils […] to act in a successful manner in a multiplicity of communicative situations’ on the basis of a ‘solid knowledge of various English-speaking countries’] (Schule-BW 2017: 7). Such an agenda imagines a very specific set of ‘target’ countries: namely, the standard destination of student exchanges or tourist visits such as the USA, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland (Gerland 2016; Weltweiser 2016). This in turn implies a narrow (Eurocentric) range of varieties of English, to which German EFL remains staunchly committed in its teaching practices. Thus the Baden-Württemberg ‘Bildungsplan’ declares: ‘Im Zuge einer zunehmenden Globalisierung werden bei Aussprache und Intonation neben General American und Received Pronunciation auch andere englische Standardsprachen akzeptiert wie zum Beispiel Australian English, Irish English oder Indian English’ [‘In the wake of increasing globalization, other English standard languages are accepted as norms for pronunciation and intonation alongside General American and Received Pronunciation: Australian English, Irish English or Indian English’] (Baden-Württemberg MKJS 2016: 9). Quite apart from the fact 314 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom that Received Pronunciation no longer exists in the United Kingdom, let alone anywhere else, it’s worth noting that Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, where English is the official language of a very large number of nations, rate no mention here� This neglect is not simply evidence of unfashionable preferences, it is in fact empirically fallacious because the centre-periphery model of global English proposed by Kachru (1986), with its ‘inner’ and ‘outer circles’, all to often mistaken for a description of given hierarchies, simply no longer corresponds to the real state of affairs. Alongside the residual and undeniably waning hegemony of certain institutions such as the Oxford English Dictionary, an irreversible multiplication of ‘Englishes’ and a steady erosion of the purchase of metropolitan hierarchies is becoming increasingly evident� Recent research stresses the infinite creativity and transmutability of English—or perhaps better, of Englishes—as transcultural, translocal and ‘metropolized’ media of oral communication (Pennycook 2007, 2010; Pennycook and Otuji 2015). This linguistic multiplicity of Englishes has definitively arrived in Germany as well, not least in the persons of the many refugees from countries where English is a language of education and administration� German curricular plans nonetheless display a clear commitment to residual global hierarchies: ‘Wichtigste Bezugsländer im Englischunterricht sind Großbritannien und die USA, wobei auch die Auseinandersetzung mit anderen englischsprachigen Nationen bedeutsam ist’ [‘The most important nations of reference in EFL teaching are Great Britain and the USA, although an engagement with other English-speaking nations is of some significance’ (Baden-Württemberg MKJS 2016: 5). Another frequently-used undergraduate textbook for future teachers of English displays the same ambivalence: Volkmann (2010: 156) acknowledges the multiplicity of varieties of English and criticizes the colonial hierarchies that govern evaluations of these varieties, but nonetheless comes to the conclusion that ‘Die Diskussion um intensivere Beachtung von postkolonialem und lingua franca -Englisch kann sich nicht dem Faktum entziehen, dass Sprachnormen nach wie vor von den native speakers festgelegt werden’ [‘Debates around a greater acknowledgement of the validity of postcolonial and lingua franca-Englishes cannot avoid the fact that linguistic norms continue to be set by native speakers’]. By ‘native speakers’ Volkmann apparently means only British and American speakers of English—those native speakers of English who come from Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Botswana, Fiji, Ghana, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Cameroon, Kenya, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Malta, Malaysia, Namibia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Rwanda, Singapore or Zimbabwe do not qualify as such, and the norms they may set clearly do not have much authority� Such hierarchies are confirmed by Volkmann’s conclusion: ‘Es sprich dabei einiges dafür, wie es sich in gegenwärtigen Lehrplänen ausdrückt, nach wie vor an einer Ambivalent evidence from textbooks 315 moderaten Version des SABE [Standard American and British English] festzuhalten’ [‘There is much to suggest that it is worth sticking with a moderate version of SABE (i.e. Standard American and British English), as indicated by the current national curriculum and its regional plans’]. To be fair, this textbook’s pseudo-liberal but ultimately conservative stance avowedly follows the guidelines set by the state educational apparatus, which clings to long irrelevant Eurocentric hierarchies. The Baden-Württemberg ‘Bildungsplan’ notes: ‘Wichtig ist, dass die Schülerinnen und Schüler im Laufe ihrer schulischen Laufbahn unterschiedlichen Standardsprachen begegnen, entweder medial vermittelt oder durch den Kontakt mit Muttersprachlern’ [‘It is important that pupils encounter in the course of their learning trajectory at school various standard [ varieties of English], either via medial channels or through contact with native speakers’] (Baden-Württemberg MKJS 2016: 9; emphasis added). Volkmann’s ‘moderat[e] Version des SABE [Standard American and British English]’ [‘moderate version of SABE’] merely makes more explicit the ‘Bildungsplan’’s institutionalized imposition of normative ‘Standardsprachen’ [‘standard varieties of English’]-a form of systemic, indeed institutional conformity (unfor which one can hardly take the author to task. But if indeed ‘Kontakt mit Muttersprachlern’ [‘contact with native speakers’] (Baden-Württemberg MKJS 2016: 9) is one of the most important criteria in the teaching, learning and utilization of language in the context of German EFL, then the notion of ‘Standardsprachen’ [‘standard varieties of English’] will have to be relativized: given the changing make-up of German school clientele, African English in its many forms may rate higher on the list than Irish or Australian English. The real existing contact with native speakers from the Global South could become the basic criteria of intercultural communication in the transnational meshwork of today’s global interaction. Ultimately, German EFL will have no choice but to accept the real existing multiplicity of Englishes introduced into the German school system by the native speakers brought there by various forms of migration, and to make this a yardstick for the acquisition of linguistic negotiation and navigational skills. In other words, the English language itself presents an intercultural platform that does not exist somewhere in the outside world, but whose multiplicity is to be found within the immediate context of the German EFL classroom. Accepting this will allow EFL to recognize opportunities to use the resources of diversity and transformation already at hand to develop a new language learning culture� 316 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom The ‘real existing’ classroom as opportunity: what now? EFL as a potential platform for intercultural learning in the form of the pedagogical fabric, and not merely in its content, is a largely missed opportunity far as these textbooks are concerned, and presumably for the teacher-training programmes for which they claim to provide essential basic knowledge or, to use the characteristic German term, ‘Grundlagenwissen’ (compare Morris-Lange et al. 2016). Such ‘Grundlagenwissen’ in its customary form is anchored in an obsession with ‘Begriffsdefinition[en]’ [‘terminological definitions’] whose desire for ‘trennscharfe Abgenzungen’ [‘clearly defined demarcations’] (Haß, ed. 2006: 169) is cognate with a nostalgic desire for a culturally homogeneous school clientele uncontaminated by migration and untamed polylingualism� This largely imaginary model of knowledge can only maintain its taxonomic stability of clearly defined terminologies by ignoring the nitty-gritty and ‘noise’—literal, conceptual, cultural and cybernetic—of real classroom teaching. A genuinely useful teacherly knowledge would, by contrast, take as its starting point the basal reality of its own pluricultural and -lingual constituencies, facing up squarely squarely to the fundamental fact of migration as the main driver of social change among learners. Having accepted migration as the overriding fact of today’s societies, EFL would be able to recognize its own potential as a platform for a learning which is transcultural through and through. Drawing the consequences from these prior steps, it would then consider ways of reforming its methodologies and contents� Feldman (2015) has suggested that innovative thought about the contemporary nation-state needs to abandon citizenship as its central normative category and accept that migrancy is the main paradigm of contemporary political life and social experience. As Brian Massumi (2002: 7) notes, ‘Position no longer comes first, with movement a problematic second. It is secondary to movement and derived from it. It is retro movement, movement residue’. The challenge is to translate the increasingly prevalent influence of ‘mobility’ (Merriman 2012) into a conservative EFL teaching and teacher-training concept that still assumes migration is a peripheral factor, ignoring the reality of classrooms where teachers have to deal with the realities of migration on an everyday basis� Rather, the classroom should be inflected by the normative influence of an ‘originary mobility’ (Dubow 2004) that infuses every aspect of social reality. Thus, to return to the points made above, we would need to factor in migration as a force which has not merely formed the English-speaking world (as in teaching units that study emigration to the US in the nineteenth century, for instance) but have become the central moulding force within the ‘source cultures’ (the plural is all important) that comprise the very form of German The ‘real existing’ classroom as opportunity: what now? 317 EFL classrooms no less than the ‘target cultures’ of EFL content � Migration, polylingualism and polyculturalism need to be understood not as supplementary aspects of a more general and often vague concept of ‘heterogeneity’ (see for instance Bohl, Budde and Rieger-Ladich, eds 2017), but rather as the driving forces of contemporary social change with the power to transform the underlying concepts of EFL teaching (Karakasolglu 2016: 39-40). All well and good, one might object, but what does this mean in reality? 1� There is a clear need to initiate a sober and objective debate about the societal and economic value of polylingualism and cultural diversity� The currently hegemonic opinion that persons with a multicultural or multilingual background have ‘identity problems’ and ‘integration problems’ is simply false. The German Minister for the Interior, Horst Seehofer, notoriously declared in September 2018 that migration is the ‘mother of all social problems’ (‘Migration is die Mutter aller Probleme’) (Migration 2018), neatly summarizing as almost official policy a groundswell of popular denigration of polyculturalism and polylingualism� Migration is not the problem so much as a society that attributes to persons with a migratory background, on the basis of out-dated ideas about the unicity of individual subjectivity and of national identity, its own problematic relationship to mobility and multiplicity� 2� As a consequence, it is time to stop assuming that children and youth with a migration background suffer from some sort of a cultural and linguistic ‘deficit’, as the majority of teaching textbooks tend to do (Niehaus, Hoppe, Otto and Georgi 2015). Rather, we need to acknowledge that such learners are experienced and sure-footed ‘border crossers’ equipped from an early age with highly complex socio-economic competencies, manifest quite concretely, for instance, in their frequent role as lay community interpreters (Ahamer 2012). In analogy to the recognition that L2-learners already posses well-developed language-learning experiences, mechanisms and strategies and thus should not be treated in the same way as infant L1 learners and taught in a way that trivializes their skills (Pennycook 1994: 135-40, 305-6), so too we need to acknowledge that polylingual pupils bring with them a whole palette of valuable competencies to the EFL classroom. We need to trust that learners have already learnt something before entering the classroom and that, more fundamentally, they have already learnt how to learn (Friere 1972; Rancière 1991). Whoever has a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ already possesses intercultural competencies, and whoever has grown up bior polylingual already possesses language-learning skills (mental software) and transcultural transferable skills of considerable sophistication. Once these ideas have been accepted, the issue becomes a pragmatic one: How can such competencies be 318 Appendix: The Multicultural and multilingual classroom integrated into the EFL programme in such a way as to benefit all the pupils in the learning group? 3� On the basis of these two fundamental paradigm shifts, it would be possible to develop a cluster of concrete strategies for new learning formats, including: • the positive shop-fronting and utilization of the genuinely extant polylingualism to be found in German classrooms (Luchternberg 1999) so as to make the pupils’ own linguistic competencies as a starting point for common learning; • the thematization of polylingualism and multicultural connections within learning strategies so that group coherence is strengthened and motivations for learning are enhanced; • the development of a range of linguistic teaching materials that focus on the varieties of English and thereby mirror linguistic diversity among the learners themselves, especially with reference to new ‘language awareness’ strategies (Luchtenberg 2002); • the development of packages of cultural teaching materials whose focus is on the encouragement of pupils’ on reflection upon their lived cultural diversity (e.g. Schäfer 2016; Reid and Major, eds 2017); • and finally, a concerted effort to appoint more teachers with a ‘Migrationshintergrund’ and proven competencies in multilingualism so as to facilitate a better understanding of the context of learning and in order to create positive identification figures for pupils with a migratory histories (Karakasoglu 2011). A bundle of practical measures such as the above would allow the language classroom to become a place of what Carli Coetzee (2013) has called ‘accented’ learning. This classroom would nurture the extant skills of polylingual learners as a first step towards more generally fostering the expertise of a large sector of the population that is customarily relegated to a subordinate economic position� An ‘accented’ EFL classroom would thus make a significant contribution to the common weal in Germany in the very near future. It would facilitate the generation of genuinely sustainable patterns of social regeneration for the coming decades of turbulent transformation� Bibliography 319 Bibliography Achebe, Chinua (1999) ‘ “Chi” in Igbo Cosmology’, in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed. African Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell: Oxford), 67-72. Adesokan, Akin (2010) ‘Abderrahmane Sissako and the poetics of engaged expatriation�’ Screen 51: 2, 143-60. 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