Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation
    Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation
    Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation
    Ebook808 pages11 hours

    Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation

    By Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In recent years, scholarship on translation has moved well beyond the technicalities of converting one language into another and beyond conventional translation theory. With new technologies blurring distinctions between "the original" and its reproductions, and with globalization redefining national and cultural boundaries, "translation" is now emerging as a reformulated subject of lively, interdisciplinary debate. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation enters the heart of this debate. It covers an exceptional range of topics, from simultaneous translation to legal theory, from the language of exile to the language of new nations, from the press to the cinema; and cultures and languages from contemporary Bengal to ancient Japan, from translations of Homer to the work of Don DeLillo.


    All twenty-two essays, by leading voices including Gayatri Spivak and the late Edward Said, are provocative and persuasive. The book's four sections--"Translation as Medium and across Media," "The Ethics of Translation," "Translation and Difference," and "Beyond the Nation"--together provide a comprehensive view of current thinking on nationality and translation, one that will be widely consulted for years to come.


    The contributors are Jonathan E. Abel, Emily Apter, Sandra Bermann, Vilashini Cooppan, Stanley Corngold, David Damrosch, Robert Eaglestone, Stathis Gourgouris, Pierre Legrand, Jacques Lezra, Françoise Lionnet, Sylvia Molloy, Yopie Prins, Edward Said, Azade Seyhan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Henry Staten, Lawrence Venuti, Lynn Visson, Gauri Viswanathan, Samuel Weber, and Michael Wood.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 5, 2005
    ISBN9781400826681
    Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation

    Related to Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation

    Titles in the series (27)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Art of Translation

      Feb 13, 2019

      AFTER a recent translation conference, a young colleague brought up an interesting question: “I keep hearing people say that they translate from the Spanish, they translate from the French. Why the?” Why indeed. This was asked of a carful of people,

      12 min read

    • Article

      Out Of The Melting Pot, Into The Fire: Multiculturalism In The World’s Past And America’s Future

      Apr 9, 2024

      By Jens Heycke New York: Encounter Books, 2023. Pp. xi, 271. $30.99 paperback. Jens Heycke’s Out of the Melting Pot, into the Fire tells a story of human suffering and survival that I’ll never forget: a woman survives the Rwandan genocide, and yet to

      6 min read

    • Article

      The International Library

      Aug 16, 2023

      The International Library
      4 min read

    • Article

      Memoirs Of A Microaggressor

      Nov 26, 2020

      TO UNDERSTAND OUr current moment, start with public apologies. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, surely thought he was on safe ground when he came out in favour of delaying a Philip Guston exhibition because it included depictions of t

      5 min read

    • Article

      How English Took Over the World

      Feb 27, 2024

      English has become not just the “language of Europe”—it has become the dominant lingua franca of the world. The post How English Took Over the World appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      One Version To Rule Us All

      Feb 12, 2024

      One Version To Rule Us All
      9 min read

    • Article

      13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics

      Dec 15, 2019

      This summer, I spent time with the collection of interviews comprising 13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002). Introduced to me by my predecessors, this publication was described as an exercise in archiving, historicizing, revis

      5 min read

    • Article

      Capital Gains

      Mar 19, 2020

      Statistics, potted migrant biographies and histories jostle for space in this ambitious, but rather turgid, comparative study of London’s immigration history. The book weaves multiple community histories through 12 broad themes, ranging from housing,

      1 min read

    • Article

      The West protests

      Jul 1, 2020

      WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING the full brunt of what the writer bell hooks calls the “dominator culture.” Those who did not previously understand this must surely grapple with it now. “Throughout our nation,” hooks writes in belonging: a culture of p

      2 min read

    • Article

      War Of The Words

      Mar 1, 2024

      War Of The Words
      12 min read

    • Article

      A Cultural Catalyst

      Apr 25, 2024

      At the National School of Languages, Linguistics and Translation (ENALLT) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the country’s capital of Mexico City, Sinologist Radina Dimitrova is recognized by both students and colleagues for her dynam

      4 min read

    • Article

      Translating Chinese Literature: Cross-Cultural Communication

      Jun 16, 2022

      Chinese literary works have become an important window for foreigners to understand Chinese culture. In bridging the gap, translators, as messengers of cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries, play an important role. A senior translato

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation

    3.5/5

    3 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation - Sandra Bermann

      Translation

      Introduction

      SANDRA BERMANN

      There has probably never been a time when issues of nation, language, and translation have been more important or more troubling than they are today. In a world where individual nation-states are increasingly enmeshed in financial and information networks, where multiple linguistic and national identities can inhabit a single state’s borders or exceed them in vast diasporas, where globalization has its serious—and often violent—discontents, and where terrorism and war transform distrust into destruction, language and translation play central, if often unacknowledged, roles. Though the reasons for this are undeniably complex, they are, at least in broad terms, understandable. Waves of migrating peoples have made the contemporary nation-state, and especially its urban centers, into global sites with multiplicities of languages and cultures.¹ At the same time, the international trade, finance, and information technologies that support these sites both depend upon and often seek to bypass translation for economic growth within world and regional markets.

      The global reach of international law and politics only heightens the importance of language and translation. Military networks, governmental agencies, as well as international entities such as the United Nations, the United Arab Emirates, and the European Union translate for purposes of intelligence, negotiation, and the dissemination of information or propaganda, as do the growing number of nongovernmental (NGOs) agencies, be they religious or secular. Global media and information networks provide news and interviews on a minute-to-minute basis to serve multiple linguistic constituencies as well as specific cultural and political purposes.

      In a world of rapidly transforming populations and technologies, where language and citizenship are caught up in tightly woven webs of economic, military, and cultural power, language and translation operate at every juncture. Indeed so central is translation’s role that, as Ilan Stavans recently noted, with only a hint of hyperbole, modernity … is not lived through nationality but … through translationality.²

      Parts of this essay were presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Convention in 2004. I am indebted to colleagues there as well as to Michael Wood and to the readers for Princeton University Press for their very helpful suggestions.

      Yet if language and translation have become increasingly important in national and international relations, and in the processes of globalization more generally, their role as cultural as well as linguistic entities is only beginning to be theorized. The social sciences, that have so well described our political, economic, military, and information networks, have, for the most part, ignored these issues or considered them simply a necessary interface. This is most likely because, in their very texture, these linguistic matters belong so fully to what we traditionally think of as the humanities. Yet closely considered, language and translation in fact open up the unavoidable complexities, the historically ingrained problems and prejudices, and the intense day-to-day negotiations that occupy our interwoven global communities, setting into stark relief the difficult suturing of global networks and the over-stressed joints of the international body politic. They tend to raise questions about linguistic power and the dissemination of texts in various media; they bring to the fore issues of human rights as well as intellectual property; they also illuminate disparities among states, nations, and local traditions, and the often tragic problems of linguistic and cultural diasporas; they reveal complex multiplicities in the shadow of apparent unity.

      Only a more deeply nuanced understanding of these linguistic ligatures, and a heightened awareness of their relationship to the national as well as to the postnational, and subnational, can begin to parse the painful dialectics of local and global, past and present, that cross the contemporary world. Pursued in greater detail, they might begin to sketch a humanistic complement to the theorization of today’s economic and information complex by the social sciences and urge, in the process, a very different, more reflective, and more culturally variegated global consciousness.

      The essays in this collection afford an opportunity to rethink national, subnational, and international connections and conflicts, their histories and their futures, from the specific standpoint of language and translation. Though the essays consider a large range of texts, languages, and cultures, all circle around the same densely interwoven issues: (1) the nation, both its discursive construction and its dismantling; (2) language, as a site of power, a means of active communication, and a scene of epistemological reflection; and (3) the ethics of translation, a topic that, as each of these contributions in one way or another reveals, underlies and amplifies our understanding of both of the other, apparently broader, themes.

      THE LEGACY OF CULTURAL STUDIES AND LITERARY THEORY

      Wide-ranging in subject matter and diverse in approach, these essays depend upon a recognizable legacy of thought from both cultural studies and literary theory. The work of Benedict Anderson, Timothy Brennan, Partha Chatterjee, Neil Lazarus, Bruce Robbins, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gauri Viswanathan, Robert J. C. Young, and others has brought to our attention the many ways in which nationhood inevitably depends upon cultural—and specifically linguistic—means for its creation, its colonial and imperialist extension, and also its dismantling.³ Benedict Anderson’s well-known description of the nation as an imagined community, Edward Said’s discussion of Orientalism, and Michel Foucault’s notion of discursive formations,⁴ have underscored the cultural—and especially linguistic—build, maintenance, and unbundling of national identities. Though foundational narratives might claim an originary moment and underlying unity, these more recent critical voices show that nationhood is better described as a never-ending, conflictual process driven by changing cultural practices. They reveal, moreover, that a nation need not be syonymous with a state. The two are often articulated in frankly problematic ways, as any number of territorial disputes attest.

      The role of language in the process of nationhood is both powerful and complex. As a means of communication that is notably tied to the demos (the we-creating sense of belonging invoked in essentialist descriptions of the nation)⁵ language has always been a defining feature of national identity, even—especially—when this nation has become diasporic. Nor is language a neutral element. Consciously or unconsciously, it performs deft feats of appropriation and exclusion, supported by a dialectic of otherness. Creating and relying upon notions of cultural difference, groups underscore our we, our identity and our solidarity. Through what Said has identified as Orientalism, through racism in its multiple forms, or through apparently more benign forms of ethnic, religious, or national enthusiasm, we create solidarity by excluding, marginalizing, if not vilifying and making enemies of, groups identified as other. The rhetoric of war or of propaganda provides ready examples of this strategy. Yet, as Hegel and his heirs have taught us, the other so firmly rejected thereby invariably inhabits any sense of self, any notion of identity. It is a strategy we live with in the public world, as in our private lives, on a daily basis.

      From this awareness of language’s role in the creation of identities have emerged powerful literary and cultural critiques of nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism, and an intellectual vigilance about the complex heteronomy that inheres in all of our constructed solidarities. Seeking to describe, interpret, and ultimately emancipate cultures and literatures suppressed by a legacy of more powerful groups, values, and paradigms, literary and cultural critiques have opened new paths. This has been particularly notable in studies described by the debated term postcolonialism, a multifaceted approach seeking to understand and rectify the literary and cultural consequences of colonialism in both colonizing and colonized countries, now and in the past.⁶

      As is well known, language has often been implicated in efforts to mute a past and, with it, a sense of cultural identity. In the current era, the problem of linguistic ‘colonialism’ continues in a specific form. Compelled by financial and literary pressure, authors seek to write in English or in one of the other major commercial languages—or else to be quickly translated. Yet despite what is known as global English, and other locally hegemonic tongues (French, for instance, in parts of Africa and the Middle East, and Mandarin in East Asia), liberatory efforts to assert historical languages and their literary traditions nonetheless persist.

      Though efforts to retrieve past languages and literatures extend to cultures and discourses of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well as to those buried within dominant cultures in Europe and North America, they may also include gender-specific and class-specific languages and literatures that have failed to find a home in the Euro-American space. The importance of such archaeologies, undertaken by peoples around the globe, can hardly be overstated. Unearthing forgotten or excluded linguistic traditions, noting their inevitable interactions with other, more powerful ones, and bringing this knowledge into current discussion are surely some of the most compelling tasks faced in the history of literary studies.⁷ Such critiques raise explicit, and often difficult, ethical and political questions concerning the relationship of the national to the international as well as to the subnational, the local to the global, and the esthetic to the political. More self-reflectively, they also highlight ways in which categories of critical analysis can unwittingly subsume the very historical and local particulars they mean to reveal.⁸

      Though the discursive reality of nationhood and its dialectic of otherness often drives the literary or cultural critic, the very complexity of language as often makes her pause. For one, language remains radically contingent upon specific local histories and contexts. Cultural practices produce and sustain—and are in turn sustained by—the lexicon and syntax of a given language. Highly particularized cultural markers must therefore be taken into account in any linguistic interpretation—in principle, an infinite task, and a necessarily self-reflective one. Interpreters can always find yet another access to meaning, another pertinent insight, as language weaves its way through dense and rapidly changing webs of culture.

      Contemporary epistemological reflections further the sense of a complex alterity at work within language. Inquiries developed throughout the twentieth century in the philosophy of language, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and especially deconstruction, underscore a shared awareness that language can never be viewed as a simple mental tool, or as a transparent medium of representation.⁹ On the contrary. Conceived as a process of difference and deferral, scripted by the unconscious, by memory, and by texts and contexts immemorial, language neither mirrors a pure truth, nor simply reflects discrete referential meanings. Language remains radically impure, haunted by endless semantic contexts and, as emphasized by Derrida and DeMan, an insuperable undecidability. Harboring its own epistemological otherness, language imposes internal barriers to appropriative understanding as well as to transparent communication. Translation only multiplies this awareness of otherness that inhabits languages as it inhabits human society more generally.

      TRANSLATION AND THE ETHICAL

      Indeed, translation (commonly defined as the rendering from one language into another)¹⁰ illuminates both the cultural otherness at stake in contemporary studies of nationhood and the epistemological otherness at work in language itself. Engaging both with nation and with language, with cultural studies and with theory, as well as with more traditional literary history, with close reading and, not the least, with everyday experience in a global context, translation has itself become an important border concept in the humanities, affecting some of the most salient intellectual and ethical issues of our time. It requires attention to cultural values, to economic and political inequalities, to individual choices and, perhaps most obviously, to otherness in its linguistic and cultural forms. In the process, it foregrounds some explicitly ethical questions.

      From Schleiermacher’s early discussion of the role of translation in the creation of German nationhood (analyzed by Venuti)¹¹ to twenty-first-century legal transplants (discussed here by Legrand), the study of translation has raised important cultural issues of local homelands and foreign nations, of national or ethnic histories and global aspirations, as well as of changing power relations. Translators have long agreed that the effort to render one language system into another requires a keen awareness of broad cultural as well as specific linguistic values. It also requires existential choices that are bound to have wide-ranging repercussions for the text and its audience. How much of the otherness of the foreign should the translator highlight? How much of the foreign should he mute or erase in order to make texts easier for the home (target) audience to assimilate? The problems posed demand judgment calls as ethical as they are practical or cognitive.

      Translation’s distinctive ability to offer insight into the language process itself aligns it with ethics and the question of the foreign in a different, though not unrelated, way. As is frequently noted, translation’s etymology—trans (across) and latus, the past participle of ferre (to carry)—suggests a transportation of meaning, a physical displacement. The German übersetzen implies the same.¹² Yet only if we conceive of language as a surface element, ready to collapse into meanings that could take a commanding role and, moreover, be fixed in some univocal way, could translation be a simple carrying across of concepts from one signifying system to another. The very impossibility of such a feat, long recognized in the history of translation studies, argues for the need to envision language in the more complicated fashion common to twentieth-century theorists. Here, each language bears its own vast and endlessly transforming intertext of socially and historically grafted meanings, along with their graphic and acoustic imagery. Though different languages clearly provide some semantic ‘overlap’ in their efforts to relate to the referential world, this overlap is only partial, as is attested by Benjamin’s famous example of "Brot versus pain or Saussure’s equally well-known discussion of mouton versus the English mutton" and sheep.¹³ If language is not a simple nomenclature for pre-established and universally recognized meanings, as most contemporary language philosophers agree, translation can never be a complete or transparent transferal of semantic content. Yet even in its imperfect, or simply creative negotiations of difference, translation provides a necessary linguistic supplement that bridges cultural chasms and allows for intellectual passage and exchange.

      Such linguistic reflections raise intriguing philosophical as well as practical questions. If, for instance, both translation and the original text are, in Benjamin’s words, recognizable as the fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are parts of a vessel, what is the nature of this greater language?¹⁴ Does it refer to an archaic essence, or rather to a harmony, where differences and Derridean différance, with its endless deferral of meaning and therefore of essence, persist?¹⁵ Though the former describes a return to divine origins, the latter suggests that translation participates in an ongoing creative process, in which the outlines of a greater human language are drawn through the work of translation itself, as each new rendering contributes to the virtually endless delineation of language and understanding. Or might Benjamin’s phrase open up an even broader concern, the greater language of human experience in which Levinas’s face of the Other will be found? In this case, the noncognitive horizon of otherness that human being and language present—and to which we are ultimately responsible—stretches within and beyond each linguistic sign and each effort at translation.¹⁶ Regardless of one’s views, the very nature of such questions suggests that the exorbitant quality of language, that which remains mysteriously other within it, is never more salient—or perturbing—than in the culturally other-directed work of translation. It also suggests that the translator’s task is inevitably an ethical one. In attempts to translate, we become most aware of linguistic and cultural differences, of the historical hauntings, and of experiential responsibilities that make our languages what they are and that directly affect our attitudes toward the world.

      Highlighting the difficult alterity within language that makes any transparent or literal translation impossible, Western contemporary theory nonetheless makes strong claims for translation’s necessity. According to Benjamin, translation is essential to the living on of texts.¹⁷ Indeed, without translation, and its close kin, interpretation, the original will die. As translation reinterprets the original for different audiences, it provides for its continued flourishing and, in the process, for the future of national and transnational cultures.

      Indeed, translation might be effectively re-thought in historical and temporal terms rather than only in ontological and spatial ones. Though traditional understandings of translation define it largely in terms of a mimesis, reflection, or attempted correspondence to the truth of an original, one might just as easily think of it in terms of a history of instances, as Weber suggests, or of linguistic negotiations occurring over time, each a poiesis, each establishing a new inscription and, with it, the possibility of new interpretation. The advent of media technology in the last two centuries has already questioned the very notion of a single original. But seeing translation in more historical terms, focusing on its role in perpetuating and transforming our cultural heritage, explains its ongoing effectiveness as it accommodates our notions to changing media and the new temporality they imply.

      In light of considerations such as these, translation not only takes on the role of a border concept between cultural studies and literary theory.¹⁸ It also plays out its destiny as an essential genetic component of literary and cultural histories. In so doing, it foregrounds its peculiar double bind, expressed in the works of Derrida and Spivak, among others—a double bind with far-reaching repercussions.¹⁹ If we must translate in order to emancipate and preserve cultural pasts and to build linguistic bridges for present understandings and future thought, we must do so while attempting to respond ethically to each language’s contexts, intertexts, and intrinsic alterity. This dual responsibility may well describe an ethics of translation or, more modestly, the ethical at work in translation. It can at least provide a moment of reflection in which an ethical relationship to others and to the self, to language and its international dissemination and transformation, might be conceived. Such reflections have, in fact, already led to new modes of literary and cultural analysis.

      Recent genealogical inquiries into the linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts in which translation occurs, or into its purposes and relations to the future, often rely upon thick descriptions of conflictual historical and cultural hauntings inscribed in the text and its subsequent interpretations. As several of the essays insist, discussions along these lines, as well as along more strictly linguistic and theoretical lines, have also prompted a major rethinking of the aims and methods of comparative literature, the literary discipline that has defined itself from the first in terms of linguistic, national, and disciplinary border-crossings. Here, the questions raised by nation, language, and the ethics of translation have already begun to produce a more thoroughgoing interdisciplinarity, as well as a geo-linguistic decentering of major proportions, and intense self-reflection.

      Yet these ethical issues have, I would suggest, still broader educational import. Though we have every reason to resist any reduction of literary texts to a set of relevant political or religious beliefs, the intertwined issues of nation, language, and translation argue forcefully for an ampler sense of this term. For little could be more relevant to the United States or to other nations in the contemporary world than the range of texts in need of translation and a heightened awareness of the complex negotiations among peoples and languages that translation, in its various modes, reveals. Indeed, without more refined and sensitive cultural/linguistic translations and, above all, without an education that draws attention to the very act of translation and to the interwoven, problematic otherness that it confronts, our global world will be less hospitable; in fact, it could founder.

      An educational focus on our translationality would allow for a heightened attention to some of the most challenging issues facing us—as literary scholars and as world citizens. We might read literary texts as well as the daily news in a more informed and critical light. We might consider in different ways the intricate circulation of texts and its bearing upon nation and post-nation. More and better translations of non-English texts could, for instance, clearly help the Anglo-American reader to engage literary worlds and historical cultures that are not her own. Similar effects could be gained by more translations in other parts of the globe. A focus on translationality might even urge rethinking of globalization itself in more carefully defined, more humanistic terms.

      Reflecting upon translation does not mean rejecting the rise in technology or the interwovenness of our cultures. But it does insist on seeing global society not only in the grand lines of financial, information, or military networks, but also in the interstices, the nodes, those endless, precarious junctures where translation between cultures and languages takes place. Be it in the workplace, in the newspaper, on television and films, on the Internet, in literary texts, there is an ever-increasing need to deal with more than one language—and therefore with translation. Here conflicting histories make their claims, with their stories of passions felt and decisions taken. Here lie the poems that make the surprising leap from culture to culture, but also the cliches of prejudice and superstition that, left unconsidered, can tragically undermine dialogue and compromise. In these junctures lie unheard, muted voices of past and present as well as possibilities for different, better-negotiated futures.

      In such an imagined community, an education in translationality might well rely upon the close readings and thick descriptions characteristic of literary study. These offer models for denaturalizing a world that can be too tightly packaged and too simply described, and begin to provide space and time for words lost or forgotten. At every juncture where there is translation—in the law, military, news, finance, movies and television, information technology, and not least in literature—there is, along with problems of misunderstanding, deception, inequality, and linguistic oppression also hope for insight, reciprocity, and therefore creative negotiation, if never perfect resolution, between languages and peoples, between values, enmities and loves. There is, in short, an opportunity for the exercise of judgment and of a situated, ethical wisdom.

      It is to such seldom theorized issues, and to such cautiously articulated hopes for a deepened understanding and more humane alternative to current conceptions of the globalizing present, or its views of the past, that these collected essays ultimately speak. They do not represent a unified linguistic, political, or literary view. But their various insights, drawn from specific contexts where cultures and languages meet, begin to limn alternative futures.

      The four sections—Translation as Medium and across Media, The Ethics of Translation, Translation and Difference, and Beyond the Nation—are each introduced separately and invite the reader to rethink the issues of nation, language, and translation in concrete, linguistically and culturally specific terms. Through such situated readings, a new and surprisingly different understanding of our world, its languages, and the individual cultural and historical perspectives so important to its flourishing, begins to unfold.

      NOTES

      1. See, for instance, Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); also Globalization and its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998).

      2. Neal Sokol, Translation and its Discontents: A Conversation with Ilan Stavans, The Literary Review 45 (3), spring 2002, p. 554.

      3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Partha Chatterjee, National Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

      4. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), The Order of Things, trans. anonymous (London: Tavistock, 1970), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977); Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1978)

      5. See J.H.H.Weiler, To Be a European Citizen: Eros and Civilization, in The Constitution of Europe: Do the new clothes have an emperor? and other essays on European integration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 237–43, for a discussion of demos and nationality. Also Lawrence Venuti, Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities, included in this volume.

      6. Young, Postcolonialism, pp. 6, 7–11. Throughout, Young underscores both the historical and theoretical complexity, as well as the emancipatory intentions, of postcolonial studies.

      7. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Future of Literary Studies, in The Future of Literary Studies, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Walter Moser (Edmonton, CA: Canadian Comparative Literature Association, 2001), pp. 188–89. In fact, the issues raised in our volume reveal a productive interplay of the two, apparently separate paradigms of which Gumbrecht speaks.

      8. See the essays to follow by Sylvia Molloy, Vilashini Cooppan, and Stathis Gourgouris.

      9. See Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words (London: Routledge, 1989) for an elegant discussion of the relationship of philosophy to translation in twentieth-century thought.

      10. Merriam–Webster’s Deluxe Dictionary, Tenth Collegiate Edition, (Pleasantville: Reader’s Digest Association, 1998), p. 1963.

      11. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London, New York: Routledge, 1995). Also his Local Contingencies.

      12. See Pierre Legrand, Issues in the Translatability of Law, and Stanley Corngold, Comparative Literature: The Delay in Translation in this volume.

      13. Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 74; Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. and annotated by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 114.

      14. Benjamin, The Task, p. 78.

      15. See Jacques Derrida, Difference, in Speech and Phenomena (1973); also, his essays treating translation, Living On. Border Lines, in Deconstruction and Criticism, eds. Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, J. Hillis Miller (New York: Seabury Press, 1979) pp. 75–176; Des Tours de Babel, trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 165–248.

      16. See Robert Eaglestone, Levinas, Translation, and Ethics, in this book. Also Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 194–220.

      17. Benjamin, pp. 71–72. See also Emily Apter, Translation with No Original: Scandals of Textual Reproduction in this volume.

      18. Compare Gumbrecht, The Future of Literary Studies.

      19. See Andrew Benjamin on Derrida, in Translation.

      PART ONE

      Translation as Medium and Across Media

      In the very last note of Minima Moralia, Adorno suggests that the only responsible philosophical answer to despair is to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.¹ The essays in the first section of this book all situate themselves at some distance from despair, but they do consistently register difficulty, and they do have redemption firmly in mind. The essays concern the role of the intellectual as translator of what gets forgotten in the contemporary world, the possibility of translating law from culture to culture, the actual practice of simultaneous translation, the translatability and untranslatability of film as a medium, and the problematic but indispensable notion of origin in the theory of translation.

      For whom then does one write, Edward Said asks, if it is difficult to specify the audience with any sort of precision? The answer is that one writes for the audience one needs, the audience who must be there if we are not to despair. The idea of an imagined community, Said continues, has suddenly acquired a very literal, if virtual, dimension, and it is through our participation in this community, our willingness to imagine it into reality, that we can best serve those less powerful interests threatened with frustration, silence, incorporation, or extinction by the powerful. If music for Adorno is a silent witness to the inhumanity all around, then for Said the intellectual is the unsilenced translator, the person who lends voice to the unvoiced and half-voiced needs of the oppressed. He points out too that film and photography, along with all the arts of writing, can be aspects of this activity.

      Pierre Legrand argues eloquently against the strategies of simplification at work in the integrationist view of European law, which rests on the blunt or naive claim that there is very little difference between European laws, that is, very little difference from culture to culture and nation to nation. This view is irredeemably suburban, Legrand says, a violent refusal of contextual knowledge, but all is not lost, and he himself shows us how to redeem local knowledge, which is best described, he says, in terms of its plasticity, pliability, diversity, and adaptability. Indeed, he suggests that justice itself can be redeemed if we respect the gaps between laws, just as literary translation respects the gaps between languages, a process that inscribes alterity at the heart of identity through the new forms it creates, and reveals thereby, as Legrand subtly says, the genuine nature of hospitality, which cannot exist without risks. We are close again to the imagined community of intellectuals.

      Continuing this line of thought, but in an intensely practical context, Lynn Visson reminds us that words which characterize the life, culture and historical development of any given country often have no precise equivalents in other languages. She offers a detailed list (often amusing) of elusive words and phrases in Russian, and describes in lucid detail the preferred rhetorical instruments of the simultaneous interpreter: condensation, deliberate omission and addition, synecdoche and metonymy, antonymic constructions, grammatical inversion and the use of semantic equivalents, and other devices. Her crucial point, though, is that the interpreter is just that: a translator not only of language but of context, a person who, if she cannot redeem local knowledge, can give it all the depth that time allows. Visson too writes of difficulty and its overcoming. "Hardest of all is the search for cultural rather than for purely linguistic or semantic equivalents, for though these are often vastly different in the two languages, the role of an interpreter of culture is the interpreter’s most important and most difficult function."

      Samuel Weber makes an important distinction between language and instance: "translation always involves not merely the movement from one language to another, but from one instance—a text already existing in one language—to another instance, that does not previously exist, but that is brought into being in the other language." This phrasing allows for translation of instances both within a single language and between different ones, and Weber has some subtle thoughts on these topics. His main project, however, is to display creation as it is described in Genesis as almost a translation, because on close reading it appears as neither an absolute beginning nor a pure performance—only almost a translation because there is as yet only one place and only one language. Translation becomes inevitable but also impossible with the building and ruin of the Tower of Babel, and Weber now brilliantly glosses Walter Benjamin’s conception of an origin as the insistent but unachievable attempt to restore an anterior state. From the standpoint of redemption the attempt would still perhaps be unachievable but it would look toward the future rather than the past, toward the world it remains for us to imagine.

      Michael Wood’s essay seeks to understand, through a study of sound and silence in films from very different cultures, something of what translation can mean in the cinema: which images seem to travel without need of translation and which images do not, what visual translation looks like when it happens, how national film cultures separate and intersect, and what is the role of music in the language of film. We get a clear sense of the importance of translation in this medium when, prompted by Sergei Eisenstein,² we remember that what in English is called a close-up is in other languages called a shot in large scale. In both cases a visual perception is translated into words, but the implied story is very different. English-speaking cultures emphasize the mimetic effect of the technique, the apparent shortening of a distance. Other cultures stress the technical fact, the actual alteration in the size of the figures or objects in the frame. Many implications lurk in such a difference.

      NOTES

      1. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (Frankfurt: Suhrhamp, 1951, 1993), p. 333; trans. E.F.N Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974, 1996), p. 247.

      2. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jan Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949, 1977), pp. 237–38.

      The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals

      EDWARD SAID

      Twenty-one years ago, The Nation magazine convened a congress of writers in New York by putting out notices for the event and, as I understood the tactic, leaving open the question of who was a writer and why he or she qualified to attend. The result was that literally hundreds of people showed up, crowding the main ballroom of a midtown Manhattan hotel almost to the ceiling. The occasion itself was intended as a response by the intellectual and artistic communities to the immediate onset of the Reagan era. As I recall the proceedings, a debate raged for a long period of time over the definition of a writer in the hope that some of the people there would be selected out or, in plain English, forced to leave. The reason for that was twofold: first of all, to decide who had a vote and who did not, and second, to form a writer’s union. Not much occurred in the way of reduced and manageable numbers; the hearteningly large mass of people simply remained immense and unwieldy, since it was quite clear that everyone who came as a writer who opposed Reaganism stayed on as a writer who opposed Reaganism.

      I remember clearly that at one point someone sensibly suggested that we should adopt what was said to be the Soviet position on defining a writer, that is, a writer is someone who says that he or she is a writer. And, I think that is where matters seem to have rested, even though a National Writer’s Union was formed but restricted its functions to technical professional matters like fairer standardized contracts between publishers and writers. An American Writer’s Congress to deal with expressly political issues was also formed, but was derailed by people who in effect wanted it for one or another specific political agenda that could not get a consensus.

      Since that time, an immense amount of change has taken place in the world of writers and intellectuals and, if anything, the definition of who or what a writer and intellectual is has become more confusing and difficult to pin down. I tried my hand at it in my 1993 Reith Lectures, but there have been major political and economic transformations since that time, and in writing this essay I have found myself revising a great deal and adding to some of my earlier views. Central to the changes has been the deepening of an unresolved tension as to whether writers and intellectuals can ever be what is called nonpolitical or not, and if so, how and in what measure. The difficulty of the tension for the individual writer and intellectual has been paradoxically that the realm of the political and public has expanded so much as to be virtually without borders. Consider that the bipolar world of the Cold War has been reconfigured and dissolved in several different ways, all of them first of all providing what seems to be an infinite number of variations on the location or position, physical and metaphorical, of the writer and, second of all, opening up the possibility of divergent roles for him or her to play if, that is, the notion of writer or intellectual itself can be said to have any coherent and definably separate meaning or existence at all. The role of the American writer in the post–9/11 period has certainly amplified the pertinence of what is written about us to an enormous degree.

      A version of this essay appeared in The Nation in 2001; another in Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Columbia University Press), 2004.

      Yet, despite the spate of books and articles saying that intellectuals no longer exist and that the end of the Cold War, the opening up of the mainly American university to legions of writers and intellectuals, the age of specialization, and the commercialization and commodification of everything in the newly globalized economy have simply done away with the old somewhat romantic-heroic notion of the solitary writer-intellectual (I shall provisionally connect the two terms for purposes of convenience here, then go on to explain my reasons for doing so in a moment), there still seems to be a great deal of life in the ideas and the practices of writer-intellectuals that touch on, and are very much a part of, the public realm. Their role most recently in opposing (as well, alas, as supporting the Anglo-American war in Iraq) is very much a case in point.

      In the three or four quite distinct contemporary language cultures that I know something about, the importance of writers and intellectuals is eminently, indeed overwhelmingly, true in part because many people still feel the need to look at the writer-intellectual as someone who ought to be listened to as a guide to the confusing present, and also as a leader of a faction, tendency, or group vying for more power and influence. The Gramscian provenance of both these ideas about the role of an intellectual is evident.

      Now in the Arab-Islamic world, the two words used for intellectual are muthaqqaf, or mufakir, the first derived from thaqafa or culture (hence, a man of culture), the second from fikr or thought (hence, a man of thought). In both instances the prestige of those meanings is enhanced and amplified by implied comparison with government, which is now widely regarded as without credibility and popularity, or culture and thought. So in the moral vacancy created, for example, by dynastic republican governments like those of Egypt, Iraq, Libya, or Syria, many people turn either to religious or secular intellectuals for the leadership no longer provided by political authority, even though governments have been adept at co-opting intellectuals as mouthpieces for them. But the search for authentic intellectuals goes on, as does the struggle.

      In the French-speaking domains the word intellectuel unfailingly carries with it some residue of the public realm in which recently deceased figures like Sartre, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Aron debated and put forward their views for very large audiences indeed. By the early 1980s when most of the maîtres penseurs had disappeared, a certain gloating and relief accompanied their absence, as if the new redundancy gave a lot of little people a chance to have their say for the first time since Zola. Today, with what seems like a Sartre revival in evidence and with Pierre Bourdieu or his ideas appearing almost to the day of his death in every other issue of Le Monde and Libération, a considerably aroused taste for public intellectuals has gripped many people, I think. From a distance, debate about social and economic policy seems pretty lively, and is not quite as one-sided as it is in the United States.

      Raymond Williams’s succinct presentation in Keywords of the force field of mostly negative connotations for the word intellectual is about as good a starting point for understanding the historical semantics of the word as we have for England.¹ Excellent subsequent work by Stefan Collini, John Carey, and others has considerably deepened and refined the field of practice where intellectuals and writers have been located. Williams himself has gone on to indicate that, after the mid-twentieth century, the word takes on a new somewhat wider set of associations, many of them having to do with ideology, cultural production, and the capacity for organized thought and learning. This suggests that English usage has expanded to take in some of the meanings and uses that have been quite common in the French, and generally European, contexts. But as in the French instance, intellectuals of Williams’s generation have passed from the scene (the almost miraculously articulate and brilliant Eric Hobsbawm being a rare exception) and, to judge from some of his successors on the New Left Review, a new period of Left quietism may have set in, but especially since New Labour has so thoroughly renounced its own past and joined in the new American campaign to re-order the world, a renewal of the European writer’s dissenting role has been enhanced. Neoliberal and Thatcherite intellectuals are pretty much where they have been (in the ascendancy), and have the advantage of many more pulpits in the press from which to speak, for example, to support or criticize the war in Iraq.

      In the American setting, however, the word intellectual is less used than in the three other arenas of discourse and discussion that I’ve mentioned. One reason is that professionalism and specialization provide the norm for intellectual work much more than they do in Arabic, French, or British English. The cult of expertise has never ruled the world of discourse as much as it now does in the United States, where the policy intellectual can feel that he or she surveys the world. Another reason is that even though the United States is actually full of intellectuals hard at work filling the airwaves, print, and cyberspace with their effusions, the public realm is so taken up with questions of policy and government, as well as with considerations of power and authority that even the idea of an intellectual who is driven neither by a passion for office nor by the ambition to get the ear of someone in power is difficult to sustain for more than a second or two. Profit and celebrity are powerful stimulants. In far too many years of appearing on television or being interviewed by journalists, I have never not been asked the question, What do you think the United States should do about such and such an issue? I take this to be an index of how the notion of rule has been lodged at the very heart of intellectual practice outside the university. And may I add that it has been a point of principle for me not ever to reply to the question.

      Yet it is also overwhelmingly true that in America there is no shortage in the public realm of partisan policy intellectuals who are organically linked to one or another political party, lobby, special interest, or foreign power. The world of the Washington think tanks, the various television talk shows, innumerable radio programs, to say nothing of literally thousands of occasional papers, journals, and magazines—all this testifies amply to how densely saturated public discourse is with interests, authorities, and powers whose extent in the aggregate is literally unimaginable in scope and variety, except as that whole bears centrally on the acceptance of a neoliberal post–welfare state responsive neither to the citizenry nor to the natural environment, but to a vast structure of global corporations unrestricted by traditional barriers or sovereignties. The unparalleled global military reach of the United States adds to the new structure. With the various specialized systems and practices of the new economic situation, only very gradually and partially being disclosed, and with an administration whose idea of national security is preemptive war, we are beginning to discern an immense panorama of how these systems and practices (many of them new, many of them refashioned holdovers from the classical imperial system) assembled together to provide a geography whose purpose is slowly to crowd out and override human agency.² We must not be misled by the effusions of Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Joseph Stanislas, and the legions who have celebrated globalization into believing that the system itself is the best outcome for human history, nor in reaction should we fail to note what in a far less glamorous way globalization from below, as Richard Falk has called the post-Westphalian world system, can provide by way of human potential and innovation. There is now a fairly extensive network of NGOs created to address minority and human rights, women’s and environmental issues, movements for democratic and cultural change, and while none of these can be a substitute for political action or mobilization, especially to protest and try to prevent illegal wars, many of them do embody resistance to the advancing global status quo.

      Yet, as Dezelay and Garth have argued, given the funding of many of these international NGOs, they are co-optable as targets for what the two researchers have called the imperialism of virtue, functioning as annexes to the multinationals and great foundations like Ford, centers of civic virtue that forestall deeper kinds of change or critiques of longstanding assumptions.³

      In the meantime, it is sobering and almost terrifying to contrast the world of academic intellectual discourse in its generally hermetic, jargon-ridden, unthreatening combativeness, with what the public realm all around has been doing. Masao Miyoshi has pioneered the study of this contrast, especially in its marginalization of the humanities.⁴ The separation between the two realms, academic and public, is, I think, greater in the United States than anywhere else, although in Perry Anderson’s dirge for the Left with which he announces his editorship of the New Left Review it is all too plain that in his opinion the British, American, and Continental pantheon of remaining heroes is, with one exception, resolutely, exclusively academic and almost entirely male and Eurocentric.⁵ I found it extraordinary that he takes no account of nonacademic intellectuals like John Pilger and Alexander Cockburn, or major academic and political figures such as Chomsky, Zinn, the late Eqbal Ahmad, Germaine Greer, or such diverse figures as Mohammed Sid Ahmad, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Miyoshi, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, to say nothing of an impressive battery of Irish intellectuals that would include Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons, Declan Kiberd plus many others, all of whom would certainly not accept the solemn lament intoned for what he calls the the neo-liberal grand slam.

      The great novelty alone of Ralph Nader’s candidacy in the 2000 American presidential campaign was that a genuine adversarial intellectual was running for the most powerful elected office in the world using the rhetoric and tactics of de-mystification and disenchantment, in the process supplying a mostly disaffected electorate with alternative information buttressed with precise facts and figures. This went completely against the prevailing modes of vagueness, vapid slogans, mystification, and religious fervor sponsored by the two major party candidates, underwritten by the media, and paradoxically by virtue of its inaction, the humanistic academy. Nader’s competitive stance was a sure sign of how far from over and defeated the oppositional tendencies in global society are; witness also the upsurge of reformism in Iran, the consolidation of democratic antiracism in various parts of Africa, and so on, leaving aside the November 1999 action in Seattle against the WTO, the liberation of South Lebanon, the unprecedented worldwide protests against war in Iraq, etcetera. The list would be a long one, and very different in tone (were it to be interpreted fully) from the consolatory accomodationism Anderson seems to recommend. In intention, Nader’s campaign was also different from those of his opponents in that he aimed to arouse the citizenry’s democratic awareness of the untapped potential for participation in the country’s resources, not just greed or simple assent to what passes for politics.

      Having summarily assimilated the words intellectual and writer to each other a moment ago, it is best for me now to show why and how they belong together, despite the writer’s separate origin and history. In the language of everyday use, a writer in the languages and cultures that I am familiar with is a person who produces literature, that is, a novelist, a poet, a dramatist. I think it is generally true that in all cultures writers have a separate, perhaps even more honorific, place than do intellectuals; the aura of creativity and an almost sanctified capacity for originality (often vatic in its scope and quality) accrues to them as it does not at all to intellectuals, who with regard to literature belong to the slightly debased and parasitic class of critics. (There is a long history of attacks on critics as nasty niggling beasts incapable of little more than carping and pedantic word-mongering.) Yet during the last years of the twentieth century the writer took on more and more of the intellectual’s adversarial attributes in such activities as speaking the truth to power, being a witness to persecution and suffering, and in supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority. Signs of the amalgamation of one to the other would have to include the Salman Rushdie case in all its ramifications, the formation of numerous writers’ parliaments and congresses devoted to such issues as intolerance, the dialogue of cultures, civil strife (as in Bosnia and Algeria), freedom of speech and censorship, truth and reconciliation (as in South Africa, Argentina, Ireland, and elsewhere), and the special symbolic role of the writer as an intellectual testifying to a country’s or region’s experience, thereby giving that experience a public identity forever inscribed in the global discursive agenda. The easiest way of demonstrating that is simply to list the names of some (but by no means all) recent Nobel Prize winners, then to allow each name to trigger in the mind an emblematized region, which in turn can be seen as a sort of platform or jumping-off point for that writer’s subsequent activity as an intervention in debates taking place very far from the world of literature. Thus, Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Elie Wiesel, Bertrand Russell, Gunter Grass, Rigoberta Menchu, among several others.

      Now it is also true, as Pascale Casanova has brilliantly shown in her synoptic book La République mondiale des lettres, that, fashioned over the past 150 years, there now seems to be a global system of literature in place, complete with its own order of literariness (litterarité), tempo, canon, internationalism, and market values.⁶ The efficiency of the system is that it seems to have generated the types of writers that she discusses as belonging to such different categories as assimilated, dissident, translated figures, all of them both individualized and classified in what she clearly shows is a highly efficient, globalized quasi-market system. The drift of her argument is in effect to show how this powerful and all-pervasive system can even go as far as to stimulate a kind of independence from it, in cases like those of Joyce and Beckett, writers whose language and orthography do not submit to the laws either of State or of system.

      Much as I admire it, however, the overall achievement of Casanova’s book is nevertheless contradictory. She seems to be saying that literature as globalized system has a kind of integral autonomy to it that places it in large measure just beyond the gross realities of political institutions and discourse, a notion that has a certain theoretical plausibility to it when she puts it in the form of un espace littéraire internationale, with its own laws of interpretation, its own dialectic of individual work and ensemble, its own problematics of nationalism and national languages. But she doesn’t go as far as Adorno in saying, as I would too (and plan to return to briefly at the end), that one of the hallmarks of modernity is how at a very deep level, the aesthetic and the social need to be kept in a state of irreconcilable tension. Nor does she spend enough time discussing the ways in which the literary, or the writer, is still implicated, indeed frequently mobilized for use in the great post–Cold War cultural contests provided by the altered political configurations I spoke of earlier.

      In that wider setting then, the basic distinction between writers and intellectuals need not therefore be made since, insofar as they both act in the new public sphere dominated by globalization (and assumed to exist even by adherents of the Khomeini fatwa), their public role as writers and intellectuals can be discussed and analyzed together. Another way of putting it is to say that I shall be concentrating on what writers and intellectuals have in common as they intervene in the public sphere. I do not at all want to give up the possibility that there remains an area outside and untouched by the globalized one that I shall be discussing here, but do not want to discuss until the end, since my main concern is with what the writer’s role is squarely within the actually existing system.

      Let me say something about the technical characteristics of intellectual intervention today. To get a dramatically vivid grasp of the speed to which communication has accelerated during the past decade I’d like to contrast Jonathan Swift’s awareness of effective public intervention in the early eighteenth century with ours. Swift was surely the most devastating pamphleteer of his time, and during his campaign against the Duke of Marlborough from 1713 to 1714, he was able to get 15,000 copies of his pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies onto the streets in a few days. This brought down the Duke from his high eminence but nevertheless did not change Swift’s pessimistic impression (dating back to A Tale of a Tub, 1694) that his writing was basically temporary, good only for the short time that it circulated. He had in mind of course the running quarrel between ancients and moderns in which venerable writers like Homer and Horace had the advantage of great longevity, even permanence, over modern figures like Dryden by virtue of their age and the authenticity of their views. In the age of electronic media, such considerations are mostly irrelevant, since anyone with a computer and decent Internet access is capable of reaching numbers of people quantum times more than Swift did, and can also look forward to the preservation of what is written beyond any conceivable measure. Our ideas today of archive and discourse must be radically modified, and can no longer be defined as Foucault painstakingly tried to describe them a mere two decades ago. Even if one writes for a newspaper or journal, the chances of multiplying reproduction and, notionally at least, an unlimited time of preservation have wrought havoc on even the idea of an actual, as opposed to a virtual, audience. These things have certainly limited the powers that regimes have to censor or ban writing that is considered dangerous, although, as I shall note presently, there are fairly crude means for stopping or curtailing the libertarian function of online print. Until only very recently, Saudi Arabia and Syria, for example, successfully banned the Internet and even satellite television. Both countries now tolerate limited access to Internet, although both have also installed sophisticated and, in the long run, prohibitively interdictory, processes to maintain their control.

      As things stand, an article I might write in New York for a British newspaper has a good chance of reappearing on individual websites or via email on screens in the United States, Japan, Pakistan, Middle East, South Africa, as well as Australia. Authors and publishers have very little control over what is reprinted and recirculated. For whom then does one write, if it is difficult to specify the audience with any sort of precision? Most people, I think, focus on the actual outlet that has commissioned the piece, or on the putative readers we would like to address. The idea of an imagined community has suddenly acquired a very literal, if virtual, dimension. Certainly, as I experienced when I began ten years ago to write in an Arabic publication for an audience of Arabs, one attempts to create, shape, refer to a constituency, now much more than during Swift’s time, when he could quite naturally assume that the persona he called a Church of England man was in fact his real, very stable, and quite small audience.

      All of us should therefore operate today with some notion of very probably reaching much larger audiences than any we could have conceived of even a decade ago, although the chances of retaining that audience are by the same token quite chancy. This is not simply a matter of optimism of the will; it is in the very nature of writing today. This makes it very difficult for writers to take common assumptions between them and their audiences for granted, or to assume that references and allusions are going to be understood immediately. But, writing in this expanded new space strangely does have a further unusually risky consequence, which is to be encouraged to say things that are either completely opaque or completely transparent, and if one has any sense of the intellectual and political vocation (which I shall get to in a moment), it should of course be the latter rather than the former. But then, transparent, simple, clear prose presents its own challenges, since the ever present danger is that one can fall into the misleadingly simple neutrality of a journalistic World-English idiom that is indistinguishable from CNN or USA Today prose. The quandary is a real one, whether in the end to repel readers (and more dangerous, meddling editors), or to attempt to win readers over in a style that perhaps too closely resembles the mind-set one is trying to expose and dismiss. The thing to remember, I keep telling myself, is that there isn’t another language at hand, that the language I use must be the same used by the State Department or the president when they say that they are for human rights and for fighting a war to liberate Iraq, and I must be able to use that very same language to recapture the subject, reclaim it, and reconnect it to the tremendously complicated realities these vastly overprivileged antagonists of mine have simplified, betrayed, and either diminished or dissolved. It should be obvious by now that for an intellectual who is not there simply to advance someone else’s interest, there have to be opponents that are held responsible for the present state of affairs, antagonists with whom one must directly engage.

      While it is true and even discouraging that all the main outlets are, however, controlled by the most powerful interests and consequently by the very antagonists one resists or attacks, it is also true that a relatively mobile intellectual energy can take advantage of and, in effect, multiply the kinds of platforms available for use. On one side, therefore, six enormous multinationals presided over by six men control most of the world’s supply of images and news. On the other, there are the independent intellectuals who actually form an incipient community, physically separated from each other but connected variously to a great number of activist communities shunned by the main media, but who have at their actual disposal other kinds of what Swift sarcastically called oratorical machines. Think of the impressive range of opportunities offered by the lecture platform, the pamphlet, radio, alternative journals, the interview form, the rally, church pulpit, and the Internet to name only a few. True, it is a considerable disadvantage to realize that one is unlikely to get asked on to PBS’s Newshour or ABC’s Nightline, or if one is in fact asked, only an isolated

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1