Showing papers in "Substance in 2015"

Michel Serres' Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology

Abstract: From the five volumes of his Hermes series (1968-1980) and through to The Natural Contract in 1990, Michel Serres has rooted the origins of human language firmly in the rhythms and calls of the natural world.1 To date, the Anglophone reception of this complex and varied oeuvre has been slender to the point of emaciation, but one area where he has received some small fraction of the attention he deserves is in his elaboration of a theory of semiotic meaning in dialogue with information theory and fluid dynamics.2 Since 2001, however, Serres has been expanding his account of biosemiotics3 with four key texts (2001, 2005, 2007, 2009) that move into the area of narratology, developing a new non-anthropocentric humanism in terms of what he calls the ‘Great Story’ (Grand Recit) of the universe. In developing a narrative of the universe, this new departure begins to show us how the powerful tool of narrative identity can be brought alongside Serres’ existing biosemiotics to challenge and shape the way we understand the ‘non-human’ world. It also affords a way to revitalize the hitherto anthropocentric notion of narrative identity at a moment when solutions to the most important global questions must increasingly surpass the bounds of narrowly human and cultural worlds. This article will argue for using the Serresian Grand Recit as a way to extend narrative identity into the area of ecology, showing how it offers new ways of rethinking the dichotomies of nature and culture and the human and non-human that go beyond deconstruction and asking whether ‘the story of the universe’ can be thought of as a subjective or at least a double genitive, told by a universe that does not rely on humans to ventriloquize it. I will then address the objection that the Grand Recit is a totalizing account of history that cuts against the grain of Serres’ own resistance to universal models and metaphors.

The Politics of Translation at Soviet Film Festivals during the Cold War

Abstract: Some time between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, my grandmother, Kira Razlogova, translated an African film at the Moscow Interna tional Film Festival. It was an official screening, with the ambassador of the African country present in the audience. She sat in a translator’s booth at the back of the theater, reading into the microphone from a printed French dialogue list just given to her. She had never seen this film before. She watched it now for the first time through the window of her booth, and synced her reading to the spoken lines flowing into her earphones, lines in an African language she did not know. Loudspeakers transmitted her voice into the cinema hall over the partially muted original soundtrack. Ten minutes before the end, the script ran out of pages. The film goes on; she has nothing to say; an administrator storms into her booth predicting a diplomatic crisis. To save the situation, she went ahead and invented the dialogue for the rest of the film on the basis of the moving images. After the screening, the ambassador, made aware that the script was too short, thanked her for making up the final scenes. He claimed her translation was quite close to the original (Kira Razlogova). My grandmother’s experience underscores Soviet innovation in simultaneous film translation—as an improvisational sound art and as a form of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. As the postwar Soviet Union opened up its cultural borders, it aimed to compete with Western powers for the attention of the decolonizing and unaligned countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Engerman). Film festivals in Moscow and Tashkent played a key role in this project. Simultaneous interpreters made these festivals possible, through their screenings as well as their heated debates about the role of cinema in newly independent states and ongoing liberation movements in the Third World. The Soviet state tightly controlled the festival in Moscow, and to a lesser extent, in Tashkent. Even so, festival participants formed friendships and discovered films in ways that explored dissident and postcolonial politics. New work on world cinema, film festivals, and film translation has barely acknowledged the existence of live film interpreting after the silent era, when live sound accompaniment was widespread. 1 Audiovisual translation scholars today focus almost exclusively on dubbing and subtitles (Gambier). I learned of this forgotten chapter of Soviet and world cinema history only because I experienced live translation myself,

Cannibalism, colonialism and apocalypse in Mitchell's global future

Abstract: begin and end in the often overlooked and liminal region of the Pacific Islands, rather than in the culturally and economically more dominant spheres of Europe, America or Asia, is no accident. In this essay, I suggest that Mitchell’s novel can be read as a (re)staging of the perennial conflict between Hobbesian and Rousseauian conceptions of nature and humanity’s place within it. I will argue that Mitchell’s use of cannibalism as a trope for savagery raises questions about the myths of progress and linear time that underlie Western thought. This mythological aspect at the heart of Western culture is echoed in the novel’s temporal structure that resembles an ouroboros, the snake or dragon eating its own tail, which Jung so aptly suggested functions as an archetypal symbol of both destruction and renewal. Mitchell’s novel is structured like a Russian doll, with the reader progressing forward through a series of interrupted narratives, and then, after a pivotal middle section, methodically working back through the narrative plots in reverse order. Within the novel there are two temporal movements that make the first and last (sixth) narrative sections special twins in a set of telescoped time. In terms of chronological story-time, the narrative progresses forward through history, from the mid-19 th century seafaring account of “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” to the post-apocalyptic future described in “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After.” These two sections frame the novel. But with the reversal of time effected by the novel’s nested structure, its discourse-time has the reader looping back to an end-point within the 19 th century. There is thus a neat symmetry between the two sections: the first section in the story-time, “The Pacific Journal,” also becomes the final section in the discourse-time. The final story-time section, “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” becomes the heart of the book when viewed within the discourse-time. These first and final sections therefore constitute the past and the future, confounding linear time by positing an interrelationship of past and future configurations of human society.

Intermediality: An Introduction to the Arts of Transmission

Abstract: Intermediality has become a fashionable concept: it appears whenever we speak about what we once referred to easily as the medium or media, of systems and apparatuses, mises en scene and structures. It is used frequently in a number of different traditions, whether European, American or Australian. In some cases it holds the potential to redefine the purpose of an art or a specific medium. Consider the example that cinema provides: “its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity. That is where its true materiality-effect, today, is situated: in the palpable aura of a mise en scene that is always less than itself and more than itself, not only itself but also its contrary, ever vanishing and yet ever renewed across a thousand and one screens, platforms and dispositifs” (Martin). But it’s important not to reduce intermediality to a simple intersection of mediums or media: “intermediality [...] refers to more than simply the sheer fact of a multimedia culture, or the mixing and copresence of many media forms within specific works” (Martin). In this way, theater, according to Kattenbelt, bears “a distinctive capacity to be a hypermedium which ‘stages’ other mediums” (37). Every art or media thus seems to find its means in other arts and media, unsettling the expected borders between them. It is important to generalize these judicious reappropriations: there is no pure medium. The impurity of the medium, as rightly emphasized by Adrian Martin, concerns all mediums. To some extent, a “media” (if we understand this term to refer to a specific medium that has been institutionalized, hence the plural form) is a stabilization system for each medium. Thus, it is important to outline a brief history of the formation of the concept of intermediality so as to better estimate its field of possibilities and what it might offer in terms of new ways of apprehending artistic or day-to-day phenomena.

David Mitchell in the Laboratory of Time: An Interview with the Author

Abstract: Paul Harris: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview for the special issue of SubStance, “David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time.” Your fiction is mind-bending and thought provoking in all kinds of ways. One particularly fascinating aspect of your work is its treatment of time. I’d like to begin by asking if you have an interest in time as such – is time something that you think about, or are there ideas, images, or theories of time that you’ve been especially drawn to?

Astronomy as Intermedia: 19th Century Optical Mobilism and Cosmopolitics

Abstract: Clouds are therefore a fine metaphor for intermediary and automatic beings… Trees too are clouds: only, they are slower at occupying space. (Queau) In the new landscape of media archaeology—especially variantology, which insists on ramified rather than convergent developments—media, too, appear to be imperceptibly changing from stable trees into metastable clouds. If we accelerate that motion, then the whole McLuhan-KittlerParikka media forest of semi-separate specimens starts to look like a selfrearranging ballet—a murmuration across species. At a certain historical rate, in other words, problems of media ontology and phylogenesis tend to turn into animated sequences in which individual or individuated media are but arrested moments. This animation metaphor, much more than a metaphor, is the substance of the present essay. Namely, I propose that the condition of possibility of intermedia is precisely cinematic animation, as an expansion of metaphor from a transport across water (its original meaning in Greek) to one across lexical meaning, to a more general transit across media. Against the grain of media archaeology’s laudable democratization of all media, I follow here the thought of Jean Epstein, for whom cinema is not one media amongst others, but the first machine that invented for us a new mobile universe of perceptual, cognitive, imaginary and philosophical circulations. 1 My hypothesis is, then, that it is cinema that discloses the horizon of multiple media and is also, and perhaps therefore, the catalyst for media transfers. The main reason that cinematic animation is media prototypical, and this is my second claim, has to do with the longer history of optical motion, or kinopsis, derived from astronomy and culminating with the new cosmology of the 19 th century, within which context cinema, and before it, photography, emerged. Cinema, then, is prototypical among media because its very fabric comes, in several separate channels, from a cosmological revolution in optics. I am well aware that, together, these two claims reprise the bete noire of media archaeology—cinema as teleological. There is, however, a major difference in asserting that cinema results merely from a telos of mimicry or a multi-sensory archetype, as Bazin and others pretty much do, and

Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time

Abstract: To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”1 in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004), and The Bone Clocks (2014). There are two very different coming-of-age tales of teenage boys: Number9dream (2003), set in Tokyo, reads like a Haruki Murakami novel unfolding inside a video game; and the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green (2007), narrated by a 13-year old in the English Midlands. The historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2011) faithfully evokes Dutch contact with Japan in Nagasaki Harbor at the turn into the 19th century, before turning into a romance-thriller. Both within each text and across his corpus, Mitchell creates a complex dynamical tension by developing disparate stand-alone storylines and weaving these narrative threads into tapestries by turns intricate and fragile. His narratives combine linear and cyclical structures and temporalities in different ways, including having texts begin and end with sections told by the same narrator (Ghostwritten, Bone Clocks), bearing the same title (Black Swan Green), or returning to the same time period (Cloud Atlas). Mitchell’s narrative time oscillates between discrete succession and cyclic repetition: time may be broken into episodes causally connected in complete story arcs, or bent into concentric circles like the “infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments” (Cloud 393) that Isaac Sachs imagines in Cloud Atlas. Because his plotting is iterative and recursive, Mitchell’s

Prolegomenon to a Differential Theory of Narrative

Abstract: The object of study of this article is narrative1 My aim is to sketch what exactly constitutes the necessary and sufficient building blocks of narrative as such The article’s concern is thus with the ontological build-up and status of narrative In this, it argues against narratology’s prevalent anti-metaphysical Kantianism and for a Deleuze-inflected metaphysical conception of narrative My account unfolds according to the following trajectory: first, I stage a critique of narratology’s default Kantianism; second, I formulate an alternative Deleuzian program; third, I present short exemplary readings of three literary narratives, two contemporary novels and a nineteenth-century short story The concept of narrative that ultimately emerges from this trajectory is differential, immanent, univocal, unconscious, and non-human

David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time

Abstract: To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”1 in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004), and The Bone Clocks (2014). There are two very different coming-of-age tales of teenage boys: Number9dream (2003), set in Tokyo, reads like a Haruki Murakami novel unfolding inside a video game; and the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green (2007), narrated by a 13-year old in the English Midlands. The historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2011) faithfully evokes Dutch contact with Japan in Nagasaki Harbor at the turn into the 19th century, before turning into a romance-thriller. Both within each text and across his corpus, Mitchell creates a complex dynamical tension by developing disparate stand-alone storylines and weaving these narrative threads into tapestries by turns intricate and fragile. His narratives combine linear and cyclical structures and temporalities in different ways, including having texts begin and end with sections told by the same narrator (Ghostwritten, Bone Clocks), bearing the same title (Black Swan Green), or returning to the same time period (Cloud Atlas). Mitchell’s narrative time oscillates between discrete succession and cyclic repetition: time may be broken into episodes causally connected in complete story arcs, or bent into concentric circles like the “infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments” (Cloud 393) that Isaac Sachs imagines in Cloud Atlas. Because his plotting is iterative and recursive, Mitchell’s

"Gravid with the ancient future": Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History

Abstract: I One of the striking generic features of the emerging field of Big History is a closing glance toward the future. Summed up by the title of Fred Speir’s Big History and the Future of Humanity (2010), this generic gesture shows up in the “Big History Project,” a free online course for secondary schools, whose final unit is entitled “The Future” and features Henry Louis Gates and Bill Gates offering their prognostications on the future of the earth over the next 50 years (Big).1 The concluding chapter of Daniel Lord Smail’s Deep History and the Brain, entitled “Looking Ahead,” offers this final admonition: “The deep past is also our present and our future” (202).2 The convention of turning back to the future can be explained, in part, by the environmentalist origins of the field. Big History grows out of the green politics of US sixties counter-culture, which first finds its expression in projects like the Whole Earth Catolog and Earth Day. The scale of Big History promises to bring into stark relief the environmental impact of our species on the planet. In a cautionary note echoed by many contributors to the discourse, Cynthia Stokes Brown opens Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (2012) by sounding on the negative ecological consequences of human activity: “the actions people have taken to keep their offspring increasing have put the planetary environment and its life-forms in grave jeopardy” (xii). As its title “What Now? What Next?” implies, the conclusion of Brown’s study pushes the book’s historical narrative beyond the title’s nominal temporal limits (from the big bang to the present) out into the future. Offering the computer modeling of Meadows, Randers, and Meadows’ The Limits to Growth (1972) as an appropriate scientific resource for playing out possible “short-term scenarios” for humanity’s future, Brown maintains that the best place to explore our “middle-range future” is in works of science fiction like George Stuart’s The Earth Abides (1949), Walter

English as a Foreign Language: David Mitchell and the Born-Translated Novel

Abstract: erature is made of words, and any ambitious novel would want to wear its words proudly, declaiming their truth as well as their beauty. Yet we know that novels produced in smaller languages, which possess fewer publishers and fewer readers, have needed to make their words accessible, both to distant audiences and to translators in dominant languages. And some works in dominant languages, when they are produced in spaces far from the centers of publishing, have likewise had to retract idiomatic phrases, alter references to regional languages, and provide glossaries. But why would a British novel, produced in English and first published in London, stake a claim for patterns rather than words? And why would it pretend – as David Mitchell’s does – to be taking place in one of several foreign tongues? In this essay, I address these questions by turning to Mitchell’s several novels, which solicit future translation by registering translation’s past. Mitchell’s novels incorporate the history of translation in an unusual way: they narrate languages rather than describe them. His works rarely display multilingualism. Instead, they make English into a foreign language by emphasizing target rather than source, audiences rather than authors, and by attributing their own beginnings to prior editions and literary works in other languages. Mitchell’s novels are therefore born translated: not merely appearing in translation, in one of many language editions produced throughout the world, they have been written for translation from the start. 1 Mitchell’s works seek to keep being translated. They register their debts to translated works, and they also invite future translations into new languages and literary histories. To keep being translated, as Barbara Cassin has argued, means that translation is already taking place and will continue to take place. 2 Writing from a dominant language, novelists such as Mitchell know that many readers will encounter their works, as we say, in the original. Addressing themselves to multiple audiences, their task is not to defend their language against incursion or absorption by some another language. Rather, it is to provincialize English as a medium of globalization. For starters, this means reminding readers that English is

Intermediality: Axis of Relevance

Abstract: Over the past twenty years, the concept of intermediality has emerged as a strategic response that has sought to bypass some of the ills that have plagued the university as an institution.1 Indeed, defined as the study of “nodes of relations, of relationship movements slow enough to seem immobile” (Mechoulan), intermediality as an approach has helped fight against the hyper-specialization of research in the humanities. By conceiving of relationships (as opposed to media forms also under investigation) as paramount, it has made it possible to view as counterintuitive the fragmented approach to the real and its representations. Thereby, the social and cultural environment has been relocated to the center of analyses pertaining to literature, film, theater, the visual arts, and digital productions. In such cases, intermediality is a tool that is placed in the service of a comparativist and multidisciplinary approach to research (Mueller). As a concept, then, it is not thought of as the property of specific objects, but as a shift in perspective on the part of scholars.2 To the definition of the concept as a strategic response, we might add an aspect that is just as relevant, namely that of intermediality as an epistemological challenge. When it is deployed to pay special attention to technique and the materiality of forms in their relation to one another, intermediality constitutes a way of sidestepping intertextual or interdiscursive issues.3 The growing importance of the concept of intermediality takes the shape of a historiographical displacement that covers the entirety of the twentieth century. Within this trend, attention that was bestowed upon formats and other mediatic environments has come to be replaced, gradually, with a focus that rests on texts and, subsequently, on the relations between texts.4 Thus, equal amounts of attention are given to the content of analyzed artifacts—the production of meaning—and to the way in which this content acquires its form through its encounter with a specific format—the production of presence (Gumbrecht). As an epistemological challenge and a strategic response, the success of the concept of intermediality can be accounted for, in equal measure, through favorable socio-cultural and technological conditions. Due to its contemporaneity with the development of the Web and the rise of social networks, intermediality has indeed benefited and contributed to the emergence of an environment that is conductive to a reflection on new technologies (Nouvelles Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication, to borrow an expression from the French communication sciences). Beyond

Mediality and the Music Chart

Abstract: One lingering, unresolved dimension of intermediality theory is the status of mediality itself. Typically, the concept of intermediality is offered as a challenge to the idea that media exist as “isolated monads” (Mueller 105); the task of the analyst then becomes that of thinking through the variety of relationships between them. The risk is that this conception of intermediality may work to hypostatize media as particular kinds of objects. In this hypostatization, work on intermediality has sometimes diverged in important ways from the ongoing development of ideas about mediality itself. Mediality is best seen, I would argue, not as a permanent and definitive property of objects or forms but as the occasional state of a wide variety of objects, including those not normally classed as “media.” Friedrich Kittler’s deliberately simple typology of media functions provides one route into an expanded conceptualization of mediality. While the list of elements that constitute this typology varies slightly across his work, the key media functions he identifies are those of processing, transmission and storage (Griffin 711). The capacity of a given object (a cultural form or technology) to carry out one or more of these functions will define its mediality, as a state in and out of which such objects pass. The eyeglasses that “remember” the size of their owner’s head, as a result of use and subsequent alteration, are medial in their storage of that information (and as a result of the “inscription” by which head size is marked upon them). Likewise, the bagel, whose central hole remembers the original circulation of bagels when they were carried by vendors on poles, transmits that original function as one of the historical features stored and expressed in its present form. There is little point, however, in gathering up eyeglasses and bagels within an ever-expanding list of media. Mediality is better seen as a distributed and intermittent property, the occasional (but not definitive) state of an object depending on its particular use at a given time or the prism through which it is viewed. In this sense, then, intermediality is less the variety of possible relationships between objects pre-identified as media than a property of those assemblages in which the functions of media are extended or transformed. In what follows, I will develop some of these ideas by examining a minor, ephemeral cultural form. For several years, in a graduate seminar devoted to the study of popular music, I have invited my students to consider the mediality of those printed charts, like Billboard magazine’s “Hot 100,” which rank the popularity of musical recordings in a given week. It seems

Revisiting Dejima (Japan): from Recollections to Fiction in David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)

Abstract: In the Edo period, all the missionaries from the capital used to “summer” up here, to escape from the heat. I suppose we have the missionaries to thank for naming these mountains “the Japan Alps.” Why do people always have to compare things with abroad? (Like Kagoshima, the Naples of Japan, that always set my teeth on edge.) Nobody knows what the locals used to call the mountains before anyone knew the Alps, or even Europe, was out there. (Am I the only one who thinks this is depressing?) (Mitchell, Number9dream 250)

Delay, Estrangement, Loss: The Meanings of Translation in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985)

Abstract: The common denominator of any translation is delay: this delay is a matter of time and space, a temporal displacement (which is one of the ways of defining “translation”), a delay that exacerbates the ontological differentiation process between sign and meaning. 2 Between the moment a text or an utterance is produced, printed and received (read, heard, understood by someone), the process through which it is engaged, and the moment it reappears, is re-uttered, reinscribed, translated, time necessarily takes place, something is displaced. Throughout this process of estrangement, which also entails a degree of loss, different intermediar ies, institutions and medias (texts, speech, readers-listeners-translators, dictionaries, publishing houses, rights owners, international law, recorders, note pads) are engaged at different levels that very often, in the end process, tend to disappear as medias and intermediaries (as often medias should, according to a certain doxa), fulfilling a certain desire for commu nication transparency that is happily resigned to blissful blindness. While one needs to resist metaphorical spins, it is certainly possible to describe translation, on an epistemological level, as a medium, a milieu, a zwischenraum in which a body of statements are voluntarily and forcefully, and often without consent, pulled in and submitted to a certain treatment that works both locally (discreet units) and globally, to transform it. If, more often than not, this translation as medium is invisible to the reader or the listener (limited to the liminary “translated from,” the occasional bracket that reinstates the “original” within the foreign tongue, the translator’s note, the dubbing or simultaneous translation that erases or overlaps the original speech), there are cases where the translation as medium appears, and this is particularly the case—although not exclusively, as many examples in this issue show—in the audiovisual realm. As is often the case, a medium appears when it seems to be working differently as expected,

Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell's Ghostwritten

Abstract: ����� ��� This paper reads David Mitchell’s figuration of the posthuman sub ject, specifically its curious temporality, in relation to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as itself an instantiation of futurity. In Being and Time Heidegger offers a way of coming to understand the human as temporally fixed as both futural and as a site of an aporetic historicality: in other words Being comes to know itself as a repetition of a prior—if not an a priori—repetition: “Dasein is as it already was, and it is ‘what’ it already was”; “Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being” (Being and Time 41). My aim here is to explore a series of questions: If Heidegger’s representation of the doubly-inflected temporality of the subject holds, does Mitchell’s figuration of posthuman subjectivity as a continuum of repeating partial objects not stand as a confirmation of an all-too-human (rather than posthuman) position? Mitchell’s posthuman subject—one I will figure, after Blanchot, as a “subjectivity without any subject” (30)—is a subjectivity always oriented to the futural or imminent possibility of radical disaster and thus stands, it seems, as an almost perfect figure of the Heideggerian human, rather than as some variety of discontinuous posthuman. (In this way, of course, a Heideggerian reading of Blanchot’s figure of the disastrous subject would seem to confer on it, Blanchot’s subject, a counterintuitively stable relation to futurity and thus something approaching a firm humanity). Or does Mitchell’s figuration of the subject suggest, in a radicalized manner, that Heidegger’s work, in its focus on the aporia of human temporality, contains a subterranean, perhaps disavowed, even spectral, acknowledgment that the very idea of human Being must acknowledge the ends of the human, as such? In this sense, a reading of Mitchell with Heidegger (rather than a reading of Mitchell through Heidegger) suggests that Heidegger’s model of subjectivity, as for instance articulated in “The Age of the World Picture,” in which the human “specifically takes up this position as one constituted by himself, intentionally maintains it as that taken up by himself, and secures it as the basis for a possible development of humanity” (219-20), must be called into question precisely as it fails to acknowledge a tempo

"In the Beginning"… an Intermedial Babel

Abstract: Media philosophers such as Friedrich Kittler have shown that there is a historical tendency to imagine the inner workings of the mind according to contemporary conditions of mediality. This is evident in the ways in which mind has variously been described or depicted as a wax tablet, book, blank sheet of paper, palimpsest, camera obscura, motion picture, or computer circuit. These metaphors suggest, firstly, that cognitive functions such as thought, memory, and perception are successively remodeled in accordance with a historically specific medium and, secondly, that as technologies multiply, so do our models for understanding the mind. This raises three related questions, which this essay explores. What does it entail for the Geisteswissenschaften to say that mind or spirit (Geist) is shaped by media technologies? Is the psyche only ever shaped by the latest technologies? Does a brain suddenly stop being “bookish-minded” with the birth of cinema and has mind now irrevocably transformed from a “motion picture” into a “computer”? Therefore, are the inner workings of the mind as medium-specific or mono-medial as these metaphors suggest? This essay demonstrates how thinking and, by extension, reading, writing, and translation, are affected by the “media in our heads”.

The Sound of Silence: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

Abstract: It should come as no surprise that the Wachowskis elected to adapt David Mitchell’s 2004 tour de force Cloud Atlas into a film. Like Mitchell’s works, the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix is a part of a contemporary trend in which artists and writers such as Angela Carter, Paul Auster, and Salman Rushdie engaged in postmodern discourse, themes, and techniques without necessarily subordinating itself their visions to a postmodern worldview. 1 Mitchell received an M.A. in 1987 from the University of Kent in comparative literature focusing on the postmodern novel, and his first three novels employ the themes and problematic tensions raised by the theory dominant during the rise of continental philosophy in Anglo-American graduate programs during the 1980s and 90s. 2 Cloud Atlas engages theory ranging from overt metafictional winks, such as Timothy Cavendish’s disapproving mockery of “flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices,” which “belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory” (150), to more subtle uses of popular postmodern metaphors apparently drawn from the theory, as when Henry Goose poisons Adam Ewing with a fake medicine, thereby literalizing Derrida’s riff in “Plato’s Pharmacy” on Socrates’s claim that writing is a pharmakon, a word that means both “cure” and “poison” (759). Like the theory it interrogates, such engagements necessarily front language, speech, and writing as central thematic concerns. Mitchell’s work is systematic in its logic, self-consciously employing a kind of neostructuralist aesthetic, wherein the novels enact a series of tensions that provide a formal structure, distinct from Levi-Straussian structuralism, insofar as the author is aware of the binaries as useful heuristics rather than as necessary universals. As Mitchell told Adam Begley concerning a later work, “Black Swan Green is carefully structured—like all halfway decent books” (“David Mitchell”) and this structure is essential to his project. In this essay, I will use Cloud Atlas as a case study to demonstrate how David Mitchell’s novels explore the problematics of language using a systematic binary logic, resisting the Derridean deconstruction made

Orality and Objectification: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Filmmakers and Translators

Abstract: Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub are filmmakers of principle. Since the beginning of the 1960s, they have been constructing a highly coherent body of work, based on a certain number of very precise, concrete laws. Some of those rules have changed with time and history; others have remained untouched, rigorously observed from the first film until today. They are not an artificial set of constraints, designed to complicate a game that would otherwise be too simple; rather, they define the artist's position in the world, in the historical moment and political situation in which they live and work, the place where they stand. Some of those rules are explicit: for instance, the sound on the film has to be the sound produced there and then, when the film was shot. There can be no exception. Other rules are less clearly formulated. For example, all Huillet and Straub films originated from a previous work. There is always a text before there is the film, out of which the film emerges. Probably not a single line was ever spoken by a character in a film by Huillet and Straub that was not a quote. That is not really a law; Daniele Huillet would probably have said that it is basically humility. In any case, it's the way they worked: they needed something to react to, something that would resist them, for which they would feel both broth- erhood and strangeness, admiration and anger. So all their films have been adaptations 1 , in a very specific sense— whether from Heinrich Boll, Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Cesare Pavese, Stephane Mallarme, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Holderlin, Paul Cezanne, Elio Vittorini, etc. In this perspective, one could argue, as Barton Byg did in his 1995 book on Huillet and Straub's work, that it exemplifies a conception of "film as translation" (Byg 199). And it is true that the two actions of translating a text and of adapting it for film share common points and problems. But in fact, Huillet and Straub have had to become translators in the narrowest sense of the word. Because of the place of previous texts in the construction of their films, Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub have had to build, from the very beginning, a cinematic approach to language that would be coherent with their poetics—and politics—as a whole. This implies considering language in all of its material forms and presence within film: as sound

Translatio and Remediation: Aby Warburg, Image Migration and Photographic Reproduction

Abstract: Aby Warburg’s research on the heritage of Antiquity can be seen as an investigation into the hybrid forms through which it has been transmitted to us. This inquiry into Western cultural memory is constructed by a unique oeuvre, at the heart of which is the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the physical library Warburg created in Hamburg, which he saw as a medium for new modes of research. The organization of the library aimed to orient scholars to the modalities of the “afterlife” of the representations and gestures associated with pathos that derive from ancient paganism. We also know that Warburg sought to situate his work in the context of a Kulturwissenschaft—a science of culture seen as a “third” position, above the schism between the natural sciences and the humanities—a position whose horizon intersects Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, Max Weber’s comparative sociology of religion, and the perspectives opened by American anthropology as practiced by Franz Boas. In what follows, my hypothesis is that in Warburg’s work, the concept of Nachleben—the afterlife of ancient modes of representation— arises from a translatio in multiple registers: simultaneously migrations in space, transpositions in media and technique, and textual and figurative translation from one culture to another. The mapping of these transfers presupposes a mechanism of remediation able to make visible the stability and variations of that which, like the “pathos formulae” (Pathosformeln), have been “translated” and thus transmitted. In order to understand the specific role that photographic reproduction plays in this complex, I propose here a case study of the iconography of Saturn as developed by Warburg in a 1913 slide-lecture on the migration of planetary images, and later, in 1926, after the opening of his new library, in his first exhibition of orientalized illustrations from astrology. 1. From Image to Image: transpositio We cannot fully grasp Warburg’s concept of a “posthumous life” of antique representations until we become familiar with the unique organization of his library, and the media mechanisms established therein.

The TV-Box: Reconsidering a Lost Television Set, Santa Claus and the Ants

Abstract: Parameters and Intermediality For several years now, early cinema historians have developed certain notions that can help us define, in a much broader context, the axes of research in intermedial studies. Even though I’ll be giving it a slightly different importance, the notion I will be borrowing from these historians here is that of the “parameter.” Work by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion on the emergence of the cinematographic medium relies on the idea that the medium appears as the result of a choice made by the historian (or some other author of periodization). To write the history of any given medium and separate it into periods, one must also select the components “that gathered together as a way of giving ‘birth’ to that medium at a given moment” (Gaudreault and Marion, “Pour une nouvelle” 230; all translations mine). Gaudreault and Marion designate these components with the concept of the “cultural series,” though they often use the term “parameter” to refine its meaning. Thus, according to them, every medium is, at the moment of its birth, a “cluster of convergences,” a system of federated and provisionally stabilized “mobile parameters” that point toward apparatuses and media:

From Time's Boomerang to Pointillist Mosaic: Translating Cloud Atlas into Film

Abstract: In a Wall Street Journal article appearing prior to the U.S. premiere of the film Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell addresses the challenges of turning his complex novel into a film. Revealing that he considered the novel’s “there-and-back” structure as “unfilmable,” he comments favorably on the new structure devised by the screenwriters/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy, V for Vendetta) and Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run; Heaven): “It [the novel] has now been adapted for the screen, but as a sort of pointillist mosaic: We stay in each of the six worlds just long enough for the hook to be sunk in, and from then on the film darts from world to world at the speed of a plate-spinner, revisiting each narrative for long enough to propel it forward” (Mitchell, “Translating”). Significantly, whereas the “there-and-back” structure—or “Time’s Boomerang,” as Mitchell calls it in a sly self-referential section of the novel (147)––suggests a dynamic state of affairs, the pointillist mosaic metaphor suggests a quasistatic one.1 I would argue that, through its restructuring, the film shifts its emphasis from a future in flux to a future that is fixed––as in a frame. The film certainly works on its own terms, the filmmakers deftly managing the mind-boggling task of tying together the six separate storylines of Mitchell’s novel through cinematic means. The changes in key plot points and in temporal structure, however, transform the novel’s theme that one can change the future (a “virtual future,” in Mitchell’s terms) to a theme

Palter & Prescience - On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten

Abstract: The works of David Mitchell have inspired a consistent utilization of the lexicon of accolade, at times even of hyperbole. Reviews and critical assessments are littered with terminology such as: visionary, protean, prolific, genre-bending jack-of-all-trades. He is, for some, the ultimate conceptual writer, a 21st Century Man. His work, until recently, was called unfilmable, and depending on your opinion of the Tykwer-Wachowski adaptation of Cloud Atlas, maybe you think it ought to have stayed that way. Maybe you’re a Mitchell fan who likes to tout the British maestro’s mash-ups of genre fiction and formalist literary mischief as redefining the novel, as mind-blowing, intuitive, challenging, pyrotechnic, ambitious, and clever. But one man’s clever is another woman’s gimmick, phrased as such because Mitchell’s books are populated by androgynes and floating consciousnesses, by liminal pubescents and dislodged expatriates, even by non-gendered (ungendered? genderless?) characters, phantasms and poltergeists, child ghosts and tribal gods and other undefinable sorts of immortal sentience. One who tends to write in the category of High Gamesmanship, David Mitchell is a cineaste audiophile lit-hound blender. Widely praised and well reviewed but also bestseller material, he is not a fringe member of some experimental fiction cabal, nor cognoscenti fodder, nor a soi-disant enfant terrible. As much as his supporters might want to argue for his indie cred, he’s been blurbed by Dave Eggers and the movie version of his big novel starred Tom Hanks. Mitchell is inarguably intelligent, seemingly sincere, even humble, despite aiming so high, aspiring to gargantuan meritorious blocks of impressiveness, an individual whose writing is highbrow and referential but who also possesses an affable accessibility. If Mitchell’s books are difficult they’re recognizably so, ‘fun difficult’ as opposed to ‘avant-garde difficult’ (for the latter, think Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, published the same year as Mitchell’s debut), and reading his first novel, Ghostwritten, fifteen years after its publication, what abides is its prescience. By presenting a Huxleyan dystopo-present freckled with brand names and macular with rampant consumerism – Mitchell would later dub the dystopo-future a ‘corpocracy’ in Cloud Atlas (in which Prescients become a race) – the globetrotting Englishman’s first book has been proven

Dispositive, Intermediality and Society: Tales of the Bed in Contemporary Spain

Abstract: The concepts “dispositive” and “intermediality” emerged at the same time and are becoming increasingly prominent. In this article, I propose to consider what intermediality brings to the dispositive, based on a case study of the diptych El Otro Lado de la Cama and Los Dos Lados de la Cama, two mainstream films from contemporary Spain in the early twenty-first century. Dispositive theory has been developed in France by academics working in the fields of modern literature and theater at the University of Toulouse, notably Marie-Thérèse Mathet, Stéphane Lojkine, Philippe Ortel and Arnaud Rykner. In the late 1990s, this group adapted Foucault’s concept of the dispositive 2 to the fields of literature and art in general.3 In 2007, a group of Hispanists in Toulouse, including Monique Martinez, Emmanuelle Garnier and Euriell Gobbé Mévellec began applying dispositive “theory” to the Spanish language corpus. Writing in the journal Critique, Bernard Vouilloux named this group the “Toulouse School”.4 According to its founders, the concept of the dispositive can be used to renew approaches to artistic and literary works, since it combines and cross-fertilizes written and image-based arts, communication and sociology. It draws on what are often separate disciplines, and the legitimacy of its analysis is grounded in a shared space of “indiscipline,” in which several objects of study can be analyzed simultaneously. The dispositive is a network of disparate means brought together at a particular moment in order to produce effects of meaning in the receiver. It comprises three superimposed and connected levels: the geometrical or technical level (the arrangement of elements in space by fiction), the pragmatic or scopic level (the interaction of several actants in front of the viewer) and the symbolic level (semantic and axiological values associated with spatial organization). In Ortel’s words, “Representation uses technical, visual and poetic means to portray a reality (I), which it then transmits to an audience (II) placed in a position to learn or judge (III)” (Ortel, “Vers” 46). When these three levels are combined in a smooth fiction intended to construct a meaning that keeps the receiver in suspense in relation to the end, the representation is based on mimesis, involving separation from the outside world. In the theater, this is manifested by the opaque fourth wall, which separates the fictional world from that of the theater, the audience and reality. When the three levels are made visible, because they

The Meridian and the Eastern Front: Contemporaneity and the Ethos of Translation

Abstract: Untranslatability haunts every literary translation. The rewriting that occurs in working out the particularities between each language recalls, from one inscription to the other, the impossible equivalence that the enduring task of translation seeks to carry out. Aren’t the inherent limits of historical representation, between the manifestation of truth and the evidence-based reconstruction of fact, similar to those related to the problem of translation? What to think, then, of cultural manifestations that use translation as a poetics of remembrance and a way of carrying a past event into the present? This essay argues that translation is more than the communication of meaning or the transmission of information through time, that it displays a powerful way of disclosing a future in the wake of a traumatic experience through an aesthetic ethos. The predicament of sharing a past experience can be accounted for by making a virtue out of the inevitable failure translation entails. If translation is inevitably related to language, it goes beyond the technical transfer of content as it can embody the possibility of living through the devastating effects of trauma through a form of material recovery, as in the case of a writer like Paul Celan, or help to negotiate the possibilities of a collective memory through a form of cultural mediation, as in Konrad Wolf’s filmmaking. Whether through literature or cinema, translating actualizes a pathological need to share experiences while upholding the task of situating oneself in the present. The effects of certain events occurring in a time of war, for instance, may leave traces that can’t be archived; they imprint the subject, alter agency and radically change the way of relating to the present. In understanding translation as a task that has an ethical relevance distinct from the functional aim of transferring cultural data, I want to show how it materializes a “fidelity to an event” (Badiou 38-42) and thus embodies a form of cultural survival that renders thought. In other words, in carrying the past into the present, translation presents a way to live through – or overcome – an experience of radical disruption and displacement in order to survive utter distress or foresee the reconstruction of a socio-political bond in spite of cultural divisions and conflict. As a figure of thought, translation allows us to address these issues.

Philosophy as Translation

Abstract: The necessity of reconsidering and rethinking the aesthetics of a literary genre is not a novelty. Now that the traditional distinction between argumentative theory patterns and narrative styles of thinking has blurred, the relationship between philosophy and literature raises a principal question: the definition of philosophy itself and of philosophical activity. Modern literature, and in particular the novel of the last century, embodies a polyphonic, complex cognitive enterprise which includes both original uses of language and sophisticated patterns of moral reflection. Modern literature thus represents a new model of paradigmatic thinking for philosophical activity, and both philosophy and literature can be viewed as translational activities. This paper first examines how famous translation theories in the field of the philosophy of language (Quine’s “radical translation,” Davidson’s “principle of charity”) frame philosophical activity as a translational one, after which (in parts 3 and 4) philosophy and translation are then considered alongside Wittgenstein’s thought on myth and science, leading to a discussion of the cognitive claim of the poetic work. This paper thus provides an introduction to an epistemological consideration of literature and to an analysis of the work of the Austrian poet and writer Ingeborg Bachmann from a post-analytical point of view.

The Untranslatable: A New Theoretical Fulcrum? An Exchange with Barbara Cassin

Abstract: Reinhardt & Habib: The Dictionary of Untranslatables (Princeton University Press, 2014) is a lexicon of philosophical terms first published in French as Vocabulaire europeen des philosophies : Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004). What was the initial aim of this ongoing project? How does each translation of this philosophical lexicon (in Arabic, Farsi, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish and English) enact this initial aim by displaying the issue of untranslatability in different idioms? How do you understand your editorial task in this work-in-progress? Did the English version offer a particular challenge?

Yves Bonnefoy and the "Genius" of Language

Abstract: Along with poets such as Eugène Guillevic and Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy represents part of a wave of poets who contributed to reorienting post-World War II French poetry towards the everyday and the here and now, as opposed to the world of dreams and the marvelous glorified by Surrealism. For more than a half-century, Bonnefoy’s writings have constantly returned to that here and now, which he calls “Presence.” For Bonnefoy, poetry ought to open onto the epiphanic experience of Presence. Bonnefoy’s most famous work, Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, is an elegy dedicated to the perpetual demise and rebirth of a fictional being called Douve, herself emblematic of the perpetually fleeing here and now. Immensely influential and widely read, Bonnefoy represents one of the most canonical French poets living today. Remarkably, he has also emerged as one of France’s premier translators, especially of the works of Shakespeare, Yeats and Leopardi, and as a prolific essayist on the topic of translation. Throughout his approaches to the topic, Bonnefoy repeatedly engages the notion that each language, with its particular configurations and characteristics, somehow influences or determines the worldview of a community of speakers. To describe this notion of language’s intrinsic character or determining force, Henri Meschonnic borrows the expression “le génie des langues” from the Swiss Romantic writer Germaine de Staël (36, 117 and passim). In de Staël’s work, this “genius of language” is intimately tied to the genius of nations: in other words, national character and linguistic character, according to de Staël, mirror one another. Other thinkers have explored the notion quite differently; as a group, such positions constitute forms of what is called “linguistic relativism.”1 Bonnefoy discusses the “genius” of English and French in distinctly metaphysical terms, characterizing English as “Aristotelian” and centered in the manifold appearances and contingencies of the real, while the French language’s “Platonic” structure lends itself to the expression of Ideas. As the present essay will demonstrate, Bonnefoy sometimes suggests that French must overcome its Platonic structure in order to accede to true Presence, while at other times, he suggests that this Platonism grants privileged access to Presence. One accedes to Presence either by way of the concrete real in all its contingency and perceptual immediacy, or by way of Ideas and essences that bypass and exclude superficial appear-