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Ideology and translation When, in conjunction with mimesis, we speak of ideology and translation, terms drawn from the social realm on the one hand and the linguistic on the other, we need to keep in mind that the binding power of ideology lies in its ability to confirm the identity of a community and that translatability presumes identity between languages. This explains the regularity with which the concepts of mimesis and representation appear in definitions of ideology. Theodor Adorno defined it as "socially necessary appearance, " Louis Althusser as the "imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, " and Hannah Arendt as the subjugation of reality to "laws of 'scientifically' established movements with which through the process of imitation it the mind becomes integrated. " (George Steiner 77) Mimeticism functions as an instrument of identification. In pursuing the issue of ideology by way of translation, the researchers suggest that the appeal of interpreting ideology through a framework of cultural symbology lies, to a great extent, in the power of narrative. A certain logic binds imitation, which is a mode of fashioning, with fiction or narrative discourse. This logic is that of semblance, which dictates that mimetic representation bridges the division between verbal and non-verbal, between language and the given or phenomenal.
Mimetic theories of representation have to state themselves in narrative. A mimetic theory that does not distinguish logos from lexis, a mimetic theory such as that propounded by Benjamin, does not conceive of mimesis as simulacrum but as language. "Works of art attract by a resembling unlikeness. Colloquial poetry is to real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. In every art I can think of we are dammed and clogged by the mimetic" (Luise Von Flotow 111). The researchers attack mimetic art as a slavish effort to reproduce the likeness of the original, but his concern is with stoppage or blockage, not with resemblance. So conceived, the only true mimetic form would be translation, the archive of non-sensuous or linguistic correspondences.
That which prevents translation, prevents the circulation of words, is the enemy. The poetic image-as-trope exhausts itself in the play of word and object, to the exclusion of the other or social discourse, appears to deny the heterogeneity of the literary work. However, the notion of the object in artistic prose proves the dialogism belongs to a reflexive theory that fails to confront radical austerity. The object is a focal point for herteroglot voices among which the prose writer's voice may sound; these voices create the background necessary for his own voice. " (Hatim and Mason 116) Such a hermeneutics seeks the dialogic al resolution of heterogeneous voices in which languages are said to be "dia logically implicated in each other and begin to exist for each other. " (Hatim and Mason 117) The readings, especially when they focus on analogies between language and money, themselves construct a reflexive system that, rather than undo ideology, reconfirm ideology insofar as they fail to address the mimetic basis of language. In other words, readings that treat the other as the negative in a reflexive system are producing allegories, narratives that confuse the contingent and metonymic with the mimetic and metaphoric. If it is argued, for instance, that the Jew is the Other in Pound's works, an enabling other that allows for the chain of substitutions between money and language, then such readings are treating metonymy, the substitution of one signifier for another, as metaphor, the resemblance between one signified and another. (Sherry Simon 142) We can pause here to note that when an analogy is established between language and money, one has a conceptual system that little can withstand.
After all, why else is it so hard to get rid of metaphysics? Because when we talk of the analogy between money and language, when we coin analogies, we are participating in a mode of thought that is mimetic and, therefore, belongs to logo centrism. The difference lies not in what the critics conceive to be "proper to man" but in the narratives they make of resemblance. (Sherry Simon 157) Narratives that turn upon an equation of language and economics may be called a specular economy that recuperates the other as the same. In the closed economy of a specular system everything is fungible, that is, exchangeable for something else. Money is fungible; it is the universal commodity, as Marx says. (Suzanne Jill Levine 119) The resistance language meets is only itself, resistance being what allows the referent to become an object of knowledge for the subject. "To language, all of the real is fungible but itself, and the resistance that language opposes to itself - which may take the form of trying - establishes the reality of language to language, which then constructs all other forms of reference upon this fundamental model. " (Suzanne Jill Levine 150) The resistance of language to language, in this formula, takes many forms in theory today and is represented by ideology, the unconscious.
The problem with these models lies in their attributing the resistance. Argument by analogy is argument by metaphor. A certain misreading of Derrida's "White Mythology" underlies this interpretation. (Suzanne Jill Levine 204) In analyzing metaphor as that which philosophy wishes to expunge from its text, Derrida is not arguing that metaphor is a foreign poison in metaphysics but that it belongs to metaphysics. Literature is not the Other of metaphysics. If it were, it would have to have its own essence of truth as distinct from philosophy, a distinction that would turn upon the relation of mimesis to alethea. Therefore, to argue that usury is the Other of poetry is to confirm the thinking that opposes proper to non proper, thought and language, intelligible and sensible.
If collapse under the weight of a metaphoric's it cannot control, then it would be both one with metaphysical tradition, in that it seeks to overcome the division between Time and Being, and opposed to it, insofar as it attacks the hierarchical order of Western thought embodied in causal logic and the idea of the Book. Which brings us to ideology and our opening discussion of mimesis and translation. Insofar as the mimetic element in language bridges the sensible and intelligent, it is irreducibly linked to metaphor and the unfolding of truth. What we call myth, the translation of an experience into a narrative, "I turned into a tree, " would be the transportation into speech of that which is heterogeneous to it. As the allegory of myth tells us, the original experience of "nonsense" can only be reached in a language that negates it as sensuous experience and translates it into a story, thereby introducing a temporal element heterogeneous to the original experience of truth. (George Steiner 160) The temptation, and a very strong one, would be to translate allegory into a theory of ideology very much like Althusser's, who writes "that in ideology 'men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form. '" (Susan Bassnett & Andre Lefevere 173) Althusser goes on to say that "it is not their real conditions of existence, that 'men' 'represent to themselves' in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them. " (Susan Bassnett & Andre Lefevere 181) In other words, what is represented in ideology is the imaginary, not the real, relations.
To know something is to place it within logical and linguistic space, but this space can never be absolutely determined by language. This "failure" is not a failure of language in the sense of words being unrelated to things, let alone a failure of referential ity, but belongs to the rift structure of language, wherein language transcends the material by virtue of its capacity to imagine more contexts than that which is immediately given, and the material transcends language insofar as it remains opaque. The opacity of the material, however, is an opacity that belongs to the figural dimension of language - we experience it as resistance in the call to translate, the urge to say, "I turned into a tree. " The failure of translation reflects the resistance of the sensible, that which allows the referent to be an object of cognition, to representation, but this failure does not end translation but is what calls it forth. (Luise Von Flotow 155) If translation is for those who don't understand the original, then translation always says the same thing. But as we know, it can never say the same thing as the original. This is not because it cannot convey the information in the original or even its poetic effects, but because the translation issues from a call, a demand to be translated. This means that translation is governed by the law of the original's translatability.
This means that the original is governed not by nature (if it were then it would be of an essential quality so as not to be translatable), but by history, which means that the translation marks the stages of life, or rather afterlife, of the original, which is always awaiting its proper translation. (Suzanne Jill Levine 165) The aim of translation is, therefore, not pointed to the original as an object, but to history itself. (Susan Bassnett & Andre Lefevere 213) Translation is redemptive. It expresses the reciprocal relationship between languages. When we say that translation is never adequate, it does not mean that a text is not translatable; in fact, it is governed by the form of its translatability (if not, it would not be language), and is always possible, not in some future realm though. Therefore, a translation does not strive for likeness with the original, but to mark the dis articulation the original undergoes in its afterlife. What the translation refers to is not the original, but the inaccessible realm of fulfillment of language (which is the element that does not lend itself to translation): it would be the realm of pure presence of God. To be in history or time is to be in the dispersal of language.
What translation does is transplant the original into the more truly historical realm of language: that is, it disarticulates the original by bringing out its essentially linguistic character rather than some essential logos. (George Steiner 191) To translate then is to seize hold of the past and redeem it not from time but from timelessness - which means it works against the belief in the eternal image of the past, universal history, or archetypal truth. This breaks up the homogeneous past and makes a specific era out of the homogeneous whole, giving it life and canceling it because now life is preserved in the translation and cancelled by it - that is, denied its transcendental removal from the world of the now. Bibliography Hatim and Mason (1997) The Translator as Communicator. George Steiner (1975 / 1998) After Babel. Luise Von Flotow. (1997) Translation and Gender: Translating in the "Era of Feminism." Sherry Simon. (1996) Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (1996). Susan Bassnett & Andre Lefevere (eds 1990) Translation, History and Culture.
Suzanne Jill Levine (1998) The Subversive Scribe.
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