ABSTRACT
The primary imperative of subjective formation under the post-Fordist regime of immaterial labor is, as Maurizio Lazzarato and Toni Negri observed nearly two decades ago, communication. “The [post-Fordist] subject,” writes Lazzarato, “is a simple relay of codification and decodification, whose transmitted message must be ‘clear and without ambiguity,’ within a context of communication that has been completely normalised” (Lazzarato 2004). Subjects of communication face the especially daunting task of accounting for enormous differences and diversities throughout and across global populations. Hence, if communication is to be effective, it requires an ideology of anthropological difference according to which the normalization of diverse populations can be universally instituted. Needless to say, in the era of postcolonial governance, such normalization would encounter impossible resistance were it to proceed according to a model of uniformity that would inevitably highlight the uneven relations between center and periphery. What is needed, rather, is a strategy of normalization that accounts for and includes difference, yet organizes it according to predictable codes. Amidst the litany of various classificatory schemes that have arisen since the nineteenth century, none is more pervasive, historically persistent and considered to be politically-neutral than that of “culture.” Culture provides communication with the crucial classificatory framework necessary both to preserve difference at a level acceptable to postcolonial governance and to ensure sufficient regularity in codification. According to this scheme, “translation” names the process of encoding/ decoding required to transfer informational content between different linguistico-cultural spheres. Just as the post-Fordist subject must “communicate,” the nature of “communication” itself is codified according to a grammar of pronominal identities and representational positions that codifies linguistic exchange according to an predetermined representational scheme of mutually-determined anthropological codes. In 2006, Naoki Sakai and I co-edited an issue of the multilingual series
Traces entitled Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference in which we presented an argument for articulating the indeterminacy of translation as a
mode of social practice to the contingent commodifications of labor-power and the nexus of knowledge that governs anthropological difference.2 The call for papers proposed to prospective authors the idea of bringing translation into a politically-informed discussion about the production of social relations and humanistic knowledge in the context of anthropological difference inherited from colonialism. Central to this discussion was the notion of a biopolitics of translation. In a series of lectures in the late 1970s, Michel Foucault introduced and elaborated the assorted concepts of “biopolitics” and “governmentality” as tools for thinking about the way in which the processes of life – and the possibility of controlling and modifying them through the technical means – enter the sphere of power and become its chief concern. Foucault’s effort has generally been understood as an innovative attempt to introduce a new ontology, beginning with the body, that would provide a way of thinking of the political subject outside the dominant tradition of modern political philosophy that frames it as a subject of law (Lazzarato 2002: 100-111). “Biopolitics” thus names a quotidian sphere of ostensibly apolitical (or depoliticized) social action and relations – what Foucault calls “the entry of life into history” – that is nevertheless invested with crucial effects for the production of social subjects. These effects, far removed from the role traditionally ascribed to politics per se inasmuch as they concern population management, nevertheless bear upon the construction of what is at stake in the formation of power relations. We found it was not only possible but also necessary to subject the latent
and pervasive Occidentalism in Foucault’s work to a thorough critique while at the same time opening up possibilities for an understanding of biopolitics in a global context. The notion of a “biopolitics of translation” acquires critical importance with a view to the specifically modern phenomenon of the linguistic standardization associated with nationalization and colonial land appropriation. Ever since the concomitant birth of philology and biology, modernity has been associated with the advent of a global cartographic imaginary that places peoples with no prior “memory” of migratory contact into relation through the mediation of an imperial center. As the transition to a global form of spatial imaginary, modernity begins when the project of standardization is extended across all manner of social differences to encompass diverse populations in the process of national homogenization and domestic segmentation (Bidet 1999). This process must be seen, in turn, in the context of contact with other global populations undergoing the same process of systemic definition and structural segmentation. The biopolitics of translation thus names that space of exchange and accumulation in which politics appears to have been preempted by the everyday occurrence of language. Our research shows that when “translation” is understood according to a representational scheme of the epistemic subject, it names not the operation by which cultural difference is “bridged,” but the pre-emptive operation through which originary difference is segmented and organized according to the various classificatory schemes of knowledge emerging out of the colonial encounter.
