Applying Luhmann to Translation Studies

Translation in Society

Sergey Tyulenev

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136631368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book deals with one of the most prominent and promising developments in modern Translation Studies--the sociology of translation. Tyulenev develops an original way of applying Luhmann's Social Systems Theory to translation, viewing translation as a social-systemic boundary phenomenon. The book consists of two major parts: in the first, translation is described as a system in its own right with its systemic properties; in the second part, translation is viewed as a social subsystem and as a boundary phenomenon in the overall social system.

Part I

System

1 Autopoiesis of Translation

Either the body system interacting with its environment succeeds in continuing its operations and thus lives on, or it does not succeed and subsequently dies, and its structures connected to the performance of life-preserving processes dissolve.

—Fritz B. Simon

In the present study, translation will be considered as an autopoietic system. Luhmann borrowed the notion ‘autopoiesis’ from biology. Chilean biologist Humberto R. Maturana is credited with introducing the term into biology to denote a specific ability of living organisms to exist as self-referential and self-reproducing systems. Apparently, however, according to Hans Rudi Fischer’s historical analysis, the basic idea of self-organization was already known to Immanuel Kant who wrote that parts of a whole form an entity because they constitute both the cause and effect of their whole. Among the first to observe self-organization in the twentieth century were electrical engineers W. A. Clark and B. G. Farley. From the end of the 1950s, Heinz von Foerster and many others conducted the focused research of the phenomenon of self-organization (Foerster and Poerksen 2002, 90–1).

1.1. DON QUIXOTE’S PRAXIS AND MATURANA’S POIESIS

New terms must be coined to make the concepts behind them conspicuous.

—Itamar Even-Zohar

We look for a way of speaking about the rough unmapped terrain, even just a name or a phrase that calls attention to the object of our attention.

—Edward O. Wilson

A short history how the neologism autopoiesis was coined would not be amiss. It appeared some time in the early 1970s when Humberto Maturana and his co-worker Francisco Varela were looking for a term that would aptly capture the circular organization of living organisms which these two scientists discovered. As Maturana himself put it:

We were unhappy with the expression ‘circular organization’, and we wanted a word that would by itself convey the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy. (Maturana and Varela 1980, xvii)

It so happened that one day Maturana had a conversation with a friend, José Bulnes. They talked about Bulnes’s essay on Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. In his essay, Bulnes discussed Don Quixote’s dilemma, whether to engage in praxis, that is, to take action and follow the path of arms or to prefer poiesis, which, on the contrary, meant to give himself to creation. Don Quixote preferred the path of praxis, but ironically, his ruminations led Maturana to the other option—poiesis. Maturana realized the power of the term poiesis and, based on it, coined the term autopoiesis, which was assigned the key position in his and Varela’s groundbreaking conceptual approach to the study of the living. This term autopoiesis had no history and, therefore, “could directly mean what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems” (ibid., xvii).

Autopoiesis was not a whim or what Giovanni Sartori called “novitism,” that is, a scientist’s desire to be original at any cost and engage in unwarranted name-inventing (Collier and Gerring 2009, 63). It is clear that in Maturana and Varela’s case the word did not come before a new concept had been conceived, their “right word” was “part and parcel of the concept” (ibid., 68). Sometimes, an outstanding wordsmith like William Golding who gave James Lovelock the name of his hypothesis ‘Gaia’ is welcomed to participate in finding the right word (Lovelock 2000, 3, 240–1).

To be sure, Maturana and Varela were not the only ones struggling against words which trap the researcher in scientific traditions. Bruno Latour, one of the authors of the actor-network sociological theory, experienced similar frustrations. While creating their actor-network theory, he and his colleagues felt that they needed to rid themselves of such categories as power, knowledge, profit, and capital, “because they divide up a cloth that we want seamless in order to study as we choose” (1987, 223). Therefore, they either assigned new meanings to existing words, such as spokesperson, or coined new words, such as actant.

Also, Pierre Bourdieu said that he was always engaged in “a permanent struggle against ordinary language” (1988, 149). Bourdieu, James Coleman, Gary Becker, and Robert Putnam (although each in his own way) borrowed the economic notion capital and applied it to sociological studies. This provided all of them with the possibility to theorize social phenomena in a new way (Field 2003, 11–40).

Going back to Maturana and Varela, the term autopoiesis became a real eureka for them. It made talking about the self-organization of the living so much simpler and helped them escape the “always-gaping trap of not saying anything new because the language does not permit it”: by revolutionizing their conceptual vocabulary, they could navigate their innovative course and “generate a new tradition” (Maturana and Varela 1980, xvii).

And a new tradition was indeed generated. In the wake of their discovery, a new school in sociology was established. Today, this sociological school is primarily associated with the name of Niklas Luhmann. His theory has also been applied to a number of other disciplines within the humanities: in the theory of law and organizational studies; in political science; in the studies of art, literature, and mass media; and in philosophy, to name just a few.

1.2. FREE FROM THE IRON MAIDEN’S EMBRACE

In his foreword to Maturana and Varela’s treatise Autopoiesis and Cognition, Sir Stafford Beer gave a brief survey of how, in the history of Western science, the synthesis was superseded by analysis. The result is that mechanism, dualism, and categorization still reign supreme. In such worldview, systemic interrelatedness is annihilated, relations fall out of sight, and synthesis is relegated to poetry and mysticism (Maturana and Varela 1980, 63–4). Sir Stafford Beer’s diagnosis is that scholarship has been trapped in the secure embrace of this iron maiden. Yet he sees the concept of autopoiesis as an attempt to free science from this embrace by re-introducing synthesis and systematicity into present-day scholarship.

Kenneth E. Boulding suggested another colorful metaphor expressing the urgent need of systemic studies. He saw general systems theory as “the skeleton of science,” that is, a framework of individual disciplines and multifarious foci of scientific research. This would help overcome ever-growing fragmentation of scientific knowledge. He also wittily remarked that the metaphor has its other meaning: general systems theory may also be seen as a skeleton in the cupboard of modern science. The latter fails to systematize all the data it has collected, yet is unwilling to admit its failure. Exacerbating the embarrassment by making painfully clear that simplistic mechanical explanations would not work, general systems theory should not be seen, however, only in its negative function; its positive, instructive, function is to be appreciated as well: it shows us where to go. Boulding concludes: “The skeleton must come out of the cupboard before its dry bones can live” (1968, 10).

Following the main focus of general systems theory, which one of its fathers Ludwig von Bertalanffy traces back to the end of 1930s (1968, 13), Maturana and Varela state that their purpose is to understand living systems’ organization in relation to such systems’ unitary character. This is possible by concentrating not on properties of components of the living organization but on processes and relations between these processes, which are realized through components. They differentiate between two types of phenomena requiring different kinds of description. While studying the trajectory of a falling body, we focus on the properties of matter and on the relevant physical laws (the kinetic and gravitational laws). While studying the organization of a plant, however, we deal with relations and laws of the conduct of relations. In the former case, the explanation takes as its elements bodies and their properties. In the latter case, the explanation is built upon descriptions of relations and their relations, no matter what bodies are involved and what their nature is. Maturana and Varela state that the object of their study is the organization of living systems, which is relation-based, and, therefore, requires the second type of description. Therefore, to distinguish between classes or types of living systems would be superfluous (Maturana and Varela 1980, 75–6).

Arguably, to study translation requires the same relational and holistic type of description (Garfinkel 1987, 202–4, 210; Yates 1987, 1–14). In order to prove my point, I will turn to Sir Stafford Beer’s foreword again. In the subsection “In Contention,” he develops Maturana and Varela’s ideas further by extrapolating the concept of autopoiesis to the social domain. Beer writes that many social institutions may be described as autopoietic and, therefore, living. He admits that this sounds odd, but says that this “cannot be helped” and adds that, although Varela and Maturana may hold their own discovery at arms length, what is at stake is not the word “alive.” According to Beer, “what does matter is that the social institution has identity in the biological sense; it is not just the random assemblage of interested parties that it is thought to be” (Maturana and Varela 1980, 71).

Such broad conception of autopoiesis makes it clear what line of reasoning might have led Luhmann to the idea of the social as autopoietically organized. Closer to the subject of the present study, hardly anybody would argue that translation is a social phenomenon. As a social phenomenon, translation may also be described as autopoietically organized. Hence, the emphasis is to be laid on translation as a relationally structured phenomenon. This understanding creates a breach with the traditional non-systemic description of translation.

1.3. MACHINES WITH CIRCULAR CLOSURES

Study relations that give rise to processes, independent of their embodiment. In other words: become a cybernetician in its interesting and ample sense of the word.

—Francisco J. Varela

Maturana and Varela define living organisms as broadly conceived machines (1980, 77–84).¹ Heinz von Foerster sees the usefulness of the concept machine in its abstract sense of a functional unit in that it disciplines the researcher to identify the studied unit’s structural and functional components. This notion and its “methodological relatives,” such as concepts transcript, en- and de-coding, computation, contributed to a better understanding of a great deal of objects of scientific research (Foerster 1981, 178).

The most important characteristic of machines is unity ensured by the network of relations, that is interactions and transformations into which components of the machine enter in order to constitute the machine as a unity. This type of relations between components is referred to as the organization of the machine. The actual material components are secondary in the sense that an autopoietic unity can be ‘made’ of different types of components. It cannot be overemphasized that to describe the organization of a machine, or system, is to shift from the specificity of the properties of its components to the relations between the components, to what makes the machine a unity. In this sense, the organization of the machine is said to be independent of the properties of its components (ibid., 77).

Note that Maturana and Varela understand the term ‘machine’ as interchangeable with the term ‘system’. It is also to be noted that the organization of machines is not dependant on the properties of its components. This explains why, among other things, human society and social systems can be devoid of consciousness while human beings are conscious. Also, this makes us question the direct link implied between translation processes and translators. But I leave off this highly controversial matter at this intriguing point for now because first I have to show that all the above said about self-reproducing machines is applicable to translation.

Machines, or systems, may be either autopoietic or allopoietic. The term autopoiesis is composed of two Greek roots: auto—self and poiein—to produce. Maturana and Varela define autopoietic machines as organized and unified networks of processes of production of components which continuously regenerate and realize their own network by interacting and undergoing transformations. The produced components also constitute the machine as a distinct unity in the space of the components’ existence by specifying the topological domain in which such a network is realized (ibid., 78–9). Thus, an autopoietic machine or system “determines its own making due to a network of reactions [or relations—S.T.] which take place within its own well-defined boundary” (Luisi 1993, 19). This makes the autopoietic organization a circular organization and, moreover, a circular or self-referential closure.

To understand what ‘self-referential closure’ means is easier when we compare autopoietic machines with allopoietic ones. The term allopoietic is coined from the root poiein, which we already know, and the root allo which means (an)other. A car is typical example of the allopoietic machine. There is also an organization with its particular concatenation of processes. Yet these processes do not produce the components which make the car a unity. The components of a car are the result of other processes, external in relation to the car’s operation. Thus, allopoietic systems are dependent on their ‘outside’ for their production, whereas autopoietic systems operate by forming a circular closure. In biological autopoietic systems, operational closure refers to the containment of the system’s operations within its boundary. The operations form a circle where components determine the system’s boundary, the system generates a reaction network (or a network of operations) which produces components; the components determine the boundary of the system and so on and so forth.

Importantly, components of an autopoietic machine are in dynamic relations. That is why a crystal cannot be considered as autopoietically organized. Although the components of a crystal are organized in such a way as to define it as a crystal of a certain kind and thereby specify its unity (in the physical space), they are static. The network of processes of production of components specifies the components, which constitute the network’s organization and which undergo constant change (Maturana and Varela 1980, 80).

Although autopoietic systems are operationally closed, they are interactionally open. They exchange matter, energy and information with their environment. This is, however, only interactional openness, not operational. On the operational level, it would be incorrect to talk about the autopoietic system’s receiving inputs from the environment. The environment only causes perturbations (or irritations) of the system. Some of these perturbations trigger internal operational responses in the system, yet they cannot determine the system’s operations.

Internally, autopoietic systems reproduce themselves by virtue of a particular structural mechanism—their self-organization. The self-organization, that is, the system’s dynamic makeup, the interacting structures of which the autopoietic system is composed, is a result of the system’s internal operations. Yet the system evolves by growing in complexity as it observes and makes sense of its complex environment. Following George Spencer Brown, Luhmann understands the term ‘observation’ at its highest level of abstraction. Observation is not reduced to optical observation but is defined as any operation that is based on classifying all phenomena as intrinsic or extrinsic in relation to the observed operation.

The system’s observation poses new “reference problems” leading to creation of new functions and respective function subsystems (Luhmann 2000a, 138). Interactions of the system with its environment, which acquire the character of reciprocal dependencies, are referred to as structural couplings. Such are interactions of translation with human psychic systems or with other social subsystems, for example legal translation is structurally coupled with the legal subsystem. Structural couplings are an important mechanism of mutual adaptation of the system to its environment and of the environment to the system. It is important to bear this in mind when we consider two autopoietic systems which come into contact and, while constituting environment for each other, adapt to each other. Continual interactions between such systems through mutual perturbations determine the systems’ range of allowable perturbations within which they can operate without loosing their identity (i.e., without disintegrating as distinct unities).

To summarize, there are two principal features of autopoietic systems: autopoiesis, (re)production of the system’s elements as such, and the system’s self-organization, its self-(re)structuring.

1.4. LUHMANN AND AUTOPOIESIS

I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it.

—St. Paul. First Epistle to Corinthians

In the previous section, I have already made some excursions into Luhmann’s vision of autopoiesis. In this section, I will discuss some of the most important differences between the concept of autopoiesis in biology and in Luhmann’s SST.

Although Maturana and Varela considered possibilities of applying the concept of autopoiesis to the study of phenomena outside biology, they were skeptical about the direct applicability of the concept to such domains as sociology. Yet such attempts were made. We have seen in Section 1.2 what Sir Stafford Beer wrote about Maturana and Varela’s reservations. (Some other references can be found in Seidl 2005, 7, footnotes 29, 30.)

Luhmann’s application of autopoiesis to the realm of the social is different from the attempts made by other scholars in that, before considering social phenomena from the viewpoint of autopoiesis, he radically generalizes the concept. For him, autopoietic systems may be both living and non-living. What all they have in common is that they exist and build themselves as self-referential closures. This leads Luhmann to distinguishing different types of autopoietic systems. The following three types are distinguished: livings systems (or organisms), psychic systems, and social systems. In contrast to Maturana and Varela, who studied primarily the autopoiesis of living systems, Luhmann was primarily concerned with social systems. In his theory, the latter can be interpersonal interactions (for instance, conversations, or “minute” social systems in Erving Goffman’s terminology (1990, 235)), or organizations, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I. System
• PART II. Subsystem
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Glossary of Key SST Terms
• Index