The Trans/National Study of Culture

A Translational Perspective

Doris Bachmann-Medick

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9783110372601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This volume introduces key concepts for a trans/national expansion in the study of culture. Using translation as an analytical category, it explores what is translatable and untranslatable between nation-specific approaches such as British/American cultural studies, German Kulturwissenschaften and other traditions in studying culture.
The range of articles included in the book covers both theoretical reflections and specific case studies that analyze the tensions and compatibilities amongst contemporary perspectives on the study of culture. By testing various key concepts – translation, cultural transfer, travelling concepts – this volume reflects on an essential vocabulary and common points of reference for scholars seeking new frameworks and methodologies for the foundation of a trans/national study of culture that is commensurate with the entangled nature of our world society.

I. Conceptualizations and Histories

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Dipesh Chakrabarty

Place and Displaced Categories, or How We Translate Ourselves into Global Histories of the Modern⁴

This essay elaborates on the related ideas of translation and displacement to show how one could use them in understanding the historical processes through which particular histories – in this case, that of India – blend into the global history of capitalism.

A ubiquitous theme of modern history – indeed, a theme that often makes a particular piece of history belong to the so-called ‘modern’ period – is how and why different parts of the world come to embrace capitalist relations. This is the process that, in the past, has given rise to debates about the ‘transition to capitalism’ in the history of the modern West. It has its echoes in the history of the non-West. Narratives of transition have usually concerned themselves with sociological questions: Was trade the real motor of capitalist growth in Europe? Or was it class struggle? Or proto-industrialization? What weakened the social bonds of pre-capitalist societies? And so on. In my book, Provincializing Europe (2007, hereafter PE), I argued that models drawn from sociological theories do not sufficiently explain how the transition to the rule of capital comes about. They need to be supplemented by linguistic models, particularly those that have to do with translation. I am concerned with translation not only in the literal sense but also in some larger, spatial sense. However, I elaborated more on the literal side in the book. Here, I want to turn to the idea of displacement-as-translation as an explanatory trope in discussions of modernity.

My argument in PE had to do with the fact that, for people to behave as subjects of a capitalist order, they need to learn to think of themselves and the world through categories relevant to the capitalist mode of production. But, because societies that embraced capitalist rules had histories that were longer and deeper than the history of capitalism, no society acted as a tabula rasa in coming under the hegemony or dominance of capital. They had other categories that needed to be translated into the categories of capital, such as ‘labor’ or ‘land,’ to give but two examples. The way these abstract categories came to have reality in people’s lives, I argued, was through a process that involved two very different processes of translation that were contradictory and yet complementary to each other. One could call them, respectively, a sociological or scientific model of translation and a quotidian, practical model. In the sociological model, the sociological term (such as ‘capital’ or ‘labor’) assimilates or sublates all other vernacular terms that may be used in different societies to designate it into itself. This is a model in which a third and higher category – as in Hegelian dialectic – mediates and subsumes other words both similar to and different from itself, thereby rendering all differences neutral. To explain this model, I gave the example of the technical/scientific expression ‘H2O’ subsuming into itself both the English word water and the Hindi word pani, thus, making their difference immaterial to the process of translation (2007: 83). Here, the assumption is that the “higher” category has a superior descriptive capacity; it can see into the real better than the “lower” categories can. This superiority is what gives it analytical value and status. Such a model underlies much sociological writing that assumes that the categories ‘capital’ or ‘labor’ simply describe the reality of a society, irrespective of the history, which the society in question may have had before the arrival of these terms.

I did not, in any absolute sense, question the veracity of this mode of thinking but rather tried to suggest that what made categories like ‘capital’ or ‘labor’ plausible in real history and to real historical actors was another mode of translation that could be compared to barter and that, in any historical process of transition to capitalism, accompanies and supplements the sociological model of translation. In the same way that, as in barter, one article is exchanged for another without the exchange being routed or measured by a third and higher category (‘money,’ for instance) and with some equivalence between the objects posited, a new and old concept could also swap places through a direct interaction between them, thanks to their linguistic properties – their alliterative, associational, or analogical values – without the intervention of any third, generalizing and supervening terms. Consider the case of the expression ‘horsepower’ coming to be a measure of the power of an engine – surely the word ‘horse,’ here, has no scientific status and only celebrates the associational and analogical functions of historical memory. My discussion in PE turned around these and related questions.

One point I did not emphasize enough in PE was that the linguistic model of translation is a spatial model as well. For displacement is, indeed, a major meaning of the English word ‘translation.’ The Oxford English Dictionary says as much in explaining the word: “removal or conveyance from one person, place or condition to another” is a sense that is inherent in the word.⁵ I want to make the case that postcolonial criticism arises from displacement of both persons and categories. For the first point – ideas and their relationship to displacement of people – I want to offer PE (both as a book and an intellectual project) as an example. And, for the second point, I want to examine the global career of the category ‘revolutionary class’ in Marxist theory and show how it has survived precisely through a process of intellectual displacement. Here, my particular example is derived from the experience of the well-known Indian series Subaltern Studies.

Since I speak of global history and the history of capitalism by deploying ideas about cross-categorical translation and translation-as-displacement – and they often work together – I need to make it clear that translation between different cultures and places often works as two-way traffic. This essay mainly concerns categories of political modernity. In PE, I explain political modernity and its attendant formulations along the following lines:

The phenomenon of “political modernity” – namely, the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise – is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe. Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy […] and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history. (Chakrabarty 2007: 4)

This contention may give the impression that, in speaking of translation and displacement, my focus is only on the transmission of European categories outside of Europe. However, translation is never a one-way street. True, I focus on what happens in Indian sites of translation as India modernizes and borrows some categories and practices from Europe that Indians will make their own. But one only has to read histories of political economy to see how terms like ‘labor’ accommodate into themselves the world-history of capitalism, a history that is always a place of encounter between different parts of the world. The so-called European categories also have deep genealogies that stretch far beyond the boundaries of geographical Europe – a fact I acknowledged in PE. Also, think of words like ‘caste,’ ‘mana,’ or ‘ashram’ that have passed into European languages. How could this have happened if translation did not work both ways? At the same time, however, the simple fact that translation is a two-way street should not blind us to questions of domination and power in global history. Modern Europe or America may have borrowed many of their operative categories from other cultures. That borrowing actually speaks of their power in the same way that credit-worthiness is something that belongs to the privileged. The less powerful cannot borrow, either in symbolic or substantial ways, as much as the powerful can. With these qualifications out of the way, let me get on with the argument at hand.

1 Provincializing Europe: A Project Born out of Displacement and Translation

‘Europe’ was not a word that ever bothered me in my middle-class Bengali childhood or youth, as I was growing up in postcolonial Calcutta. The legacy of Europe – or British colonial rule, for that is how Europe came into our lives –was everywhere: in traffic rules, in grown-ups’ regrets that Indians had no civic sense, in the games of soccer and cricket, in my school uniform, in Bengali-nationalist essays and poems critical of social inequality (especially the so-called “caste-system”), in implicit and explicit debates about love-match versus arranged marriages, in literary societies and film clubs. In practical, everyday life, ‘Europe’ was not a problem to be consciously named or discussed. Categories or words borrowed from European histories had found new homes in our practices. It made perfect sense, for instance, when radical friends in college would refer to someone – say, an obstructionist father-in-law-to-be – as being full of “feudal” attitudes or when we debated – for interminable hours over cheap cups of coffee or tea in inexpensive restaurants or tea-shops in which we generally overstayed our welcome – whether the Indian capitalists were a “national bourgeoisie” or a “comprador” class playing second fiddle to foreign capital. We all knew, practically, what these words meant without having to put them under any kind of analytic microscope. Their meanings did not travel beyond the immediate environment in which they were used.

What was the need, then, for “provincializing” this Europe? The answer to this question has to do with the story of my own dislodgement from this everyday life in ways that were both metaphorical and physical. I will recount the story briefly, for the implications of it go, I think, beyond the merely autobiographical. My metaphorical displacement from my everyday middle-class life happened as I trained, in Marxist circles in the city of Calcutta, to be a professional historian for whom Marx’s ideas were to be a conscious analytical tool. Words familiar from their everyday use (I should explain that I had been a student of science and business management before) now grew analytical wings, soaring to the level of what Roland Barthes would have called “second or third-order” metalanguages. Marxism, even more than liberalism, was the most concentrated form in which one encountered the intellectual pasts of Europe in Indian social-science circles.

It was about two decades ago, as I completed the manuscript for my book Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (2000), that the question PE addresses began to formulate itself. The roots of my effort in labor history went back to some of the passionate debates in Bengali and Indian Marxism of my youth about the world-historical role the proletariat might play in a country such as India that was still predominantly rural. There were obvious things to be learned from the Chinese and the Vietnamese revolutions. Yet, the more I tried to imagine relations in Indian factories through categories made available by Marx and his followers, the more I became aware of a tension that arose from the profoundly – and, one might say, parochially – European origins of Marx’s thoughts and their undoubted international significance. To call historical characters, whose analogues I knew in everyday life as familiar types, by names or categories derived from the revolutions in Europe of 1789 or 1848 or 1871 or 1917 felt increasingly like a doubly distancing activity. There was, first of all, the distance of historical objectivity that I was trying to enact. But there was also the distance of comical misrecognition similar to what I had often experienced watching performances of Bengali plays in which Bengali actors, cast as colonial Europeans, acted out their heavily Bengali-accented imitations of how Europeans might have spoken Bengali, that is to say, their own stereotypes of how Europeans may have stereotyped us! Something similar was happening to my characters from Bengali and Indian history, now clad, in my text, in the European costumes lent by the Marxist drama of history. There was a sense of comicality in my own earnestness that I could not ignore.

Yet, in this discussion of Marx to which I was heir in Calcutta – the discussion was always mediated, for historical reasons, by the available English-language literature on the subject – there was no room for thinking about Marx as someone belonging to certain European traditions of thought that he may even have shared with other intellectuals whom we usually pitted against Marx. This was not something that arose from a deficiency of reading. Calcutta had no dearth of bibliophiles. People knew nooks and crannies of European scholarship. But there was no sense of academic practices being part of living, disputed intellectual traditions in Europe. No idea that a living intellectual tradition never furnished final solutions to questions that arose within it. Marxism, as far as we were concerned, was simply true. The idea of ‘uneven development,’ for example, so central to much of Marxist historiography, was treated as a piece of truth, at most an analytical tool, but never as a provisional way of organizing information or even as something that was originally forged in the workshop of the Scottish Enlightenment. Marx was right (though he needed updating) and anti-Marxists were plain wrong, if not immoral; such were the stark political antinomies through which we thought. Even Max Weber did not get much of a serious look in the passionate scholarship of Indian historians of Marxist persuasion of the 1970s. There were, indeed, some gifted non-Marxist social scientists and historians in India. The names of Ashis Nandy and the late Ashin Das Gupta or Dharma Kumar eas...

Table of contents

• Concepts for the Study of Culture
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• I. Conceptualizations and Histories
• II. Knowledge Systems and Discursive Fields
• Notes on Contributors
• Index