Situated in Translations: Cultural Communities and Media Practices 9783839443439

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Michaela Ott, Thomas Weber (eds.) Situated in Translations

Culture & Theory  | Volume 174

Michaela Ott is professor of philosophy and aesthetic theories at the Academy of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg. Her main research interests are aesthetics of film, poststructuralist philosophy, theories of space, affections and dividuations and (post-)colonial topics. Thomas Weber is professor for media studies at Hamburg University. His main research is on documentary films, media theories, and European cinema.

Michaela Ott, Thomas Weber (eds.)

Situated in Translations Cultural Communities and Media Practices

Printed with the friendly support by the Authority of Science and Research (Landesforschungsinitiative) Hamburg.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Translation and proofread by Lydia White Typeset by Linda Kutzki, textsalz.de Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4343-5 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4343-9 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839443439

Table of contents Introduction 7 Michaela Ott, Thomas Weber

Portrait of the Philosopher as a Translator

15

Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Reassessing the Situation of the Text in the Algorithmic Age

23

William Uricchio

Fragile Translations: Languages of/in Media Art

39

Claudia Benthien

Chameleons (graphic short story)

61

Birgit Weyhe

Framing and Translation in Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes 107 Johannes C.P. Schmid

Translation as Entanglement: Staging Cordelia’s Survival in She She Pop’s King Lear Adaptation Testament (2010)

119

Martin Schäfer

Sensory Impressions as Imaginations of the Real: On the Translatability of the Immediate in Political Documentaries

133

Thomas Weber

Situated Between Cultures. The (Im-)possibility of Translation in Ghassan Salhab’s Films Michaela Ott

161

Diasporic Culture and Colonialism: Katherine Dunham and Berto Pasuka’s Dance Translations

179

Ramsay Burt

And so you see …: On the Situatedness of Translating Audience Perceptions 191 Gabriele Klein, Marc Wagenbach

Unbelievable Treasures: Artworks as Intersections of Culturalization

215

Sophie Lembcke

Biographies 229

Introduction Michaela Ott, Thomas Weber From our Westernized and globalized cultural perspective and on the basis of our academic and ethical convictions, we would like to demonstrate that the construction of today’s cultural communities is not primarily dependent on geographical, ethnic, social, or political attributions, but on aesthetic and media practices that communicate, transmit, and transform mediatized material, and translate it into new contexts of media culture. Singular differences aside, these practices of translation are, on the one hand, ubiquitous due to the dissolution of borders in a mondialized world and the growing variety of technological configuration, transmission, and storage media; but, on the other hand, they are specifically determined by the distinct way that they are situated within media milieus and specific cultural communities. It is these media milieus and cultural communities that the articles collected here will examine with regard to their respective heterotypical forms of translation, understood as practices of adaptation that amalgamate cultures and transform meaning. In this sense, translation does not simply occur between two languages or cultural spheres. Instead, it is shaped by a continuous process of cultural and media transformation that takes place between different semiotic registers and “Kulturtechniken” (“cultural techniques”). Within this context, the difference between original and copy seldom plays a significant role, as there is a burgeoning awareness of the fact that all symbolic expression, whether it takes place in language, image, or another sign system, is always mediatized and ‘translated’ to begin with—that is, it has undergone a process of historical genesis and transformation and therefore demonstrates diachronic, multilayered, and complex structures. Similarly, translation is an act of ‘appropriating’ that which is understood as foreign and therefore by an act of adaption, but also by an act of self-attribution that shapes and expresses the way a community sees itself. In particular, it is today’s hybrid mediatizations and composite-cultural products that make translation a procedure that tendentially cannot be brought to an end. Analyzing the traces of this procedure reveals the ambiguous situatedness and historic cultural contingency of expression, which frequently evolves locally and then diversifies mondially.

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Gabriele Klein and Marc Wagenbach define translation praxeologically as an ensemble of practices that resituate and generate the configuration of subjects, media, artefacts, and techniques differently in relation to the situation. In their understanding, the situational only emerges from praxes of translation in the first place. In this way, Klein and Wagenbach describe translation as a “situational and situated praxis. Both the ‘situational’—in terms of something momentary, performatively generated, ephemeral, always absent—and ‘situatedness’—i.e., context, embeddedness, framing—are constitutive for translation.” (cf. Klein/Wagenbach’s text in this volume, p. 191) Both the spatial and temporal contingency of expression and the deliberate way the context of that expression is framed resounds in the title Situated in Translations. In their examination of dance performances, Klein and Wagenbach are less interested in analyzing the static, immutable aspects of a performance—the choreographic structures, the narrative, or the intention of the artists—than they are in examining the ephemeral, the “singularity of every single performance in terms of its temporal and spatial contingency.” (Ibid., p. 194) The special situatedness of each performance comprises “various observable interdependent activities, which cannot be traced back to individual motives or intentions. Instead, choreography here is understood as embodied, materially conveyed performance, organized by collectively shared, practical forms of knowledge [...].” (Ibid.) The aim of their praxeological perspective is to highlight the types of translation that result above all from actions and atmospheres, exhibiting performative dimensions that are always contingent, including the reaction of the audience. In their analysis of different performances, they discuss the difficulty resulting from the fact that the fluidity of the situational “cannot be grasped in reflection, but only remains a memory” (ibid., p. 212)—which is why memory protocols were crucial for their analysis. On the other hand, the performance must be deliberately embedded within the composite culture so that it can be perceived and judged: “A process of realization, perception, reflection and description thus condenses the situational and situatedness into a complex and conservable product of translation.” (Ibid.) Moreover, they understand translation as a process that brings about change in different temporal dimensions and, in some cases, also affects that which is supposedly original, casting it in a different light. Viewing translation as a situated and situating, multidirectional activity like this necessarily shifts the focus toward artistic productions, as they frequently constitute cultural and media composites. In these composites, there is an interplay between not just different languages and their modal forms of expression, but also between different media articulations, between image, tone, and sound, between material installation, a given spatial ambience, and patterns of reception, and between configurations of protagonists and viewers. In her article, which also investigates modes of expression in both composite culture and multimedia, Claudia Benthien thus speaks of an “excess” of translation and problematizes the complexity of the translation process.

Introduction

But there is another more pointed, epistemic, and political dimension to broaching the issue of situatedness: because contemporary translation is increasingly taking place between cultures that are not just European, there is a growing desire to capture the situatedness of each translation in its cultural and political precarity and to pay special heed to that which has not yet been perceived within such contexts, allowing us to observe symbolic difference in the sense of acknowledging, listening to, and examining the “Other” of another culture. One aspect of emphasizing situatedness is the epistemological and ethical aim of, through specific framings, finally accentuating and giving shape to what is there below the surface, what goes unheard, what is repressed. Framing and scaling frequently decide what can become visible and audible. Similar processes are thus also reflected upon as subprocesses of translation. Using critical concepts such as intermedia and composite-cultural translation, we would like to put forward the idea that each cultural articulation depends on series and different scales of translation and framing processes. The contributions to this edited volume focus on media practices situated within different composite-cultural contexts and a broad range of media, including the body and its movement, voice, literature, film, art installations, and graphic novels. Going well beyond traditional notions of media production and reception, we are instead asking in which ways media are not only framed, translated expressions of specific, mostly Western codes and norms, but also whether there are other, non-Western, culturally different, and as yet unnoticed modes of framing and translating that complicate our understanding of these processes. The authors approach this question from a variety of perspectives, from which they discuss the materiality and conceptuality of media, as well as the cultural variety of translating and framing. In her article, Benthien joins Klein in speaking against the use of Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the “third space” to represent composite-cultural processes, as it does not do justice to all speakers to the same degree or pay the same attention to all positions: “They do not just create a (subversive) and dynamic ‘third’ but also imply and negotiate patterns of ‘social in- and exclusion’ (Klein) as well as hegemonic claims” (cf. Benthien’s text in this volume, p. 41). Today, there is criticism coming from many corners that concepts of interculturality, which consider two cultures to be distinct yet connected by way of a subject, no longer do justice to today’s cultural entanglements; they are often rejected in favor of more complex and challenging notions of cultural negotiation, notions that also include experiences of failed or fragmentary forms of translation. In this sense, Benthien shows how media art reflects upon the delicate “threshold between pitfall and promise” (ibid.) in linguistic and cultural translation processes. The very different analyses collected here use symptomatic examples to show how contemporary translations combine different forms of media and cultural expression at the same time, thereby necessarily bringing forth other perspectives, modes of subjectification, and cultural composites. The translation processes at

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issue here deviate from a conventional understanding both in diachronic and synchronic aspects: in diachronic terms, they distance themselves from a model or an ‘original text,’ become medial transcriptions, distance themselves from the purely linguistic, and reframe and reinterpret what has been said; in synchronic terms, simultaneous and qualitatively different translation processes can be observed, especially in theatrical, performative, and cinematic performances. Martin Schäfer speaks of “translation as entanglement” (cf. the title of Martin Schäfer’s text in this volume, p. 119). It becomes important within this context to redefine the concept of ‘the universal,’ as Soulemayne Bashir Diagne explains in his article: this concept should no longer function as a vertical referent that has been removed from culture or as a binding standard; rather, it should become recognizable as the effect and the result of the incessant contact being made at a lateral level, of movements of transmission, and thus itself as a continued deviation and minimal redefinition. Despite all criticism, for Diagne, it is obvious that this kind of universal is indispensable to allowing that which has so far been excluded to communicate, participate, and become visible. Ramsay Burt, in turn, makes reference to the Caribbean-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, the first (post)colonial theoretician, who emphasized that, in the 20th century, every avant-gardist art form began with movements of cultural translation. In particular, says Burt, this is demonstrated in contact zones like the one between American/British culture and Caribbean-African culture, although it is not just different cultural codes that collide, but also different forms of expression, such as cultic dance and theatre performance. Burt even conceives of the theater performance as a process of translation that has solidified into a complex cultural practice. He also makes use of Hall’s concept of “perfidious reality” to characterize the different ways that African-Caribbean articulations are translated into Europe-compatible dance and the accompanying alterations, reinterpretations, and deliberate deceptions. He calls these types of translation “compromises,” as they are well suited to preparing one for a life in composite-cultural environments. Alongside the articles that discuss the interweaving of different cultural elements and forms of expression (Burt; Klein/Wagenbach; Schäfer; Benthien; Ott; Lembcke), there are also articles that deal with graphic and, in particular, cinematic articulations as multilayered translation processes, which offer different images of reality (Ott; Weber; Weyhe). On the basis of these different observations, we contend that all symbolic articulations are situated in translations as determinative processes, i.e., that they are imprisoned and empowered to an equal extent. The aim is thus to analyze cultural medial situatedness and translatedness in precisely this ambiguity. We are interested in subtexts, that which is suppressed, and that which is also intended in symbolic expression, that which can only be heard, perceived, and deciphered by considering its specific situatedness, its novel

Introduction

use of media, the different epistemological approach taken (e.g., sensory ethnography, Weber). In the texts collected here, there are numerous examples of translations taking place between cultures that seem to be worlds apart—Western European countries, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and different African countries—which are testament to enduring (post)colonial relations. Analyzing the composite-cultural situatedness of filmic translations encompasses, as in the article by Michaela Ott, a network of references made between Lebanon, Senegal, and France, reveals the aesthetically conveyed uncertainty in the different speakers’ points of view and in the filmic expression that results from their situatednesss between different cultural referents, made additionally uncertain by ongoing acts of war. Ott thus comes to the conclusion that, due to these circumstances, Salhab’s films problematize translatability itself, refusing to simply translate perceptions into plausible images of reality. They de-individuate themselves through the continual dividuation of the films, which participate in one another, blurring the boundaries of the single film, and tending toward indistinguishability. Continually shaken by events of war [...] the films exhibit, in ever more radical variations, the consequences of trauma as the near zero point of expression and translation. (cf. Ott’s text in this volume, p. 176) In her graphic short story Chameleons, Birgit Weyhe describes her childhood in Uganda and her experiences of cultural difference, which is also the subject of her graphic novel Madgermanes. In this novel, she problematizes the situatedness of Mozambicans in the late GDR and after they returned to their country of origin, thereby graphically dramatizing the situation of cultural and social in-betweenness typical of the time. As Johannes Schmid emphasizes in his article, her graphic novel “oscillates between the generic cornerstones of autobiography, documentary, and realist fiction. Furthermore, Weyhe thoroughly explores the concepts of memory, home, and the experience of migration” (Schmid’s text in this volume, p. 107). Weyhe does not just translate this narrative underpinned by autobiography into an amalgam of documentation and fiction, but also charges its meaning metaphorically. According to Schmid, Weyhe’s metaphors underline experiences of cross-cultural movement and displacement, conferring central significance to perceptions und emotions in the conveyance of memory. In other texts, dance performances testify to the processes of translation that take place between South African and Afro-Caribbean experiences on the one hand and those of a European audience on the other (Klein/Wagenbach; Burt), while others analyze contemporary art installations in terms of the way they combine Arabic and English texts in audiovisual media (Benthien) or integrate African objets d’art into contemporary European artworks (Lembcke). Lembcke deals with various practices that hybridize art objects between ‘African’ and European spaces. Using the specific example of the translation of an Ife bronze head into a piece of Western art for a Western art exhibition, she also discusses how such practices are appraised in different ways, with understandings ranging from hy-

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perculture to the emphasis of difference. She examines the way that the art market constructs identitary cultural niches on the basis of economic interests, together with the accompanying symbolic devaluation or valorization. Joining Reckwitz, she takes a critical look at (dein)dividualized ‘hyperculture,’ which results from accepted patterns of appropriation, translation, and cultural remixing in the behavior of globalized players. Martin Schäfer also refers to a complex tangle of overlapping translation operations in his article. He takes a look at She She Pop’s performance of King Lear, which references a German tradition of appropriating Shakespeare, a tradition that itself includes different translation operations that function as different forms of attribution and appropriation. Moreover, he describes the performance as a translation of text into a stage performance through media transformation, as a combination of various media, as a post-dramatic concept of alienation that exhibits its own mediality, i.e., its own staging, and not least as a transformation of the characters and their roles. Schäfer’s analysis focuses on the complexity of the various layers of translation processes, which allow new dimensions of meaning to appear by way of different processes of transcription. William Uricchio’s article primarily focusses on situatedness within the context of global media developments. He emphasizes that algorithms are becoming the new cultural gatekeepers and that paradigms, epistemes, and paratexts, which are crucial to the way that cultural products are received and understood, are undergoing a qualitative change to their inherent value systems. The production of knowledge, he says, is being fundamentally altered by new technologies and their economic structures as they create new orders of knowledge in operations of configuration and curation. One and the same text can be ascribed different meanings in different networks, while previous terms such as author, agency, and textual stability are dissolving into new constellations. Thomas Weber’s article deals with the presentation of sensory impressions in documentary films. These can be construed, firstly, as presentations of sensory, material, and corporeal characteristics and, secondly—as in recent documentary productions—as productions that generate constructions of corporeal sensory impressions in the spectator. Whereas the former is metaphorically charged with meaning, the latter is used to construct an impression of immediacy, whose meaning only unfolds in the specific medial milieu. Media milieus are constituted as specific forms of cooperation between different human and non-human actors (in the Latourian sense), which each develop their own specific practices of constituting meaning. Not least, the analyses offered here are themselves understood as practices of translation that further transpose their objects of analysis. For its part, the theoretical analysis of modes of media expression sets the situational of the performance and the situatedness of the cultural context in relation to one another, which is why the overall conclusion can be drawn that such analysis “also relates the situated-

Introduction

ness of academic and artistic practices to one another” (Klein/Wagenbach’s text in this volume, p. 212). It is clear that, as the result of different disciplinary approaches taken, this edited volume cannot provide a coherent statement on the contemporary question of situational performance, cultural situatedness, or their media translation. Instead, it provides different, epistemologically stimulating options for accessing the research question by discussing contemporary examples of procedures of translating and framing. It reveals something about the complexity of today’s academic analyses, because increasing epistemological, postcolonial, and media awareness means that more and more points of view are being included, as a result of which processes of translation appear to be increasingly multilayered constructs that are even more sensitive to context. This book was developed within the scope of the Hamburg-based research group Framing and Translating: Practices of Medial Transformations. The group was interested in taking an innovative approach by conceptualizing media and cultural perception, appropriation, articulation, and reception as forms of ‘translating’ and ‘framing.’ The aim was to build on existing theories of translation, moving toward interdisciplinary studies, and combining research on the arts, media studies, and cultural studies, as well as the social sciences. The research group, established in 2015, consisted of different projects led by scholars from the University of Hamburg and the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK). This edited volume is based on the second international conference held by the research group in May 2017, which brought together scholars and practitioners working in the fields of philosophy, media, performance studies, and cultural studies, whose projects mostly focus on dynamic processes of cultural transformation in mondialized contexts. The texts collected here are the results of this symposium, which was held at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Special thanks go to Linda Kutzki for her work on the layout and to Lydia J. White, who translated, copy-edited and proofread these sometimes challenging texts.

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Portrait of the Philosopher as a Translator Souleymane Bachir Diagne Let me first present myself as a member of French philosopher Barbara Cassin’s team of friends who are working with her on the still ongoing enterprise that the Dictionary of Untranslatables is (Cassin 2014). And the reason why I am evoking our intellectual collective is that my present contribution has as its starting point the very premise upon which the Dictionary project is founded: namely that we always philosophize in tongues. To explain the meaning of this expression (a paraphrase, of course, of a biblical phrase), let me put it in connection with two quotes: one by Edouard Glissant and one by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o. Glissant famously declared that he writes “in the presence of all the languages in the world” (2010: 14),1 while Ngũgĩ writes in Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance that “translation is the language of languages” (Thiong’o 2009: 96). In this book, the Kenyan writer forcefully states that remembering Africa demands the development of all of the languages of the continent in their plurality: “A shared modern heritage will emerge.” (Ibid.: 97) And to the potential objection that plurality means dispersion, he responds that translation is precisely what creates a common horizon. “Philosophizing in tongues,” being “in the presence of all the world’s languages,” translation as “the language of all languages”: all of these phrases converge to tell us about the importance of the fact that a language is always “one among others,” none being the Logos—in other words, the embodiment of the universal. In philosophy more particularly, they go against what French translator JeanPierre Lefebvre has labeled “ontological nationalism,” one example of which is Heidegger’s position, which holds that philosophy naturally speaks Greek and now today’s Greek, that is, German, and possibly other European languages. In a word, philosophers have to realize that they always philosophize in certain tongues, that their theses and arguments are always produced in given idioms on which they depend in a way that their translation into other languages would reveal. The philosopher as a translator is fully conscious of the fact that she writes in the presence 1 |  “[C]’est ce que j’appelle l’imaginaire des langues, c’est-à-dire la présence à toutes les langues du monde.” Unless stated otherwise, all passages in translation have been translated by Souleymane Bachir Diagne.

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of languages that de-center her position by questioning the philosophy of the very grammar in which it is expressed. This calls for two remarks. The first remark is that, of course, the point is not to demand from a philosopher the actual mastery of many different languages (although it should be noted that this is the case for many philosophers from the “global South”) or even simple bilingualism. It should be recalled here what Jacques Derrida, the very figure of the philosopher-translator who nevertheless declared himself monolingual, has said about the meaning of translation within a single language (cf. Derrida 1998). It is clear that all the different languages of the world are rustling in his monolingualism, which means that to be a philosopher-translator is simply to have in mind the very texture of one’s language and to ask what turn one’s expression would take in another language. My second remark is to respond to the objection that of course philosophers know perfectly well that they are thinking in a language, that there is no thought without language, and that, for this reason, they do know that the grammar of our language must be examined, questioned, and reconstructed in a way that allows the true meaning to manifest itself. For instance, and to paraphrase a famous example given by Bertrand Russell (1985: 188), given the following assertions: (1) the present king of Belgium is bald, and (2) the present king of France is bald, in order to decide whether they are true, I first have to analyze them respectively as (1’) there is an individual who satisfies the condition of being king of Belgium and who has the property of being bald, and (2’) there is an individual who satisfies the property of being king of France and who has the property of being bald. When (1) is analyzed as (1’), I can declare that, yes, it is true that an individual exists who is king in Belgium, so I just need to check a picture of him: if he is bald the assertion is true. As to (2), its form (2’) tells me immediately that the assertion is false since there is no individual satisfying the condition of being king of France.2 The point is that, without the logical analysis of the assertion, I could have considered that, since that what does not exist has all the properties I could imagine, it is true that the current king of France is bald (since there is none: nothingness has all properties). Such a philosophical reconstruction of our language is, of course, a form of translation (taking us from the surface grammar to the logical grammar of our language) that leads to a clarification of what we say. But being aware that we always think in language is not the same as being aware that we think in a particular idiom, which is always one among many. To examine what we say, to perform a critical reappraisal of an argument is to submit it, if only virtually, to what Antoine Berman has called “l’épreuve de

2 |  P resident Emmanuel Macron is nicknamed “Jupiter.” But we can agree that being the “king of gods” does not qualify one as king of France.

Portrait of the Philosopher as a Translator

l’étranger” (1984)—“the test of the foreign”—the text of translation, imagining, for example, a language that functions differently from the one we work with. We now have to take into account the fact that “ontological nationalism” means prejudice vis-à-vis other languages. A Heideggerian would thus dismiss the whole notion of philosophizing in a language that is one among others. Why do I need to translate into languages that are not the Logos, she would say? The history of philosophy was constructed at a given time, relatively recently, upon the notion of the exceptionalism of Europe and its languages, at least some of them. The form taken by such exceptionalism is the result of forgetting the role of translation in that history and the becoming-philosophical of languages through translation. Thus, it was understood that translatio studiorum, the transfer/translation of Greek philosophy outside Greece and the Greek language, followed a unilinear trajectory from Athens to Rome and from Rome to London, Paris and/or Heidelberg; from Greek to Latin, then, before the European vernaculars progressively became languages of philosophy. However, apropos translatio studiorum, here is what Roger Bacon wrote: God first revealed philosophy to his saints and gave them the laws…. It was thus primarily and most completely given in the Hebrew language. It was then renewed in the Greek language, primarily by Aristotle; then in the Arabic language, primarily through Avicenna; but it was never composed in Latin and was only translated/transferred [translata] based on foreign languages, and the best [texts] are not translated. (Cited in: Cassin 2014: 1149)

Noteworthy here is what is said about the becoming-Arabic of the history of philosophy. Because it questions the unilinear trajectory of Jerusalem-Athens-Rome-Latin-Christian Occident, to which, later on, the fabrication of the history of philosophy as a uniquely European affair will reduce the translatio studiorum. The history of written erudition in Africa also partakes in such becomings, to which Timbuktu is the best-known testament. The translation/becoming-Arabic of philosophy has been erased in the construction of the history of philosophy as Europe’s own particular telos, which could only be realized in the language(s) of that province of the world. The forgetting that any human language is, by right, a language of philosophy is a consequence of colonialism, of the idea that Europe had a natural anthropological calling, from the vantage point of being the incarnation of the Logos, to invite into its history, its languages, and cultures the other ‘humanities.’ Descartes did not think, while writing the Discourse of Method in French, that he was thus speaking a language decreed to be the abode of Being. On the contrary, he chose that vernacular against the expected sacrosanct Latin because it was his servant’s tongue. And when it comes to philosophy in languages other than the European languages, this thinker of the radical beginning had no problem acknowledging that algebra, the matrix of his philosophy, was a science transferred/translated from Arabic.

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Colonialisms create and feed the idea that there are languages that embody the Logos, unlike all other human idioms, which can only be ‘primitive.’ Anthropology as the daughter of colonialism, as best expressed in Levy-Bruhl’s thought (cf. Levy-Bruhl 1933), constructs non-European languages as primitive and naturally incapable of translating the Logos. Untranslatability divides humanity into humanities, establishing a radical separation between an imperial language, full of the Being that finds in it its abode, and indigenous tongues, which are not fully languages, as they are defined by lack and incompleteness. Ethnographical literature thus often offers clever discourses explicating what those other languages tell us about the natives, as they lack (1) the verb “to be,” of course, (2) abstract concepts, and (3) future tenses. Forgotten is what Roger Bacon wrote about translation in the history of philosophy. I just spoke of anthropology as the “daughter of colonialism.” That is what it has historically been, as we know. But that being said, it should also be noted that, as the ability to translate (against Levy-Bruhl’s anthropology) and put in perspective, and the ability to de-center, anthropology is also a machine de guerre against colonialism and imperial negation. One should not say that anthropology is colonial science without adding that it is an equally postcolonial or de-colonial possibility. One of the best illustrations of such a possibility is Edward Sapir’s essay on “The Grammarian and the Philosopher.” Usually when the name Edward Sapir is invoked, it is in relation to linguistic relativism, especially when his name is associated with that of Benjamin Whorf in the phrase “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.”3 The hypothesis of radical linguistic relativism seems to make translation impossible, since languages then appear as separate worlds. But we should cite at least as often Sapir’s important notion that the philosopher must be a translator who is eager to submit his arguments to Berman’s “test of the foreign” and who is even eager to choose for such a test the most foreign language, the one constituted precisely by colonial ethnography as ‘primitive.’ Here is an essential passage from his essay, full of humor and truth, that deserves to be quoted at length: Few philosophers have deigned to look into the morphologies of primitive languages nor have they given the structural peculiarities of their own speech more than a passing and perfunctory attention. When one has the riddle of the universe on his hands, such pursuits seem trivial enough, yet when it begins to be suspected that at least some solutions of the great riddle are elaborately roundabout applications of the rules of Latin or German or English grammar, the triviality of linguistic analysis becomes less certain. To a far greater extent than the philosopher has realized, he is likely to become the dupe of his speech-forms, which is equivalent to saying that the mould of his thought, which is typically a linguistic mould, is apt to be projected into his conception of the world. Thus innocent 3 |  M any reviews of the Science Fiction movie Arrival have quoted this hypothesis, which is indeed at the core of the original novel and film scenario.

Portrait of the Philosopher as a Translator linguistic categories may take on the formidable appearance of cosmic absolutes. If only, therefore, to save himself from philosophic verbalism, it would be well for the philosopher to look critically to the linguistic foundations and limitations of his thought. (Sapir 1949: 157)

And Sapir specifies that the best way to apply such a critical look is the test of translation: It would be absurd to say that Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” could be rendered forthwith into the unfamiliar accents of Eskimo or Hottentot, and yet it would be absurd in but a secondary degree. What is really meant is that the culture of these primitive folk has not advanced to the point where it is of interest to them to form abstract conceptions of a philosophical order. But it is not absurd to say that there is nothing in the formal peculiarities of Hottentot or of Eskimo which would obscure the clarity or hide the depth of Kant’s thought—indeed it may be suspected that the highly synthetic and periodic structure of Eskimo would more easily bear the weight of Kant’s terminology than his native German. Further, to move to a more positive vantage point, it is not absurd to say that both Hottentot and Eskimo possess all the formal apparatus that is required to serve as matrix for the expression of Kant’s thought. If these languages have not the requisite Kantian vocabulary, it is not the languages that are to be blamed but the Eskimo and the Hottentots themselves. The languages as such are quite hospitable to the addition of a philosophic load to their lexical stock-in-trade. (Ibid.: 154)

It is important to emphasize Sapir’s insistence that every language is both complete and open (“hospitable” he says) to hybridizations. Thus, to say that a language lacks abstract concepts is to forget that words are words before they are concepts, which is to say that it is the usages of words that are abstract and not the words in themselves. One excellent illustration of this is the word “abstract” itself. If I read in it its etymology—abs-trahere: to pull from—it is totally concrete; otherwise it is abstract in most of its usages. In the same way, to say that a language lacks the verb “to be” is absurd: it is a case of what Sapir considers a projection of one’s own language’s mode of expression (S is P: a subject, a copula, and a predicate) as a “cosmic absolute.” And this leads me to a last remark on translation as a test, a way of questioning our “philosophical grammar,” as Nietzsche would say. What Sapir says in this essay written in 1924 is for a large part what French linguist Emile Benveniste will say in 1958 in his famous article reproduced in the volume Problems in General Linguistics and entitled “Categories of Thought and Language” (Benveniste 1971). What Benveniste says in this essay is, in substance, that the onto-logical categories of Aristotle are ultimately what Sapir calls “absolutes,” constructed as “applications” of Greek grammar: they translate the different ways of using the verb “to be” as a copula when responding to the different questions about the quantity, quality, position, modality, etc. of a thing. I have mentioned Benveniste recapturing a point made by Sapir. In fact, the archeology of the notion that the logico-philosophical categories that metaphysics

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owes to Aristotle are but the categories of Greek grammar takes us back to a famous controversy that was staged in Baghdad in 922, a conflict between philosopher Abu Bichr Matta and grammarian Abu Said as Sirafi (Elamrani-Jamal 1983: 151). The latter denounced the philosophers’ pretenses that Aristotle’s logic had provided them with access to a universal grammar of reasoning: Sirafi held that the so highly praised logic was only the logic of Greek grammar, while Arabic had to exhume its own logic as well. In addition to this tenth-century Baghdad controversy, it should be noted that in 1956—that is, two years before Benveniste published his essay—Rwandan philosopher Alexis Kagamé had expressed the same position and had consequently argued that modern philosophical thought in Africa should develop as an exploration of the categories implied in African languages (cf. Kagamé 1956). I will conclude on this point by saying, first, that it is indeed important that African languages be or become once again, through translation, languages of modern philosophy. I mentioned earlier the Dictionary of Untranslatables. With my colleagues at Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, I am currently carrying out a project of creating a Wolof version of selected articles from the Dictionary. But I make the precision that the perspective of developing Wolof as a language of modern philosophy has nothing to do with Kagamé’s relativism, according to which each language conveys its own specific philosophy. On the contrary: once again, the point is to translate. To philosophize from language to language. Against relativism, I believe that we must hold on to the aim of a universal, but a universal of translation—of an encounter between languages in translation. French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called such a universal a “lateral” one, which he defines in this passage: The equipment of our social being can be dismantled and reconstructed by the voyage, as we are able to learn to speak other languages. This provides a second way to the universal: no longer the overarching universal of a strictly objective method, but a sort of lateral universal which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self. It is a question of constructing a general system of reference in which the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized man, and the mistaken views each has of the other can all find a place—that is of constituting a more comprehensive experience which becomes in principle accessible to men of a different time and country. (Merleau-Ponty 1960: 119-120).

I consider the invitation in this passage to be the foundation of a universal understood as task and horizon: an invitation to travel, which means de-centering out of exceptionalism; an invitation to learn other languages, which means coming out of the universalism of the Logos in order to comprehend, first, that a language is always one among many and, then, that the universal is evaluated in the text of translation. And I consider Merleau-Ponty’s thought here to be ‘postcolonial’ in the

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sense that it is thought that takes into account the post-Bandung world, a world of plurality, weaving together languages and cultures, all of them equivalent.

R eferences Benveniste, Emile (1971): “Categories of Thought and Language.” In: Problems in General Linguistics, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, pp. 55–64. Berman, Antoine (1984): L’épreuve de l’étranger, Paris: Gallimard. Cassin, Barbara (ed.) (2014): Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, translated by Steven Rendall/Christian Hubert/Jeffrey Mehlman/Nathanael Stein/Michael Syrotinski, translation edited by Emily Apter/Jacques Lezra/­ Michael Wood, Princeton/ Oxford: Princeton University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1998): Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prothesis of Origin, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Elamrani-Jamal, Abdelali (1983): Logique aristotélicienne et grammaire arabe, Paris: Vrin. Glissant, Edouard (2010): L’imaginaire des langues: Entretiens avec Lise Gauvin, Paris: Gallimard. Kagamé, Alexis (1956): La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être, Bruxuelles: Acadedmie Royale des sciences coloniales. Levy-Bruhl, Lucien (1933): La mythologie primitive, Paris: Alcan. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964 [1960]): “From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss.” In: Signs, edited and translated by Richard C. McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 114–125. Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (2009): Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, New York: BasicCivitasBooks. Russell, Bertrand (1985 [1918]): “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism.” In: The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 8, Boston/Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 157–244. Sapir, Edward (1949 [1924]): “The Grammarian and his Language.” In: Selected Writings of Edward Sapir on Language, Culture, and Personality, edited by David G. Mandelbaum, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Reassessing the Situation of the Text in the Algorithmic Age William Uricchio

In the course of Rambo 2: First Blood (1985), the eponymous Caucasian hero single-handedly kills 69 mostly Asian characters. And yet, says Pico Iyer, “Rambo has conquered Asia. In China, a million people raced to see First Blood within ten days of its Beijing opening, and black marketers were hawking tickets at seven times the official price.” (Iyer 1988: 3) In India, five remakes of the movie were put into production, and, in Thailand, 15-foot cutouts of the American vigilante towered over local theaters. For those who have seen the film, Iyer’s reports seem anomalous, even unsettling. In the West, Rambo 2 appeared to many as a crudely revisionist effort by some in America to finally win the Vietnam War. The film was singled out for its particularly brutal killing of nameless Vietnamese characters, many of them, in fact, played by actors of Chinese ancestry. How, then, could this lone white character gather a following among some of the very people portrayed as victims of his vengeance? We know, of course, that audience reception is a rich and unpredictable terrain, and that a bit of well-targeted research could yield any number of plausible readings with which to comprehend the film’s popularity in some circles. We have well-developed traditions to gather this sort of evidence and solid theories to help make sense of it. But this essay will not take up the work of reception; rather, it will address the situation of the text—the contextual and often material conditions and practices that position and frame the text. In the case of Rambo 2, we might look at how the promotion of the film played to regional political and social dynamics; or at the role played by the languages dubbed in for the Asian victims as part of the film’s localization process. These and other practices situate the narrative in a particular way, enabling Chinese viewers to experience something quite different from their counterparts in the US market in the mid-1980s (just as those viewing the film in the US in 2018 see it in a new situation). The situation of a text is a condition of its reception and thus distinct from the text’s reception. However, reception can certainly function as part of a text’s situatedness, as a book cover emblazoned with bestseller status suggests.

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This is not a new insight: scholars in various fields have already described some of the process’ mechanics. Thomas Kuhn’s work on the history of science discusses paradigm shifts—when taken-for-granted truths suddenly collapse in the face of a new situation—offering a fresh understanding of an existing data set. For example, Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the celestial spheres displaced Ptolemy’s geocentric model. The implications were profound, with long-held epistemologies suddenly appearing naïve and myth-bound. A new set of assumptions completely reframed the results of empirical observation, giving them fundamentally different meanings. Copernicus’ work can certainly be inscribed, as Kuhn shows, within a ‘scientific revolution,’ but it was also part of a larger process of reframing, of resituation, in the form of the circulation of printed tables enabled by the printing press and in the form of the Reformation, with its wide-ranging critique of inherited orthodoxies and truth systems, both religious and cosmological. This move beyond the scientific domain to a more encompassing cultural situation was taken up by Michel Foucault with his concept of the episteme. An episteme “defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” (Foucault 1970: 183) The radically shifting historical status of madness, or punishment, or sexuality in Foucault’s work illustrates the profound implications of epistemic situation on the lives of people. These grand theories—and ensuing realities—of situation owe much to Gaston Bachelard’s generative idea of epistemic rupture. But there are also more fine-grained and quotidian approaches. In this regard, one might invoke Gerard Genette, whose notion of the paratext looks specifically at the situation of a text through peritexts (elements on the periphery of the text such as the author’s name, the publishing house, and bestseller proclamations emblazoned on the cover) and epitexts (elements at a distance from the text that nevertheless refer to it, such as reviews and advertisements). These ‘thresholds,’ to invoke Genette’s language, shape our expectations of a text, inform our reading, and radically contextualize our approach. As with Kuhn’s paradigm or Foucault’s episteme, their operations are most visible at times of change. Some of my and Roberta Pearson’s work has addressed these issues, considering Shakespeare’s or Washington’s fast-changing cultural status in late-19th century America where, for example, they shifted from being popularized or even neglected to being ‘sacralized,’ resulting in texts with contradictory paratexts. These contradictions revealed underlying social tensions regarding national identity and values, with particular paratextual strategies adhering to or targeting particular social formations, as outlined in scholarship on the period’s contested cultural status (Levine 1990; Uricchio/Pearson 2014). Paradigms, epistemes, paratexts … these and other concepts all attempt to account for the shifting situation of reception for cultural artifacts—a task I wish to continue in this essay, but with two twists. Firstly, I would like to address a number of recent changes in cultural production that suggest a powerful change in the situation. These have been accruing for several decades and have generally to

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do with the increasing digitization of texts and networking of distribution systems. These processes have yielded a number of qualitative shifts that bear directly on inherited value systems. Secondly, I would like to pull on a still-nascent but fast developing dynamic within this process that has distinct implications for the notion of situation itself, as well as its operations as an intermediary. I will consider the potentials of algorithms, and artificial intelligence systems generally, to disrupt the binaries of text-reader and text-context by intervening in both relationships and recursively rendering them responsive. In both cases, I will be concerned with the media and notions of mediality, although the implications are broader. These two approaches – one to today’s changing situation and the other to the changing operations of situation—fall within the contours of the term translation in the Middle English (14th century) sense of transference, removal, or conveyance from one person, place, or condition to another.

The changing situation Digitization, globalization, the paroxysms of late capitalism … a handful of frameworks and causal agents tend to be invoked to explain the rapid changes to economies, identities, values, and connectivity characteristic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The speed and intensity of these developments in many parts of the world have led to cultural spaces awash with both legacy and emerging practices. With growing tempo, long-revered artifacts have become unmoored from established frameworks, while new forms coalesce and dissipate with little apparent logic. The example of Rambo 2—floating among different linguistic and cultural frameworks, audiences, and exhibition contexts—offers a slow-paced 1980s example of these dynamics and their implications for reception. With the advent of the 1990s, the World Wide Web and World Trade Organization in their very different ways signaled an intensification of these trends, with implications for the situation of cultural production and reception. The following section briefly considers several of these developments.

C oncentration / diffusion Beginning in the mid-1990s, two contradictory trends began to pick up speed. On one hand, the concentration of media ownership, already evident after the Second World War, began to accelerate. In part triggered by technological changes such as satellite and cable distribution, fueled by deregulation, aided and abetted by transnational economies and treaties, companies and particularly media organizations began to cluster both vertically (multiple newspapers or television companies joining together) and horizontally (gathering television, film, music, print, and

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telecom companies together under a single holding company). Digitization and an increasingly global economy further stimulated the process, emblematized today by figures such as Rupert Murdoch or companies such as Bertelsmann and The Walt Disney Company. Although a global dynamic, it has been most pronounced in the United States. In 1984, fifty independent media companies owned the majority of media interests within the United States. By 2017, that number dropped to six large companies with control of ninety percent of the market. At the same time that media corporations were devouring one another in a feeding frenzy that left but a handful of bloated survivors, networked computing began its inexorable spread. And with that spread came radical diffusion and disruption. Individuals could produce and distribute their own media texts, whether blogs or garage band sounds; they could pirate music, television programs, books, and films, sharing their ill-gotten gains with friends; they could shift consumption patterns by spending their money on games, phones, and apps. Diffusion of the means of production and access to the means of distribution grew at pretty much the same pace as concentration within legacy media industries. Suffice it to say that the confluence of these two contrary movements, concentration and diffusion, has led to considerable churn and uncertainty. Ever more powerful computer processors, ever faster connectivity, and ever lower costs have fueled new possibilities, whether industries such as digital gaming or social formations such as the countless interest groups that make use of Reddit. But at the same time, the braking mechanisms of government intervention (anti-piracy schemes, surveillance) have combined with continued corporate mergers (media content companies’ acquisition of the ‘pipes’ that distribute the internet, compounded by threats of net neutrality in the US), all while a new and superior breed of media conglomerates have entered the picture (Facebook and Alphabet). While it is difficult to predict whether we can expect an outcome or must simply face more unexpected twists and turns, the fundamental uncertainty regarding the very ontology of our communications systems has created a new situation, and one that is taking particular forms. In this fast-changing space of corporate takeovers, fan sites, spam, and surveillance, the situation of texts is uncertain in the sense that their ownership, provenance, and therefore implication is of uncertain origin. Fan sites turn out to be closeted corporate creations, branded platforms are in fact owned by the competition, and individual agency in social media sites is anything but guaranteed. In a world where the consumer has morphed into a content producer (YouTube, various social media, massively multi-player games, etc.), and where online cultural participation can easily violate expansive intellectual property laws, inherited notions of ownership, author’s rights, and fair use have lost their clarity.

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H ierarchies of knowledge Consider the nature of authoritative knowledge. The appearance of the printing press ushered in a notion of attribution, of authorship as a claim to ownership but also to responsibility. Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, although penned by a number of late 18th century French luminaries, ultimately owed its authority to its editor, who commissioned, rejected, and at times even encrypted the work of his authors. From the steady publication of charts, maps, and secular texts in the late 15th century until the early 21st century, when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started Wikipedia, authority was bound to the individual. Wikipedia, by contrast, offered a radically new model by harvesting the wisdom of crowds. With largely anonymous collective authorship and editorship, dynamic texts, and discussion rather than certitude on some issues, it has grown to become a massive multi-language project that has eclipsed its print predecessors. As of this writing, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 299 different languages. While a small-scale study of science articles published in Nature showed that Wikipedia’s accuracy was on par with the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s, Wikipedia’s great advantage is that it reveals precisely which parts of an issue are controversial (Giles 2005). By examining a page’s editing history, the reader can see exactly which terms are contested and assess the nature of that contestation. In a world where truths are complex, this strategy offers an alternative to assertions of certainty … or silence. Responsibility and, with it, authority are diffused and even anonymous, and yet, in the aggregate, texts function authoritatively while offering the advantages of transparency. The situation of texts and the knowledge they purport to impart is dynamic, a process that encourages consideration and cross-checking rather than blind acceptance. Transparency, in this situation, helps to rework uncertainty, at worst simply demarcating it as such and, at best, turning it into sites of interrogation. A related dynamic seems to be taking place with news. Where the public was once served by a professional, vetted, and often clearly editorially-demarcated press, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly disaggregating news stories from their sources, mixing them with reports of unknown provenance, and sharing them with like-minded communities of readers. Like the Wikipedia example, Facebook’s dynamics—including authorship—are often anonymous, its texts potentially mutable, and discussion rather than certitude on some issues prevails. But there are also significant differences. These commercial platforms are not driven by the altruism of the Wikipedia community, but rather by profits—which means clicks. Curation of sometimes vetted texts vies with anonymous authorship to produce decontextualized content with minimal quality assurance. Transparency is absent. And the communities, like the mix of texts, are algorithmically curated, posing a set of challenges that will be discussed in the final portion of this essay. In this setting, in contrast to the related Wikipedia

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example, the situation of the text and the status of its claims to truth are difficult to locate and open to question. Once, clearly defined hierarchies of authority and attribution (such as the mainstream press in the US) offered a common national reference point. But this certainty has given way to a free for all. The way that Facebook and other social media disaggregate news from its editorial sources effectively resituates reports into a free-floating position as possibly true or false, with dramatic implications for the epistemological status of the text.

A cquisition /access The networked era has been good for the consumer sector, and while companies such as Amazon attest to the continued market for physical artifacts, in the media sector, they also reveal the steady growth of access as an alternative. The issue is one that most academics know well from university libraries, in which bound paper journals are steadily being displaced by digital access. Convenience is certainly an issue, since digital issues can be accessed from nearly anywhere, but these subscriptions also have a dark side: when they end, users no longer have a backlog of paid-for issues as they would with hard copy. Access to issues past and present terminates. The growth of companies such as Netflix, Spotify, and Pandora, together with the shifting business models of legacy publishers and even software and games companies, which are increasingly using upgrades for revenue purposes, all point in the same direction: payment for access rather than acquisition has become the new normal. While this behavioral shift might be understood as a response to mobile lifestyles, or an acknowledgement of the ephemerality of cultural forms, or simply an effort to maximize profits and minimize environmental footprints, it represents a far more profound shift in the understanding of consumption. Digital acquisition generates data, as well as money. And the nature of the data in many cases is fine-grained. Amazon’s Kindle tracks readers’ behaviors—how quickly they read, where they start and stop; Netflix, like Spotify, tracks usage, extrapolates tastes, and suggests relevant texts. Alphabet took in nearly $ 28 billion for its third quarter in 2017, a good portion of which represented data sales. Conditions in the US and Europe differ considerably regarding data privacy, with the US having far fewer restrictions, but the use of data generated by searches and acquisition in the aggregate has profound implications for the situation of culture, which we will consider shortly.

Reassessing the Situation of the Text in the Algorithmic Age

Terra incognita A few data points: WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $ 19 billion despite having no apparent revenue model. The casual, ‘free-to-play’ game League of Legends generated $ 1.7 billion in 2016 despite being … ‘free.’ And, that same year, YouTube generated $ 12 billion largely on the basis of opt-out advertisements. From the perspective of classical economics, such exchanges—significant dollar amounts for essentially free services—defy reason. Stranger still, after twelve years in operation, YouTube—like WhatsApp—reportedly has yet to yield a profit (though it seems to be roughly breaking even), despite its revenues and despite well over a billion monthly users. Data obviously play a role in this tale, but what does data that can be valued in the billions pertain to? And who is it for? An economic rationalist might chalk up these developments to speculation in a market awash with value, a Tulip mania of the early 21st century, or to the winner-takes-all instincts of Facebook (WhatsApp) and Alphabet (YouTube) in acquiring potential competitors at any cost. But their sheer number, the scale of capital valuation, as well as their presence across the media terrain (including the medium of currency with phenomena like Bitcoin) suggest that, like the striking reconfigurations of authority and ownership, something else may be at play. Investments and revenues seem unmoored from traditional notions of value and, in that slippage, constitute a new situation. Networked dispersion, the distribution of knowledge and authority, access rather than acquisition, data traces, and economic movements that defy traditional notions of value are combining with one another to become new conditions for cultural production and consumption. One by one, we can find ways to explain away or temper their radical potential, but together they suggest that something rather fundamental is at hand.

E nter ritual Like many in his trade, James Carey, a professor of journalism, understood communication as the transmission of information. Journalism, after all, involves seeking out information, vetting it, crafting and contextualizing it, and getting it to a public. Communication theory, due in no small part to Claude Shannon, predicated itself on transmission theories worthy of the telecommunications industry – and indeed, Shannon’s seminal “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” was published in the Bell System Technical Journal. Transmission entails a simple principle: getting a message from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ as efficiently and completely as possible. ‘Sender,’ ‘message,’ ‘transmitter,’ ‘channel,’ ‘noise,’ ‘receiver’ … the terms of the metaphor permeate the English-speaking field’s academic language. And, for nearly 70 years, communication theorists have tinkered with one component or another of this system in a vain attempt to systematize the messy realities

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of communication. A cottage industry of theory resulted and, with it, regulatory responses (censorship, ratings, age limits) and ever more refined advertising strategies. Yet, somehow, the dynamics of communication have remained elusive. Carey intervened by arguing that transmission, while accurate in functionalist terms, was inadequate for understanding communication as a cultural practice. He argued that ritual, by which he meant the sharing, exchanging, and maintaining of symbolic reality, provided an enabling framework: the situation of communication. More in line with John Dewey’s and even Emile Durkheim’s notions, ritual occurs when people stand around the coffee machine and trade information, and process and debate the news. With a few prominent exceptions such as Nick Couldry, ritual has not generally been the central concern of media scholars or producers. However, that is changing, and quickly, with the growth of networked digital media—social media—which are little more than enablers of ritual. Consider the just-noted 2014 sale of WhatsApp to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for $ 19 billion. That same year, the Washington Post print and broadcast empire was acquired by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for a fraction of that amount: $ 250 million (the newspaper itself was closer to only $ 60 million). The well-respected, well-researched, and well-written content of the Post, one of the US’ leading newspapers, was worth a mere sliver of a content-less platform that simply connected and enabled sharing and exchange. The Post is in the business of transmission, and What’sApp in the business of ritual, and to the extent that money reveals cultural priorities, ritual trumps transmission in this brave new world. Digital networks have enabled ritualistic behaviors, have connected people who are dispersed geographically and socially, drawing them together on the basis of shared interests and tastes. And they have done so by the billions, on a scale that dwarfs familiar units such as the nation. Indeed, the enablement and formal articulation of ritual may well be the dynamic that underlies and binds together the coincident trends described in the previous pages—the contradictory state of media production and distribution, diffused constructions of knowledge and authority, the dematerialization of acquisition, the increasing value of transactional data, and powerful economic forces that defy long-held notions of production. It winds through each of them, through the communities that contribute to and debate on Wikipedia; that share musical tastes and discussions on Spotify; that are identified as data aggregates, cultivated, and shared as pseudo-personal links by social media marketers on Facebook. And to the critiques of digitization, globalization, and late capitalism, it offers an affirmative and even constructive counterpart. These new modalities constitute key elements in an emergent situation, framing and mobilizing texts and reception practices in quite different ways to those used by traditional cultural gatekeepers. Obviously, this new situation is more or less relevant in various national settings and demographic segments, and I write this in the US where its presence is strong and privacy protections weak. But its

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creep seems inexorable, judging by the steady transformation of legacy media organizations driven to embrace data metrics and social media marketing in an endeavor to lower the average age of participation and stay relevant. It is manifest in new systems of recommendation and assessment, akin to the shift in knowledge and authority mentioned earlier with Wikipedia; it has enabled a transformation of cultural behaviors, from consumption to sharing and display. And it has radically resituated the individual text through dynamic recontextualization, where it appears in mobile and changing textual and social constellations. As the ‘fake news’ of the moment suggests, this all has implications for meaning and the body politic. The same text, mobilized through one network or another, presented as part of one textual amalgam or another, recommended by one person or another, can have radically different epistemological status. Again, the operations of Genette’s paratexts come to mind, except that the scale and nature of the ‘threshold’ is distinct. Said another way, the digital situation of today’s texts has far greater implications than the disruption of business models, or the ease of distribution, or even the enablement of participation, which have largely dominated the discussion. The diverse ‘symptoms’ sketched out above combine to point to a significant new situation of textual access, authority, and meaning. So far in this essay, I have attempted to connect a number of dots that, in the aggregate, suggest the contours of a new situation for cultural texts—media texts in particular. Even in the hasty and unnuanced terms of a sketch, the dimensions of those contours seem significant. A dramatic comparison might liken this shift in situation to the emergence of the printing press and the ensuing struggle to control cultural framing between established and emergent authorities—a move resonant with the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of his Disputatio. The implications of that shift are still being debated, if Elizabeth Eisenstein’s and Adrian Johns’ quite different readings of the nature of the book are any indication. The point is that it takes time to assess implication. To extend the analogy with the emergence of the printing press, we have barely entered the 16th century with our current digital technologies. The decades that follow may well be a 21st century equivalent of the Early Modern period, when alchemy vied with chemistry and astrology with astronomy as a messy paradigm shift played out.

The changing operations of situation Provisos aside, if, as argued in the preceding pages, the situation that frames cultural forms is changing, there are also good reasons to argue that the very nature of situation and its operations are changing as well. At several earlier points, discussion was deferred until a later point in the essay, and that time has come. By ‘the changing operations of the situation,’ I mean to suggest that situation as context or paratext has undergone not just a change in the sense of one situation or anoth-

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er, but a change in the very nature of its framing operations. That latter change in operations involves the active intervention between the text and its user, and between the text and the context. The intervening agent, the enabler of this new situation, takes the form of artificial intelligence or, synecdochally speaking, the algorithm. I have argued elsewhere, and will recapitulate the argument here, that our current deployment of algorithms intervenes in and fundamentally disrupts the subject-object relationship characteristic of the long modern. Certain classes of those interventions bear upon the situation in ways that differ fundamentally from its operations in the past—the topic of this portion of the essay. First, a bit of disambiguation: the term ‘algorithm’ seems to conjure up responses disproportionate to the simplicity of its meaning. Formally speaking, an algorithm is simply a recipe, a process or set of rules usually expressed in algebraic notation. The actual values plugged into the algorithm are less the point than the step-by-step formulations that govern their processing. They scale easily, whether working with the relatively meagre data of the pre-computer era or the more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated daily at the time of this writing. The great pyramid of Giza, remarkable for its precise measure, was built using a basic algorithm in the form of a seked, a ratio for inclination that scaled large or small. Euclid’s use of algorithms to find the greatest common divisor ca. 300 BCE is better known, and both references hint at the technique’s deep history. Just as algorithms have a deep history but have also recently achieved new power thanks to their changing circumstances (big data and dramatic improvements in processing and transmission), their cultural use also has a long history as well as a fast-evolving present in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Despite their relative simplicity as concepts, algorithms today pose some significant definitional problems, mostly because of a series of misapprehensions. Tarleton Gillespie has noted three broad uses of the term that obscure its meaning. Algorithms are invoked as synecdoche when the term stands in for a sociotechnical assemblage that includes the algorithm, model, data set, application, and so on. They reveal a commitment to procedure, formalizing social facts into measurable data and clarifying problems into models for solution. And they function as talismans when the term implies an ‘objectifying’ scientific claim. Indeed, one might step back and note that these three uses say much more about social anxieties and aspirations than they do about algorithms. How, for example, can one make a claim to ‘objectivity’ with an authored protocol whose operations depend on the highly variable character and structure of a particular data set? And yet, a glance at any newspaper will confirm the accuracy of Gillespie’s insights into the term’s ambiguity. The definition of the algorithm is also complicated by more insistent epistemological problems. Nick Seaver finds that most discussions of algorithms get caught up with issues of access and expertise. Access is an issue because many commercial algorithms, Google’s for instance, are closely guarded secrets. ‘If only we had

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access…’ the mantra goes. But even if we had access, we would immediately face the expertise problem, for most individual algorithms inhabit vast interdependent algorithmic systems (not to mention models, goals, data profiles, testing protocols, etc.), and disaggregating and making sense of them typically requires large teams of experts. But even more troublesome is the fact that any given process usually has many possible algorithmic combinations (ca. 10 million in the case of a Bing search), some of which might be uniquely deployed or used for purposes of personalization or even testing. Individual algorithms and algorithmic clusters are recycled and appear in different settings, with some dating from before World War II still in circulation today. This means that we can never be sure precisely which set of algorithmic elements we are examining, and, even if we were, the work of personalization would limit our ability to compare findings. A further twist appears in the form of disciplinary specificity. The valences of the term ‘algorithm’ differ in mathematics, computer science, governance, predictive analytics, law, and in culture at large, complicating cross-disciplinary discussion. Finally, unlike earlier technologies, developments in machine learning have enabled algorithms to self-optimize and generate their own improvements. They can now self-author and self-create. This greatly complicates notions of authorship, agency, and even algorithms’ status as tools, which imply an end user. Together, the various factors described by Gillespie and Seaver fundamentally challenge our inherited notions of culture and cultural production. The humanities research agenda not only has to deal with the implications of radically reconfigured notions of the author, agency, and textual stability, but also has to embrace radically expanded corpora. Data, the structure of the data set, models, software systems, and interfaces all play determining roles in cultural production and, as such, are not only appropriate but increasingly important sites for humanistic inquiry. That said, data and algorithmic activities only partially overlap with the work of situation. Two sites of activity stand out in particular.

The cultural work of algorithms : curation and configuration Certain algorithmic configurations draw on user and textual data for purposes of textual curation and customization, combing through large data sets to establish correlations regarding taste and likely matches. In the case of curation, the AI system recommends and makes available texts that align with a user’s taste profile: the situation entails more than framing and contextualization, and includes the selection and sequencing of texts. So, for example, of YouTube’s 300 or so hours of video uploaded per minute, the new work of situation includes bringing relevant texts to our attention (i.e., selecting from among the nearly 160 million hours of video uploaded per year) and sequencing them with other texts, thus actively build-

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ing a context. Situation, in this case, literally is the process that selects texts for the user’s screen and that contextualizes them. In the case of configuration, the AI system draws on past user behaviors and extrapolated preferences to build a unique text in real time. In the most advanced systems, the process of textual configuration occurs in response to the user’s biomarkers. In these operations, the notion of situation is at its most recursive, using a reading of the user’s data to frame and construct a text from a set of possibilities. The traditional scenario of situation as the framing of the user’s reading of a text has here evolved to situation as the algorithmic extrapolation of user data to simultaneously frame and to construct the text. The AI system transfers or conveys the conditions for meaning in the very process of negotiating the existence of the text. And it is here, with the work of curation and configuration, that we can see the new situational functionality made possible by the algorithm. Not simply another contextual frame, the algorithmic situation negotiates between reader and text in ways that are fundamentally new and generative.

Textual curation The earlier invocation of Netflix and Spotify suggested that their data trails had implications for the situation of texts. In these cases, algorithms paired with large data sets combine to select and push the texts to which we have access, serving as recommendation systems. In this context, ‘recommendation’ has implications for situation in the double sense of making available (or occluding) texts as well as ordering textual sequence. This new situation curates the textual world to which we have access on the basis of an extrapolated sense of who we are and what we desire. Consider EchoNest’s prediction algorithms that comb through data derived from millions of users’ behaviors as well as data drawn from musical texts, seeking correlations by extrapolating past behaviors into future desires or by searching for other users’ patterns that might offer a basis for suggestions. To the extent that users play along and offer consistent feedback, Spotify and other streaming music services that use EchoNest’s algorithms demonstrate an uncanny ability to identify and provide access to the desired, the familiar, and the reassuring. As users of Amazon’s book recommendation services or Netflix’s film and video suggestions know, the same principles apply on these platforms as well. In these predictive systems, the past is prologue, as the data generated through our earlier interactions shape the textual world selected for us. No ‘surprises’ or ‘unwanted’ encounters, just uncannily familiar themes and variations emerge from this curatorial process.1 1 |  T his logic extends into the informational domain as well, where it has been the subject of sharper critique, mostly focused on the argument that such predictive systems create an echo chamber in which our existing views of the world are reinforced but rarely challenged.

Reassessing the Situation of the Text in the Algorithmic Age

These behaviors take a slightly different form on Google and other search engines, where ‘relevance’ includes choices made on the basis of server location (language settings) and presumed relevance of search terms based on prior usage. Those whose settings allow will experience prompts derived from Google’s many services including Gmail, Google Maps, and one’s history of past purchases. This recursive loop has its conveniences, but the new situation both promotes certain texts and occludes others, invisibly shaping a unique world of possibilities. And it does this not arbitrarily, but based upon a reading of us, neither in consultation with us nor transparent in its operations. Moreover, ‘we’—our data assemblages—are the real products that drive Google’s profits. Situation is both recursive, in the sense of factoring ‘us’ (or some data semblance thereof) into the mix that determines what we see, and extractive, in the sense of profiting from both sides of the data equation, ‘us’ and the texts we see.

Textual configuration Algorithms have been used as tools for textual production at least since as far back as the Middle Ages, for example, with the canon form in music. And they have continued to appear throughout the ages, whether in the Musikalisches Würfelspiel attributed to Mozart, Lejaren Hiller’s compositions using the ILLIAC computer in the 1950s, or as pervasive elements in the most quotidian of contemporary digital music. But in the era of big data, they have recently demonstrated a new dynamic in their role as creative tools. In some settings, the combination of user data and algorithms serves as a gatekeeper for cultural production, in the process, displacing the embodied knowledge of established tastemakers and short-circuiting the activities described by Howard Becker in Art Worlds. For example, Epagogix, a company that specializes in risk mitigation, has found a niche in advising film and television investors about the likely success of a given project. Data from audiences, box office history, the script, as well as various casting configurations are analyzed by Epagogix’s proprietary algorithms, generating a financial assessment that may (or may not) serve as an incentive for investment. All this is to say that algorithms are increasingly playing roles in cultural production as gateways, permitting creativity, and as tools, serving grosso modo as creative implements. While essential elements in the cultural pipeline, neither of these applications speaks directly to the situation of readers and texts, a related but different activity that requires disambiguation. Algorithmic activity moves into situation when it generates texts on demand for the individual user. This process is a bit like curation, just described, but instead of selecting and assembling existing texts based on a reading of the user, it draws on user data to actually construct and configure the text itself. That is, rather than shaping the user’s textual access and environment, the algorithm, again, using

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user data, anticipates user interests and preemptively makes decisions regarding the textual structure. It acts as a third party, standing between the audience and the text, and brokering the two by extrapolating insights from user data and a pre-existing textual environment, which in turn is selectively called upon to construct a text. From a world of textual possibility, the user simply experiences a made-tomeasure linear text, a text that generally masks the fact that it has been compiled on the fly algorithmically. The algorithmic creation of texts on demand for individual users has a robust presence in the realm of print. Companies such as Narrative Science, Yseop, and Automated Insights mine and analyze data, using natural language processing to deliver it to the user as a story. Millions of these stories were produced and sold in 2017. Although still primarily deployed in business settings, by the press for structured data sets (sports and finance), and on sites such as BuzzFeed as narrative reductions, they are perfectly capable of targeting uniquely configured stories to individual participants. Video production, while far behind, is fast taking advantage of advances in image recognition software to analyze shots for content and emotional register, and to suggest edited sequences, as evidenced by recent work emerging from a Stanford-Adobe partnership (Leake 2017). Still nascent in time-based visual culture, these responsive textual systems with their algorithmic mediation of the user pose a new order of questions. Even if—to the algorithm—the user appears as both a highly individuated data set and a responsive rule set for textual construction, the algorithm nevertheless recursively produces real-world texts. It breaks the reader-text binary by introducing an intermediary element that determines both and, in so doing, marks out a new dynamic that we will have to grapple with. Whereas with traditional texts like the initial Rambo 2 example, the situation of film emerges from cultural context, marketing endeavors, translation conventions, and the rest, all targeted at a broad audience, here, the scale of the transaction is reduced in granularity to the individual, and framing is literally embedded in algorithmic decisions regarding textual construction. The made-to-measure text, in these cases, is always already situated. Lab experiments have recently focused on what might best be described as ‘physiologically enabled texts.’ Virtual Reality goggles equipped with pupil-trackers calculate what the user is viewing and even extrapolate an assumed level of user interest by observing pupillary dilation, heartrate, and, in some use cases, even temperature, brain activity, and galvanic skin response. These data points add a responsive layer to the more predictive data set acquired from past behaviors, combining to construct an ‘appropriate’ experience for the algorithmically extrapolated user. Obviously, this scenario is riddled with significant ethical challenges regarding agency and privacy. The agency issues are currently being played out in the domain of self-driving cars, but the privacy issues, in which our gaze and biomarkers are datafied, interpreted, and presumably monetized as signs of interest, go far beyond the familiar data trails that we are still struggling to contain in

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policy terms. Nevertheless, they point to an extreme example of algorithmically situated texts and a sector that is quickly growing.

Final comments RealEyes, a company that among other things designs technologies that ‘read’ facial micro-gestures and translates them into six categories of quantified emotional units (‘happiness,’ ‘disgust,’ etc.), represents a ‘next step’ in facial recognition. And although primarily directed toward gauging responses to online advertising, its implications for responsive text generation of the sort just described seem obvious (as do its more sinister implications for surveillance and predictive policing). This is all to say that the changing operations of situation, particularly as described above with textual curation and configuration, offer particularly relevant sites to rethink the contextual and material conditions and practices that position and frame the text. Of course, these conditions and practices are in flux and are caught in some challenging dilemmas, as the first half of this essay argued. But they are also moving in a particular direction. Rambo 2’s success in the Asian market hews to the well-established logics of cultural translation. I have taken the term translation to mean ‘transference, removal, or conveyance from one person, place, or condition to another,’ and John Rambo, like countless narrative figures before him, has played along with these shifting conditions, meaning very different things in different situations. But the nature of cultural situation is changing—and changing quickly. We inhabit a space where the old logics of translation exist alongside the new, and the very condition of coexistence itself is quickly challenging the clarity and efficacy of once well-understood cultural operations. One could, of course, take up other lines of inquiry, looking at cultural conveyance through the shifting of texts across media platforms; or at the role played by code in operating and translating cultural systems, a task taken up by Lawrence Lessig, among others; or even at the determining role of apparatus and the translation of race in color film stock, Instagram filters, and facial recognition algorithms—worthy approaches, all. But this essay has limited itself to two emerging directions in the situation of cultural texts and their readers, one concerned with framing conditions and the other with the changing operations of the frame, particularly as evident in algorithmic curation and configuration. And it has tried to show that the cultural space we are entering is not simply changing the situation, as we have seen happen countless times before, but rather, that the very operations of situation are themselves changing, and in a recursive, generative, and individuated manner. This is all to say that this is a start, not a conclusion, and that the hard work of stepping outside of inherited boundaries and categories is more pressing than ever.

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R eferences Bachelard, Gaston (1986 [1938]): The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, Boston: Beacon Press. Becker, Howard (1984): Art Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press. Carey, James (1989): Communication as Culture, New York: Routledge. Couldry, Nick (2003): Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, New York: Routledge. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979): The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel (1970 [1966]): The Order of Things, New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard (1997 [1987]): Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giles, Jim (2005): “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head: Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.” Nature 438 (7070): 900/1. Gillespie, Tarleton (2014): “Algorithm [draft][# Digitalkeywords],” June 25, 2014. In: Culture Digitally (http://culturedigitally.org/2014/06/algorithm-draft-digitalkeyword/). Heidegger, Martin (1938): “Die Zeit Des Weltbildes.” In: Holzwege. Frankfurt a. M. Iyer, Pico (1988): Video Night in Kathmandu And Other Reports From the Not-SoFar East, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Johns, Adrian (1998): The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, Thomas (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leake, MacKenzie et al. (2017): “Computational Video Editing for Dialogue-Driven Scenes.” In: ACM Transactions on Graphics 36/4 (Article 130), pp. 1–14. Lessig, Lawrence (1999): Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, New York: Basic Books. Levine, Lawrence (1990): Highbrow-Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Seaver, Nick (2013): “Knowing Algorithms.” Paper presented at Media in Transition 8, May 3–5, 2018, MIT (http://nickseaver.net/papers/seaverMiT8.pdf). Shannon, Claude (1948): “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” In: Bell System Technical Journal 27/3, pp. 379–423, and 27/4, pp. 623–666. Uricchio, William (2017): “Data, Culture and the Ambivalence of Algorithms” In: Mirko Tobias Schäfer/Karin van Es (eds.), The Datafied Society, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, pp. 125–138. Uricchio, William/Pearson, Roberta (2014 [1993]): Reframing Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fragile Translations Languages of/in Media Art Claudia Benthien

I ntroduction At galleries of contemporary art, visitors frequently encounter media artworks that employ and play with language. Some of the artworks both present and transform acts of translation—as shifts and volatile movements between different languages and linguistic modalities, and between different media and cultures. Such works may also be found online, in what is referred to as ‘net art.’ Through a simultaneity of languages as well as linguistic modes, media artworks strategically create an ‘aesthetic excess’ that challenges the recipient’s reading, listening, and comprehension abilities. The process of translation, which is commonly intended to overcome strangeness and to make the unfamiliar familiar, is itself ‘translated’ into a challenging estranging aesthetic that lays bare the inherent fragility of translation and renders it perceptible. This article approaches three media artworks: a single-channel video by the Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum, a net art piece by the Korean-American artist collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and a video installation by the Bosnian-German artist Danica Dakić. Each of them combines different languages with the different visual and acoustic layers of language, i.e., their modalities: as oral (acoustically audible) language or as written (visible and legible) language. In general, language both transmits communicative meaning and functions as an aesthetic tool independent of its phonetic dimension. For instance, in media art, written language may continuously shift between ‘legibility’ and ‘visibility,’ and it is often presented in motion, as kinetic script (cf. Schneider 1998, 223– 243; Benthien/Lau/Marxsen 2019: 80–110). Media linguistics has conceptualized language as an ‘intermedium’ (Jäger 2010b: 302): firstly, it is in itself multimodal (cf. Androutsopoulos 2007: 73)—it can appear in oral, scriptural, or gestural

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form1—and, secondly, it appears in various media formats, for instance in books, on computer screens, or in artistic light projections in the public space. Media art often combines linguistic multimodality—the coexistence of different modes of language—with multimediality—the coexistence of different media (cf. Androutsopoulos 2010: 425; Jaworski 2014: 135). It integrates written language into visually structured environments or oral language into acoustically structured environments and produces (poetic) meaning through the interplay of language and other semiotic means. The concept of translation is therefore not used solely in the linguistic sense, as in ‘communicating meaning from one language to another,’ but also in a much more comprehensive sense. The reason for this is that processes of translation—between languages, between linguistic modalities, between media, and between cultures—occur perpetually,2 both in contemporary cultures and in the media artworks considered here. Recent cultural theory sometimes equates the terms ‘linguistic translation’ with ‘cultural translation’ (Bachmann-Medick 2013). Their correspondence has been emphasized by Homi K. Bhabha, who sees cultural translation as intertwined with hybridity: “By [cultural] translation I first of all mean a process by which, in order to objectify cultural meaning, there always has to be a process of alienation and of secondariness in relation to itself. In that sense there is no ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’ within cultures because they are always subject to intrinsic forms of translation.” (Bhabha 1990: 210) Bhabha concedes a proximity between this “theory of culture” and a “theory of language, as part of a process of translations,” in which this term is not used “in a strict linguistic sense of translation as in a ‘book translated from French into English,’ but as a motif or trope as Benjamin suggests for the activity of displacement within the linguistic sign” (ibid.). According to Bhabha, seamless translation is impossible. On the contrary, he considers translation a “way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing sense,” since even the original “is never finished or complete in itself” (ibid.). The “mode of intention”, as Walter Benjamin puts it in his seminal essay The Task of the Translator, can only be transported conditionally: “‘Translation’ and ‘original’ do not manifest

1 |  In media studies, multimodality has a wider meaning than in media linguistics, which tends to limit it to the modes of language (oral, written, gestural), while the former integrates different kinds of media or medial combinations, for instance “text, image and sound”, or rather “the combination of sense faculties”, for instance “the visual, the tactile, and so forth” (Elleström 2010: p. 14). In the present article, multimodality primarily refers to combinations of different linguistic modes used in media art. To pick up Elleström’s differentiated terminology: due to the topic of ‘translation’, the focus will be both on the “material modality” and the “sensorial modality” but the “spatiotemporal” and the “semiotic” modalities will not be left out either (cf. ibid., 15–24). 2 |  “[Translation] including both interlingual and intersemiotic translation.” (Bauman/Briggs 1990: p. 75)

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any systematic congruence; their relationship is at most that of a ‘distinctive convergence’” (Benjamin 2007: 14, 72). Languages and cultures are evolving rather than static entities and are “constituted in relation to that otherness internal to their own symbol-forming activity which makes them decentered structures” (Bhabha 1990: 210). Therefore, cultural translations cannot be understood “euphorically as the space of a singularly positive ‘in between’” (Klein 2009: 28), as one might suspect in relation to some branches of postcolonial theory.3 They do not just create a (subversive) and dynamic ‘third’ element or state, but also imply and negotiate patterns of “social in- and exclusion” (ibid.) as well as hegemonic claims. Leslie Adelson emphasizes this in her manifesto Against Between, in which she remarks that the trope of ‘betweenness’ “often functions literally like reservation designed to contain, restrain, and impede new knowledge, not enable it” (Adelson 2001: 245). As this critical remark illustrates, in contemporary debates, concepts of interculturality, which consider two cultures as distinct yet connected by way of a subject, are often rejected in favor of more complex and challenging notions of cultural reciprocity or negotiation, notions that also include experiences of failed or fragmentary forms of translation. Using the continuous disruptions created by the simultaneous presence of other languages and sign systems, media art both reflects upon and actively influences the delicate complexity—the threshold between pitfall and promise—of linguistic and cultural translation processes. When considering the concept of translation as it is practiced in the field of media art, it is necessary to contextualize it within theories of media relations. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have prominently termed the network created between old media and new media “remediation.” This rationale of the networking of media systems follows a ‘double logic’ of “immediacy” and “hypermediacy” (Bolter/Grusin 1999: 30–38). Immediacy suggests a quest for “disappearance,” towards creating a seemingly “transparent, perceptual immediate” and “unmediated presentation” (ibid.: 22, 30, and 42–44). The counter-concept of hypermediacy, or “opacity,” brings the medium to the foreground by making an issue of it: “In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy.” (Ibid.: 34)

3 |  O ne example of this would in fact be Bhabha’s remark: “The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens a space of translation: a space of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moments of politics.” (Bhabha 1994: 25, italics added)

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Related to Bolter and Grusin’s concept, yet even more pertinent to the present material, is Ludwig Jäger’s theory of “transcriptivity” (cf. Jäger 2010a). The advantage in Jäger’s approach is its terminological proximity to the notion of translation. He considers “transcription” to be a multi-layered process of media correlation and recursivity. According to him, significance is established “by way of different means of reference that in an epistemological sense do not antecedently take place between sign-systems and the world but that mainly on the one hand are executed between diverse (mediated) sign-systems and on the other also within the same sign-system” (Jäger 2010a: 78). Jäger understands transcriptions as being “in the mode of intra- and intermedial referentiality of signs to signs, or of media to media,” and consequently, “as the respective transition from disruption to transparency, of de- and recontextualization of the signs/media in focus.” (ibid.) As will be argued below, the media artworks to be analyzed all alternate on various levels between different phases of transparency—“as that state in the process of media performance in which the respective sign/medium disappears, becoming transparent regarding the contents it mediates”—and of “disruption”—“focusing on the sign/medium as the (disrupted) operator of meaning” (ibid.). The three media artworks considered here operate both using different languages and different linguistic modalities. They combine oral speech and written language, and both address and demonstrate the fundamental differences between the following pairs of languages, some of which are based on different systems of writing: English and Korean, English and Arabic, and German and Bosnian. By the way of aesthetic means, they reflect the challenges of translation and understanding in and between different languages and sign systems. In doing so, they commit to a strategy of (conceptually) overwhelming the viewer with the simultaneity of languages and linguistic modalities. Each in their own specific way, these artistic explorations expose the intricacies of translation as a way to explore the cultural practice of translation and the very question of translatability itself. All three works reference literary or, more precisely, narrative genres: crime fiction, autobiography, and fairy tales. However, these narrative works are very different—in their political statements, in their aesthetics, in their artistic approaches, and in their cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, two of them are media artworks created to be presented in art galleries, while one is a piece made to be watched online, on a computer screen or other digital device. Thus, the works not only represent different states-of-the art of technology, but also imply diverse forms of situativity: between a public, collective reception situation, involving the movement of the audience within the gallery space, and a private, singular, motionless viewing situation. What all three have in common is their bilingualism, using script and soundtracks that are to be received in parallel to each other, negotiating the processes of interlingual, intralingual (modal), medial, and cultural translation.

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S imultaneous translation as net art—Young -H ae C hang H eavy I ndustries ’ B ust D own the D oor A gain ! The artist collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) comprises the Korean Young-Hae Chang, an artist and translator with a PhD in aesthetics from the Université Paris I, and the US-American poet Marc Voge.4 Both live in Seoul and have been working together for many years. YHCHI have produced a number of fast-paced text films in which words, accompanied by a jazz soundtrack, appear in rapid succession in a browser window, filling the entire screen in a monochrome font. Their online artworks make numerous references to film5 as well as literature, for example, to concrete poetry and narrative genres. YHCHI use Flash, a web animation tool that quickly transmits images and font elements and instantly alternates between frames (cf. Tribe 2006; Choi 2009). One significant component of their visual aesthetic is their use of the classic, old-fashioned Mac font Monaco in capitals. As it briefly flashes up on and disappears from the screen, the script is reminiscent of the neon signs found in the USA and in Asian metropolises—and of neon sign artworks by artists such as Bruce Nauman. Their works commonly include a ‘countdown,’ after which the literary texts, written by the artists themselves, tell dramatic stories about sex, violence, crime, and passion. Some of their pieces, such as Dakota and Samsung Means to Come, refer to literary works, here to Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. YHCHI’s works, presented almost exclusively online and using elements of writing, music, and at times voice, are situated in the realm between digital poetry and digital art. The artists write in Korean, English, and French. Due to help provided by translators, many of their works also exist in further languages (e.g., German, Swedish, Turkish, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese), so that there are often several versions of the same artwork available in different tongues.6 The artists claim that every language has its own specific

4 |  Y HC for Young-Hae and HI for Marc. “We changed Marc into ‘HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ because Koreans love big companies and Marc doesn’t mind being objectified and capitalized on.” (Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries 2005) 5 |  T he black and white versions of Bust Down the Doors Again! With Drums might for instance be referring to: Fritz Lang’s last silent movie Frau im Mond (Lang invented the countdown as a dramatic device); film noir very generally (the black and white film and its setting are reminiscent of film noir’s flair for subjective perspective, and for dream sequences in particular); the highly self-referential black and white avant-garde text film So Is This by Michael Snow; and/or Gustav Deutsch’s tableau movie Film ist, in particular the section composed of subtitles from silent films. The author is indebted to Eric Ames, Seattle, for these references. Since this article is not about intermedial references to film, however, it will not go any further into these works. 6 |  Cf. http://www.yhchang.com/

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aesthetic due to its unique shape and sound, which is why they compose different music for each language version (cf. Choi 2009). There are six versions of Bust Down the Door(s)!, including two English-­ Korean pieces. One of these bilingual versions, Bust Down the Door Again! (fig. 1), captioned on YHCHI’s website as “With Drums,” consists of Korean and English lettering that appears simultaneously.7 The other bilingual piece, entitled Bust Down the Door Again! Gates of Hell—Victoria Version, also contains written Korean and English, but with the addition of spoken English (fig. 2).8 All six versions of Bust Down the Door(s)! present the tale of a night-time home invasion carried out by unidentified, armed perpetrators. The second-person narrative used in the first version discussed here (Bust Down the Door Again!) subjects the viewer quite directly to the violence being described—and also turns him or her into a victim of the violent aesthetics. The narrative, recited by the perpetrators (“we”), consists of just one very long sentence in the present tense (i.e., dramatic mode, simultaneous narration); this is key to creating the tension communicated by the work. The short language piece presents a snapshot: while outwardly something terrible is happening—the ‘you’ is being murdered by strangers for no apparent reason— paradoxically, the narration also presents something extremely beautiful, which the subject, or ‘you’ (who, in another paradox, narrates the piece and seems to have penetrated the consciousness of the perpetrators) has just dreamed about: sitting with a lover at the seaside and drinking to the sound of “unbearably sweet” Bossa Nova music.

Figure 1. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Bust down the Doors! With Drums (2004), net art, 1’00 min.

7 |  http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_Rodin.html 8 |  http://www.yhchang.com/GATES_OF_HELL.html

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Figure 2. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Bust Down the Door Again! Gates of Hell—Victoria Version (2004), net art, 1’00 min. The violent assault described in the narrative, which ‘takes place’ in the simultaneity of the here and now, is duplicated by the aesthetic of the net artwork: it, too, is overwhelming and ‘brutal,’ especially at the fast pace and with the powerful rhythmic drums of this version. The artists have remarked that their “words [should] exert a dictatorial stranglehold on the reader” (YHCHI in Choi 2009). YHCHI’s aesthetics ‘immobilize’ viewers seated in front of their computer screens in a literal sense: unlike the conventional process of reading, in which the eye moves across fixed lines, here the script is in motion and the viewers’ eyes are forced to remain passively focused on the same spot on the screen, where text segments continuously appear and disappear, leaving the recipient with no possibility to influence them (cf. Hayles 2008: 125; Knowles 2015: 57). During the first run, the English text appears in large letters with the Korean text underneath, in a significantly smaller size. This formal arrangement on the screen is reminiscent of film subtitles (cf. Egoyan/Balfour 2004), but in a paradoxical way, since subtitles normally help the viewer to understand a work, which is not the case here. The second run reverses this hierarchy. Due to the languages’ different linguistic structures, the Korean narrative has only an approximate resemblance to the English one, and idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms specific to each language are used (cf. Hayles 2008: 128).9 It is, in fact, the same story, but the words and phrases are arranged differently and in a different order.10 The 9 |    H ayles actually makes this remark in relation to Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ piece Nippon, but the statement also applies here. 10 |  F or help with the Korean translations, the author would like to thank Nadine Henkel and Sug Henkel, Duisburg.

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simultaneous presence of Korean and English on the screen foregrounds the dissimilarities between these writing systems. In contrast to other Asian languages, such as Chinese, the modern Korean script, Hangul, is not made up of ideograms but of letters. However, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, each of which transcribes a syllable. Even though such a syllable may look like a single character, it actually consists of two to five letters. Korean is also a ‘featured script,’ which means that it contains components that indicate the elements of articulation (such as fricatives or back vowels). The different writing systems of English and Korean thus create a strong visual difference between the two fonts perceivable on the screen. In Gates of Hell—Victoria Version, the second-person narrative is transformed into a first-person narrative, so that the viewer is now no longer being addressed directly. In addition, the ‘perpetrators’ have become a single ‘perpetrator.’ The aesthetic of this version is also fundamentally different, as oral speech supplements the two writing systems. A female computer voice speaks the English words that appear simultaneously on the screen, corresponding to the alternation between these “text images” (Mitchell 1986). During the ‘Korean loop,’ the same voice again speaks in English. The Victoria Version includes a background image: an installation piece exhibited in YHCHI’s first offline exhibit in the Samsung Life Insurance building art gallery in Seoul, Korea. This art space, now called Plateau, was formerly known as the Rodin Gallery, after the Auguste Rodin sculptures found there, among them The Gates of Hell. The coincidental name of this gallery carries rather significant connotations: as a shift from a master representative of European ‘high culture’ to a global mega enterprise that specializes in communication and entertainment technology. At the left of the work’s background image, a bronze cast version of the monumental Rodin sculpture referred to in the online work’s title can be seen, and at the right of the image are nine refrigerators, which display the YHCHI piece (including sound) in a small format (cf. Jana/Tribe 2006: 94).11 A large screen is visible in the background, being viewed by three visitors, on which the piece in the previously discussed version, Bust Down the Door Again! With Drums—subtitled Rodin in the hyperlink—is also being shown: on the computer screen, we thus see an exhibition space, where the work that we are viewing

11 |  T he artists’ intended meaning of the phrase “Internet refrigerators” does not become apparent in the short catalogue text. Perhaps they are referring to ‘intelligent refrigerators,’ which alert consumers about products that are running out or which are nearing their expiration dates. This can be presumed, because Jana and Tribe quote YHCHI as follows: “Advertisers would have us believe that the Internet refrigerator puts the housewife at the cutting-edge of modern, hi-tech life. We titled our piece THE GATES OF HELL because, on the contrary, we feel that their refrigerator helps keep women in the kitchen.” (YHCHI in Jana/Tribe 2006: 94) In one of the piece’s image captions, they also talk of “Samsung Internet Fridges” (YHCHI in Schuster et al. 2005: 72).

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is simultaneously being exhibited and viewed! It is therefore an ‘image within an image,’ or, rhetorically speaking, a mise en abyme. One particularly interesting feature of Bust down the Door Again! Gates of Hell—Victoria Version is its multimodal and multilingual use of language. The artists have remarked that each of the languages they use in their works comes with a full baggage of history and culture. Language is the essence of the internet, the real gateway using the web. To write, read, and chat in English on the Internet is to implicitly justify a certain history. Certain governments don’t ban or burn books anymore, they prevent access to the Web, meaning they justify a different history than the one we do by using English. So our choice of language is probably the biggest historical influence on our work. (Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries 2002) 12

As YHCHI point out, political and historical motives are at work in their choice of languages, a deliberate act that decisively influences worldviews and global contextualization. YHCHI’s internet art can therefore be considered a conceptual investigation into the transcriptive movements of language. Both of the languages used in the Victoria Version can be read in parallel to each other, and the English version can simultaneously be heard. This linguistic multimodality is recursive, as the computer voice itself seems to mimic the mechanized typeface, speaking in a slightly alienated, staccato, and not very ‘human’ way, like a prosthetic, digitally manipulated female voice: The subvocalization that activates the connection between sound and mark in literary reading here is complicated by the text’s movement and its interpenetration by sound, becoming a more complex and multimodal production in which embodied response, machine pacing, and transnational semiotics, along with the associated spatialization of temporality, all contribute to construct the relation between text, body, and machine. (Hayles 2008: 127)

The full-screen format of the text and the simple but singularly iconic layout (Pressman 2009: 47) cause reading and seeing to constantly merge. A continuous shift between transparency and opacity occurs. The circular aesthetic of YHCHI is aptly described by Suk Kyoung Choi as follows: “The text is information, the information is image. Text is the text of an image. Image is the image of the text.” (Choi 2009) The loop structure invokes a linguistic and medial ‘interspace’: a space imposed on the viewer, as he or she is subjected to the dominant aesthetics of this net artwork with its hypermedial aesthetics. Moreover, as has been described with 12 |  T he significance of writing-based online communication has been confirmed by media linguistics: “As a social practice, digital writtenness distinguishes itself through its dispersal into domains that had thus far been orally centered […]. In spite of the integration of all former transmission and storage media into the ‘super medium’ of the computer, writing is still the central, often the only available sign system for interpersonal communication.” (Androutsopoulos 2007: 74–75)

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regard to other artworks by the duo, YHCHI’s aesthetics demand that the viewer alternates between ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’ (Pressman 2009: 47); it defamiliarizes the viewing experience, causing the viewer’s focus to shift between the design of the Monaco font and the text’s content.

C ommunication subject to the condition of exile : M ona H atoum ’s video : M easures of D istance Mona Hatoum, an artist who was born in Lebanon to Palestinian exiles and who has lived in London since 1975 (cf. Heinrich 2004: 9), works with a range of media and materials.13 She was visiting London when the Civil War broke out in Lebanon, preventing her return. In her single-channel video Measures of Distance,14 Hatoum examines this situation of exile as a specific experience of exclusion and alienation, illustrated by the lost ‘mother tongue’ and the foreign languages of the country (or countries) of exile. Hatoum’s piece consists of a montage of images, writing, and voices. Photos the artist took of her mother showering in the family apartment in Beirut make up the background of the piece. Excerpts from letters in Arabic script that the artist’s mother wrote to her in England are superimposed onto these images (fig. 3). Viewers hear, in somewhat hushed tones, a (recorded) Arabic-language conversation between these two women, and, more clearly, the artist reads the excerpts from the mother’s letters in English translation.15 The photos and the recordings were taken in 1981, while the artist briefly visited her parents.16 Hatoum’s video suggests both proximity and distance and evokes a number of entangled dichotomies: between home and exile, reading and writing, reading and translation, mother and daughter, autobiography and artistic imagination, private and public. The artist connects the medium of script with questions of corporeal presence and absence, as the letters recited by Hatoum turn what we see into an event that is significant for both biographies: the afternoon spent together in the bathroom, the photographs of the mother used in the artist-daughter’s work, and the father’s jealousy. By cross-fading the letters—through Arabic text and audible oral text—with the Arabic dialogue between mother and daughter, the past is correlated with the present, and the ‘bio-graphic’ is shown both literally and 13 |  A n earlier version of this analysis is published in Benthien/Lau/Marxsen 2019: 202–204. 14 |  Cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkM1ZcUmAs8; cf. also Heinrich 2004: 45. 15 |  O ne surmises this autobiographical context, which has been confirmed in comments Hatoum has made about her video; in fact, the recording took place during the production of the video in 1988: “a melancholic voice-over by Hatoum produced seven years later in Vancouver” (Khan 2007: 319). 16 |  At the end of the piece, the viewer reads “slides and taped conversations, Beirut 1981.”

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in its processuality. That the artist repeatedly falters—pauses—while translating and reciting the letters is thus not just a technical means of bringing to the fore the quieter Arabic conversations, but also serves to mimetically depict the act of remembering that which has passed. Hatoum’s selection of excerpts focuses on the beginning of the letters. The viewer repeatedly hears the salutation “my dear Mona.” This refers to the letters’ communicative impulse, but also to the artist persona Mona Hatoum, who continually ‘calls’ herself with her own voice as the self-referential addressee of her video artwork: “In Measures of Distance, the viewer hears ‘Mona’ but never sees her. ‘Mona’ exists in the void between the somber voice of a daughter in London, recorded in 1988, and the laughter of a mother in Beirut, recorded in 1981.” (Khan 2007: 319) The one-sidedness of communication—that only the mother’s letters can be heard, but not the daughter’s answers—is reinforced by the spatial installation of this piece in the black cube of the museum, where the sound emanates, rather unusually, from only one loud speaker and is thus rendered as ‘mono.’17

Figure 3a/b. Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance (1988), single-channel video, 15’26 min. The artist has said that she intentionally went back to autobiographical material for Measures of Distance—quite in the sense of the feminist notion that ‘the personal is political.’ She understands the relationship with her mother as an allegory with political implications. By countering the stereotypical, neo-oriental media images of Arabic women in the West as intimidated and veiled beings, as well as the way they are often depicted in groups or as parts of familial constellations, Hatoum’s video artwork emphasizes the individuality and autonomy of her mother (cf. ibid).18 The transparent script of the letters is superimposed on photographs of 17 |  A single loud speaker, placed on the floor to the left. Reference is made here to the solo exhibition Mona Hatoum in spring 2012 at the Sammlung Goetz, Munich, a private media art collection with exhibition space where Measures of Distance is kept. 18 |  For feminist implications, cf. also Pollock 2008: 260–263.

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the artist’s naked mother in her shower. Her Arabic handwriting on the soft grid of the writing paper seems to disguise and reveal her body at the same time.19 This visual text can be interpreted in a number of ways: a conventional reading would be to understand it as demarcating ‘foreign territory’ and as a Middle Eastern, patriarchal strategy to (verbally) protect the female body from Western hegemony (cf. ibid.: 329). However, the text does not appear as the mark of a final boundary, but rather as a soft veil—a permeable semiotic texture. Furthermore, it is not imposed onto the mother, but rather has been actively produced by her. For Western viewers, the excerpted texts and the similarly fragmented body situated behind it are only conditionally—or simply not at all—‘legible’: Hatoum has stated that she deliberately intended to alienate both non-Arabic-speaking and Arabic-speaking audiences with Measures of Distance […]. The non-Arabic speaking viewer experiences a sense of frustration when trying to decipher the blurred shapes of Hatoum’s mother through a veil or wire cage of Arabic script while having to listen attentively to the English translation of those letters […]. Similarly, the Arabic-speaking viewer becomes equally frustrated when attempting to block out both the English translation and the visual presentation of the letters in order to catch the more enticing conversation between mother and daughter, revolving around such physically intimate details as a couple’s wedding night or a young girl’s experience of getting her period. (Ibid.: 325)

This description highlights the extent to which perception oscillates between transparency and disruption (or opacity) and how cultural transcriptions succeed or fail due to the audience’s language skills. In a state of disruption, it is not that which is transmitted, but rather “the sign/medium as such” that becomes “visible and therefore […] semantically operative” (Jäger 2004: 84). But even a viewer who speaks both languages and is familiar with both cultural contexts is caught in a permanent to-and-fro between four semiotic poles—Arabic lettering, body, English voice, and Arabic voices: “[A]s both audiences have to wrestle between hearing and seeing, between reading a body and a text, the act of viewing Measures of Distance parallels the experiences of those who belong to diasporic communities.” (Khan 2007: 325) Processes of linguistic, cultural, and social translation take place “both literally and figuratively in the letters and images of Hatoum’s mother and in the exchange between artist and viewer” (ibid.). Mehre Khan analogizes the difficulties that arise when viewing Hatoum’s video artwork with the “migratory experience,” where continuous transcriptions between writing and sound, image and language are essential. Disruption and transparency alternate—as in the internet artwork by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries—depending on whether the viewer manages to concentrate temporarily on one of these layers. 19 |  T he grid is reminiscent of the technique of central perspective developed during the Renaissance by placing a geometric grid on top of the surface to be painted, by which the image was conceived as a finestra apera (‘open window’).

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The beginning and the end of the piece in particular make clear that plural layers of meaning are present and that the fruitless attempt to separate them is the subject of the piece. Measures of Distance begins silently, without sound. At the beginning, the viewer only sees the Arabic lettering and the abstract, colorful surfaces behind it; then, a female body becomes hazily visible; soon after, the women’s voices speaking Arabic become audible. The dialogue between the two women creates a domestic atmosphere (especially if one does not understand the language and instead simply enjoys the ‘presemiotic’ sound of the words and the familiar mood that expresses itself as a kind of ‘ambient sound’20). Then, the voice of the translator (and recipient of the letters) becomes audible. By contrast, at the end, the image first fades out into a monochrome black. The Arabic dialogue then also dies down and comes to an end, while we continue to hear the English-speaking voice in the dark, reading from a letter that tells of combat in Lebanon and relates it to severed communications—the telephone no longer functions, the post office has been destroyed by a bomb. Then, suddenly, there is silence.21 The last excerpt, from a letter that self-referentially notes the fact that it has become almost impossible to continue sending letters, ends with the words “etc. etc.”—it leads into the unknown.

A passage between two languages —D anica D akić ’s video installation A utoportrait The Bosnian-German artist Danica Dakić was born in Sarajevo and has lived in Germany since 1988. She studied art in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Düsseldorf. Like Hatoum, wartime events in her home country have indirectly shaped her art. The Bosnian War and the occupation of Sarajevo (1992–1996) took place after she had moved to Germany, “separated from my family and friends, in fear and uncertainty what was happening to them there” (Dakić 2004: 22). This experience of exile resulted in a politicized concept of art, and many of Dakić’s works deal with topics such as escape, displacement and the status of migrants with uncertain futures, such as her multimedia installation El Dorado, presented at Documenta 12 in 2007. Language and the issues of “understanding and not understanding as well as the relation between image and language” (Dakić 2009: 44) also play an important role. One example of this is the four-channel video installation, I love, I don’t love, which Dakić created in 2000 together with her Bosnian colleague Maja Bajević. 20 |  R eferencing Julia Kristeva’s theory of the (preverbal) “semiotic,” Griselda Pollock relates the fact that the language being spoken by the women is generally not understood by Western viewers as a system of expression bound to the body, especially that of the mother (‘Chora’) (Pollock 2008: 249). 21 |  “ ‘Mona’ is cut-off from her mother and the audience is cut-off from ‘Mona.’” (Khan 2007: 330)

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In these two video projections, filmed in Sarajevo, the artists speak Bosnian and declare that they “love” the city, while in the two video projections filmed in their current European locales (Düsseldorf, Paris), they speak German or French and claim that they “do not love” Sarajevo (Dakić 2004: 11).22 In this video installation, viewers stand between four monitors arranged around them in the gallery space and hear all of these self-contradictory and heteroglossic statements at the same time—a veritable “Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages” (Bakhtin 1981: 278). A visitor entering the video installation finds him- or herself “at the heart of a ‘Shakespearean dilemma’—to love or not to love, one’s own allegiance(s) and why” (Dakić 2004: 26), as the artist phrases it, in both a figurative and quite physical sense. In Dakić’s video installation Autoportrait, which is the focus here, the spatial setting is just as relevant, since viewers can circle around the screen that stands like a barrier in the middle of the space and must position themselves accordingly.23 The technique of rear projection, which allows visitors to view the screen both from the front and the back, reinforces the theme of the dual division of the person in the medial aspect of the work (cf. Spieler 2004: 61). Autoportrait creates “a passage between two languages” (Dakić 2004: 25). The title suggests that the piece has something to do with self-portraiture; however, the face is so strongly de-personalized that this aspect is not the conceptual focus (fig. 4).24 The piece is not primarily about personal experiences, but is rather “an attempt, to reflect on collective experiences” and “to adopt a position such that the personal story becomes more or less invisible” (Dakić 2009: 44). Autoportrait is a video installation in which the figure being portrayed—the artist herself—speaks with two mouths.25 This disfiguration is the result of a second, ‘false’ mouth, projected onto Dakić’s forehead once the eye area had been fully covered by a mask: 22 |  D akić remarks: “My concept of home has utterly changed. In both cities I am a little at home, but also a little bit a stranger. My distance from both places has afforded me the position of a critical observer, a position that can be very fruitful for an artist. Learning to live with the difference and to speak from within this difference: that is the potential in incongruence.” (Dakić 2009: 43) 23 |  D anica Dakić: Autoportrait (1999), single-channel video artwork, excerpt provided by the artist. Reference is made to the exhibition Ich ist etwas Anderes—Kunst am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts at K20—Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, spring 2000, where the work was presented (and also placed on the catalogue cover). An earlier version of this analysis is published in Benthien/Lau/Marxsen 2019: 196–198. 24 |  Cf. the following statement by Dakić: “In Autoportrait, for example, there is a face, its eyes masked by a second mouth, and both mouths narrate fragments from two fairy tales in two languages; but it is so depersonalized that it is no longer important that this is me.” (Dakić 2009: 44). 25 |  “ Speech is presented here as central to identity formation. In place of eyes, which normally serve to identify a person, a second mouth appears as ‘identificatory organ’—the individual attains identity through speech.” (Spieler 2004: 61)

Fragile Translations The video installation shows the artist’s face in classical three-quarter pose against a black background in the manner of the Old Masters. Warm flesh tints and delicately delineated facial features almost recall Leonardo. Everything anecdotal has been omitted—there is no article of clothing that might indicate fashion or taste, no jewelry, no accessories: a face detached from space and time. Only the face has no eyes, and in their place is a second mouth. A minor intervention, yet it catapults us out of the world of the Old Masters and straight into the new millennium […]. The mouths speak, slowly but uniformly and very forcefully. They speak two distinct languages—one German and the other Bosnian. Their speech is not synchronized; rather, each mouth follows its own autonomous rhythm, now the one, now the other, and part of the time in parallel […]. The mouths speak textual collages from two fairy tales that revolve around the theme of identity as well as that of appearance and reality. (Spieler 2004: 61)

Figure 4. Danica Dakić, Autoportrait (1999), single-channel video installation, 4’35 min. Dakić reproduces these two fairy tales—a literary genre traditionally passed down by word of mouth—beside one another in her catalogue, written in the neat style of a child’s ‘best handwriting’ at school (fig. 5). Both fairy tales address the themes of language and voice. The Bosnian fairy tale tells of voices from all over the world that whir around on “the Island of Voices,” ghostly and bodiless (ibid.).26 The German fairy tale narrates the story of a lonely man, the Spottvogel (mocking bird), who is alone in the forest and imitates the voices of others. A ‘stranger’ who comes to the forest inquires perplexedly about the whereabouts of the people whose voices he can hear. The conclusion to the spoken fairy tale reads:

26 |  F or her translation of the Bosnian tale, the author would like to thank Sabina Pasic, Seattle.

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Thus, the German fairy tale contains both intramedial self-reflection as well as an intermedial commentary, which, however, proves to be paradoxical: in Dakić’s Autoportrait, the eyes should be deceived but have been eliminated—and not by chance. Contrary to this view, “the auditory aspect of the mouth” does not lead to an expansion of “the visus of the eyes” (Spieler 2004: 61), but to a detachment of language from the speaker—to a ‘passage between two languages,’ which the viewer seeks to generate to no avail, because, as the visual representation of the written text makes clear, we are dealing with parallel worlds. These narrated worlds negotiate common issues, but are by no means translations of one another. Rather, they are autonomous, independent narratives that may have been handed

Figure 5. Texts for Autoportrait: German and Bosnian fairy tales, as printed in the catalogue Voices and Images. Danica Dakić (2004)

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down in their respective cultures and linguistic communities (or written by the artist herself). This situation of “double-voicedness” (Bakhtin 1981: 325), in which one must listen to both tales simultaneously, becomes recognizable as a fundamental disruption, out of which only singular moments of transparency emerge.

C onclusion In these three media artworks, translations are performed as cultural negotiations of meaning and power. Situated in front of or even within the artwork, the recipient both observes these negotiations and becomes subject to them. It is no accident that both Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries in their font-based net art and Mona Hatoum in her video installation opt for English, the lingua franca of contemporary media art, as one of the two languages used.27 In both works, English is also the dominant language, as it represents the only and main soundtrack. The internet artwork selects a pragmatic path at the level of the written text, in that Korean and English characters appear alternately, both large and small; these two variants switch continuously. Due to the swift speed of both the frames and the speech, viewers must ‘choose’ one of the languages, even if they understand both. The underlay of an English-speaking woman’s voice in the Victoria version of the piece clearly suggests that the viewer reads the English and not the Korean text—which could be interpreted as a reflection upon a hegemonic strategy that is very difficult to escape. In Hatoum’s Measures of Distance, translation takes place aesthetically in several ways: the artist translates Arabic letters, represented visually, into spoken English communication that can be heard at the same time—a monolog superimposed onto an Arabic dialogue. It is impossible to ascertain whether we are dealing with identical texts here, even if we understand both languages, because the Arabic letters are only shown in excerpts. In Danica Dakić’s Autoportrait, the two oral narrations of fairy tales differ significantly, which is apparent even if the viewer cannot speak Bosnian or German, e.g., due to the recitation of a list of different languages in the Bosnian version (“francuski, holandski, ruski, tamil, kineski…” [Dakić 2009: 132]—French, Dutch, Russian, Tamil, Chinese), a passage that is not found in the German tale. The artist, speaking simultaneously in two languages, demonstrates that both ‘mouths’ have something different to say, that the narratives are not congruent, and that we are not, in fact, dealing with translations at all. In both of the other media artworks, translation processes prove similarly delicate, unstable, and uncertain.

27 |  Q uestioning the hegemonic position of English as ‘the world language’ is part of an ongoing debate about cultural translation, especially with regard to hybrid formations in multilingual societies (Bachmann-Medick 2013: 236).

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The aesthetics and practices of translation in media art operate at four closely entwined levels of ‘difference’: language, linguistic modality, media, and culture. Translingual, transmodal, transmedial, and transcultural: this series of ‘in between’ adjectives aptly describes the fragility of translation examined here. Within the context of cultural theory, all three artworks—notwithstanding their obvious temporal, cultural and aesthetic differences—might be characterized as attempts to enable the viewer to experience both the process and the reciprocity of translation, with all of the difficulties, disruptions, and insufficiencies that it entails: “[R] ather than theorize globalization as a general field of translation which, in spite of all the empiricization of apparently impersonal mechanical translation, in fact privileges host or target, ceaselessly and indefinitely, we should learn to think that the human subject in globalization is an island of languaging—unevenly understanding some languages and idioms with the ‘first’ language as monitor, within an entire field of traces, where ‘understanding’ follows no guarantee. A new call for a different ‘conceptual’ art, a different ‘simultaneous translation.’” (Spivak 2008) As media art reflects upon these contemporary topics, ‘simultaneous translation’ not only creates and thrusts upon the recipient an aesthetic of excessive demand upon him or her, challenging his or her abilities to read, listen, and comprehend. It also focuses on disruptions and the recurring moments of opacity and untranslatability that are intrinsically bound to processes of intralinguistic, linguistic, medial, and cultural translation. Translated by Lydia White

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R eferences Adelson, Leslie (2001): “Against Between: A Manifesto.” In: Dadi Iftikhar/Hassan Salah (eds.), Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, pp. 244–255. Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2007): “Neue Medien—neue Schriftlichkeit?” In: Mitteilungen des deutschen Germanistenverbandes 54/1, pp. 72–97. Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2010): “Multimodal—intertextuell—heteroglossisch: Sprach-Gestalten in ‘Web 2.0’-Umgebungen.” In: Arnulf Deppermann/Angelika Linke (eds.), Sprache intermedial: Stimme und Schrift, Bild und Ton, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 419–446. Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2013): “The Translational Turn.” In: Yves Gambier/ Luc van Doorslaer (eds.): Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 4, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 186–193. Bauman, Richard/Briggs, Charles L. (1990): “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 19, pp. 59–88. Benjamin, Walter (2007): “The Task of the Translator.” In: Benjamin: Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, pp. 69–82. Benthien, Claudia/Lau, Jordis/Marxsen, Maraike M. (2019): The Literariness of Media Art, London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994): The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bolter, Jay David/ Grusin, Richard (1999): Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT. Bhabha, Homi K. (1990): “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” interview by Jonathan Rutherford. In: Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 207–221. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981): “Discourse in the Novel.” In: Bakhtin: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 259–422. Choi, Suk Kyoung (2009): “The Moment between Site and Non-Site: Is What Remains Text or Context?” July 19, 2009 (http://skchoi.org/2009/07/19/the-moment-between-site-and-non-site/). Dakić, Danica (2004): “Voices and Images. Danica Dakić in Conversation with Dunja Blažević,” interview by Blažević, translated by Christopher Jenkin-Jones. In: Dakić (ed.), Voices and Images: Danica Dakić, Frankfurt, Revolver pp. 22–28. Exhibition catalogue. Danica Dakić (2009): “Ulrike Groos and Tihomir Milovac in Conversation with Danica Dakić,” interview by Groos and Milovac, translated by Gerrit Jackson. In: Danica Dakić, Cologne: König, pp. 41–52. Exhibition catalogue.

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Egoyan, Atom/Balfour, Ian (2004): Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, Cambridge, MA: MIT. Elleström, Lars (2010): “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In: Elleström (ed.): Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, Basingstroke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 11–48. Hayles, Katherine (2008): Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Heinrich, Christoph (ed.) (2004): Mona Hatoum, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Exhibition catalogue. Jäger, Ludwig (2004): Störung und Transparenz: Skizze zur performativen Logik des Medialen. In: Sybille Krämer (ed.), Performativität und Medialität, Munich: Fink. pp. 35–73. Jäger, Ludwig (2010a), “Epistemology of Disruptions: Thoughts on the Operative Logic of Media Semantics,” translated by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky. In: Jörgen Schäfer/ Peter Gendolla (eds.): Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 71–94. Jäger, Ludwig (2010b): “Intermedialität—Intramedialität—Transkriptivität: Überlegungen zu einigen Prinzipien der kulturellen Semiosis.” In: Arnulf Deppermann/Angelika Linke (eds.): Sprache intermedial: Stimme und Schrift, Bild und Ton, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 301–324. Jana, Reena/Tribe, Mark (2006): New Media Art, Cologne: Taschen. Jaworski, Adam (2014): “Metrolingual Art: Multilingualism and Heteroglossia.” In: International Journal of Bilingualism 18/2, pp. 134–158. Khan, Mehre Y. (2007): “‘Shaking up’ Vision: The Video Diary as Personal and Pedagogical Intervention in Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance.” In: Intercultural Education 18/4, pp. 317–334. Klein, Gabriele (2009): “Bodies in Translation. Tango als kulturelle Übersetzung.” In: Klein (ed.), Tango in Translation, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 15–38. Knowles, Kim (2015): “Performing Language, Animating Poetry: Kinetic Text in Experimental Cinema.” In: Journal of Film and Video 67/1, pp. 46–59. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1986): Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pollock, Griselda (2008): “Beyond Words: The Acoustics of Movement, Memory, and Loss in Three Video Works by Martina Attille, Mona Hatoum, and Tracey Moffatt.” In: Murat Aydemir/Alex Rotas (eds.): Migratory Settings, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 247–270. Pressman, Jessica (2009): “Don’t Close Your Eyes: The Flashing Art of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.” In: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Solo Show, Athens: Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, pp. 47–50. Exhibition catalogue.

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Schneider, Irmela (1998): “‘Please Pay Attention Please’: Überlegungen zur Wahrnehmung von Schrift und Bild innerhalb der Medienkunst.” In: Julika Griem (ed.), Bildschirmfiktionen: Interferenzen zwischen Literatur und neuen Medien, Tübingen: Narr, pp. 223–243. Schuster, Peter-Klaus et al. (eds.) (2005): Four from Korea: Kim Changkyum, Oh Inhwan, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Jung Yeondoo, Berlin: Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst. Exhibition catalogue. Spieler, Reinhard (2004): “Voices of Identity,” translated by Christopher Jenkin-Jones. In: Danica Dakić (ed.): Voices and Images. Danica Dakić, Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, pp. 60–65. Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty (2008): “More Thoughts on Cultural Translation,” April 2008 (http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/spivak/en/print). Tribe, Marc (2006): “An Ornithology of Net Art” (http://www2.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/entry15274.shtm). Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries: (2002): “Distance, Homelessness, Anonymity, and Insignificance: An Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries,” interview by Thom Swiss, December 15, 2002. In: The Iowa Review Web 12 (https://elmcip.net/critical-writing/distance-homelessness-anonymity-and-insignificance-interview-young-hae-chang-heavy [presently not fully online due to revision requirements]). Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (2005): “Intercultural medium literature digital,” interview by Hyun-Joo Yoo, February 2005 (http://www.dichtung-digital. org/2005/2/Yoo/index-engl.htm).

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Framing and Translation in Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes Johannes C. P. Schmid

Madgermanes (2016) is a work of graphic literature that transcends genres: author Birgit Weyhe intertwines her own transnational biography with the experiences of Mozambican contract workers whose witness accounts she translates into three fictionalized characters. The story consequently oscillates between the generic cornerstones of autobiography, documentary, and realist fiction. Furthermore, Weyhe thoroughly explores the concepts of memory, home, and the experience of migration. In Madgermanes, she retells the history of the Mozambican contract workers who were lured to the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s with the promise of being able to study, but were then forced to perform menial labor. After German reunification, these “madgermanes”—a self-chosen play on the phrase “made in Germany”—were sent home without compensation, only to find that their wages, which had been entrusted to the Mozambican regime, had been embezzled and that the Federal Republic of Germany was unwilling to compensate them. The narrative explores how this group was formed and their lives permanently affected by the experience of German exile. Madgermanes documents this largely-ignored chapter of German history and lends these workers a voice and visibility, while at the same time negotiating the experience of the migrant laborers. Weyhe, who spent her childhood and youth in Uganda and Kenya, translates the experiences of the madgermanes in dialogue with her own biography, both being products of cross-cultural translation (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2009: 8). This paper will outline Madgermanes as an attempt to perform acts of both cultural and medial translation, and as a series of dynamically interwoven processes that manifest themselves in the text (cf. Benthien/Klein 2017). It will also examine Weyhe’s position as the author and cultural translator. The primary subject matter of this investigation will be aspects of Weyhe’s autobiographical frame narrative as well as its paratext, as they establish a frame of reference that the reader is encouraged to apply to the narrative. Secondly, excerpts from the narrative will be discussed with regard to the strategies of translation that Weyhe employs to communicate the experiences of the madgermanes.

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M ediation as translation and framing The term ‘translation’ first and foremost denotes a linguistic concept, which has subsequently ‘traveled’ toward becoming a term used to describe cultural phenomena (Bachmann-Medick 2009: 5). Here, the object that is being translated has shifted from the smaller units of linguistic codes and their transposition toward a more global exchange of concepts such as experiences, identities, and encounters. However, the basic principle remains that translation necessarily combines transformation and interpretation (cf. Benjamin 1972). In cultural studies, translation can also describe “the movement of peoples around the globe,” people like the madgermanes, “for translation is not just the transfer of texts from one language into another, it is now rightly seen as a process of negotiation between texts and between cultures, a process during which all kinds of transactions take place mediated by the figure of the translator.” (Bassnett 2002: 6) Therefore, according to Bachmann-Medick, translation “becomes, on the one hand, a condition for global relations of exchange (‘global translatability’) and, on the other, a medium especially liable to reveal cultural differences, power imbalances and the scope for action.” (2012: 23) This means that these processes are envisioned as dynamic and reciprocal: the term “[t]ranslation here is more than just a bridge between two unrelated poles, more than a one-way transfer process; instead, the concept is a complex sociological, relational one which opens up translation to reciprocity and mutual transformation.” (Bachmann-Medick 2009: 7) Closing a circle of conceptual travel and in light of this cultural enrichment, translation can be reapplied to describe intermedial transposition and the production of textual artifacts (cf. Benthien/Klein 2017: 10–1)—and can also be applied to the process of producing a comic text per se (Böger 2017: 75). John Frow, for instance, employs the term to describe the process of activating but also dynamically negotiating a genre frame during the specific process of reading a text within a given context. He writes that “texts translate (activate, perform, but also transform) the complex meanings made available by the structure of the genre, which in turn translates the information structurally embedded in the situation to which it responds.” (Frow 2006: 16) The reading process can thus be described as a continuous process of translation between preconceived forms of knowledge and the textual artifact at hand, as well as a (re-)alignment with and (re-)adjustment of genre knowledges. This chapter will first explore Madgermanes with regard to the genre framing that the reader is presented with. As stated above, the processes of translation and framing are to be understood as dynamic and reciprocal: every translation process recontextualizes information within a new frame of reference. Likewise, a frame of reference is mandatory for generating meaning as it narrows down the ubiquity of potential meanings to an (ideally) manageable amount. While various elements contribute to the creation of the individual frame of reference for the specific reader, this paper will focus on textual factors that seek to establish a socially

Framing and Translation in Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes

shared frame of interpretation. These instances are, firstly, the paratext, which as the outer, material frame of the book not only presents its physical boundary but also constitutes a transitional sphere between text and context that largely consists of aspects of genre pragmatics (cf. Genette 1997; Wirth 2013). Moving into the text, narrative framing will be considered in a second step. Here, the structure of the narrative discourse will be examined in order to describe further layers of the framework through which the author channels the generation of meaning.

Framing M adgermanes The larger narrative structure of Madgermanes comprises three main chapters that focus on the experiences of one fictional character in a group of friends and presents different takes on the characters’ shared experiences. All three chapters are presented as interviews in which the characters address the reader as the interviewer and report on their experiences. Importantly though, the book begins with a prologue that serves as a frame story and establishes the author Birgit Weyhe as both a character in the narrative and as the person who is translating the actual experiences being related to her into the fictional account. Weyhe thus frames her fictionalized documentary of the Madgermanes with an autobiographical account of her own experiences of cross-cultural movement and displacement. From the very beginning, her position as the author is authenticated by the inclusion of particularly subjective experiences as part of the migration experience. Weyhe pays special attention to the perceptions and emotions that overwhelmed her upon arriving in Uganda (Weyhe 2016: 8) and would accompany her throughout her childhood (ibid.: 10). But not only her subjective sensory experiences establish her as an apt cultural translator: she also refers to documentary evidence of her childhood. Photographs of her first and last day at school adapted into drawings attest to the timespan that she spent in East Africa (ibid.). Together with this account of her childhood and upbringing, Weyhe also includes a brief travel narrative that explains how she developed her material. The autobiographic narrative thus sets the frame within which the fictionalized stories are to be understood. It serves as an authenticating strategy that testifies to the veracity of the material presented, but also to Weyhe’s own (trans)cultural capital and authority in her position as the translator. At the end of the prologue, Weyhe thanks her interview partners and presents the work of translation through the visual metaphor of condensation (see fig. 1). The speech bubbles of her many interview partners blend and point towards the three fictional characters José, Basilio, and Anabella, while the accompanying texts claims that the accounts of her interview partners have ‘flowed’ into their stories (in German: “sind eingeflossen”). The frame narrative thus establishes that the following three stories are based on Weyhe’s documentary research, although they have been fictionalized. Importantly, it also suggests that Weyhe’s

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own biographical background qualifies her for the task of translating her research into narrative fiction. But even before the narrative itself beings, Birgit Weyhe establishes her authority as the translator within the book’s paratextual frame. The book contains a dedication that ostensibly refers, among others, to Weyhe’s brother who lives in Mozambique, which reads as follows: “To my Mozambican family—Alex, Gianni, Olivia, and Oscar.”1 The dedication, of course, does not only or even pri1 |  A ll of the passages from Madgermanes quoted here have been translated by Johannes P. C. Schmid.

Framing and Translation in Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes

marily address the dedicatee. As Genette suggests, “dedicating is a public act that the reader is […] called on to witness,” which “proclaims a relationship, whether intellectual or personal, actual or symbolic, and this proclamation is always at the service of the work […].” (1997: 134–5) The reader is thus made aware from the very beginning that Weyhe has a personal relationship with Mozambique. The fact that the “family” members are addressed by their first names only emphasizes the close personal bond. Only in her acknowledgments following the core text does the receptive reader learn their full names (Weyhe 2016: 238). Here, Weyhe also provides a list of her ten interview partners, to whom she expresses her gratitude. Some are cited by their full names, but most by their first names only, and one interview goes by the pseudonym “Anonyma.” Again, these references serve as a double gesture: they address the interview partners directly, but also showcase the fact that Birgit Weyhe has had privileged access to information that the reader has not. A quote is attributed to one of them, David Z., on the front cover. It reads: “When I came to Germany, I hoped we could study. Soon after our arrival, I realized that that was not the point. We were supposed to work, nothing else.” This quote not only serves as a teaser for the narrative, but the reader is made aware from the very beginning that the narrative, though fictionalized, is based on actual experiences for which fiction is only the lingua franca that will allow them to be easily communicated.

V isual metaphors and symbolic juxtaposition As discussed above, Madgermanes constitutes an attempt to translate both subject matter—a reciprocal cross-cultural encounter—and form, especially since the author communicates these experiences through the visual language of the comic. In this section, metaphor will be explored as one of the central strategies of translation that Weyhe employs. In this regard, metaphor, like translation, is not merely a linguistic process, but also describes, as Lakoff and Johnson discuss in their seminal “conceptual metaphor theory” (CMT), fundamental human thought processes of “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (2003: 5; italics in the original). One conceptual domain, regardless of its semiotic manifestation, is understood in terms of another. This usually involves an abstract conceptual target domain that is represented through a concrete source domain (cf. Forceville 2009: 20). Thus, in Madgermanes, for instance, the concept of memory is depicted as a female dog in heat (Weyhe 2016: 22), as having a big head (ibid.: 99), or as needles (ibid.: 165)—depending on how different characters conceive of it and what aspects of memory are most relevant to them. Weyhe chooses the specific metaphor of pollen to portray the experience of migration as a whole and intertwines migration, memory, and identity both at the beginning and the end of her story (see fig. 2).

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In the beginning, she accompanies these images with the question “What are memories made of?” (ibid.: 7) and, at the end, she relates the image to the experiences of migrants, including her own experience. She writes: “We are all without bonds, without an anchor, floating between the cultures. Regardless of whether we return or stay.” (Ibid.: 236) In the underlying logic of the metaphor, both migrants

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and memories are likened to light, free-flowing objects, floating in the wind, but also ready to blossom and fertilize. Pollen as the target domain provides a concrete frame of reference for abstract and rather intangible experiences. The latter statement can be attributed to the third fictionalized character Annabella, but, especially in combination with the metaphor of the pollen, it appears as a general statement

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that applies to the actual person Birgit Weyhe as well. The concepts of memory and migration are thus both intertwined and conceptualized in terms of pollen: they are both fruitful and productive, but uncertain and in flux. A seed might land on fertile ground, or it might not. Besides this plant metaphor, Weyhe also includes the animal metaphor of migratory birds (ibid.: 15). Thus, she maps these naturally occurring phenomena on her characters to allow the reader to understand the complex cultural interrelations that have shaped the lives of the madgermanes. At the same time, these metaphors from the domain of nature highlight the fact that migration is not a human invention, but rather a larger aspect of the world. Using a second strategy, Weyhe juxtaposes and superimposes signs attributed to the two cultures of origin, Mozambique and Germany in a process of integrating and pairing images and visual codes. Here, Weyhe relies on the reader to translate the information presented and, through his/her inferences, to transform the text into a meaningful whole. Weyhe juxtaposes symbolically charged objects with designs from both cultural contexts, as is the case in the sequence of three images seen in fig. 3. One excerpt from the prologue is particularly instructive in this regard: the first image positions a photograph of a young black man in European clothing in front of an ornamental banner with an animal motif (ibid.: 15, see fig. 3). The two panels beneath show, firstly, a mask beside a banner of the football club FC Erfurt and, secondly, the superimposed outlines of a face and a broken mask. The accompanying text reads: “To them the question of belonging and home is fundamental.” (Ibid.: 15) These two visual approaches attempt to make sense of the binary split between Mozambique and Eastern Germany. The direct juxtaposition of the metonymic cultural emblems first and foremost shows that answering the question of belonging with one side or the other does not yield any satisfying results—but neither does the solution of using ‘both.’ Superimposing the mask as a symbol of the culture of the birthplace onto the face of a human being distorts the image and makes it unrecognizable. Both attempts to manifest the cross-cultural experience as convenient visual entities fail: neither selecting between two opposites nor attempting to contain both within the concept of the self provides any satisfying answer. What follows in the narrative is Weyhe’s description of how she conducted and compiled the interviews, and subsequently created the three representative characters. This may point to a solution: working through the experience in a continuous process of approximating that experience, Weyhe performs an attempt at cultural translation that is by Weyhe’s own definition neither conclusive nor exhaustive. The stories that follow present the accounts of acquainted characters and their different perspectives of shared experiences. Both fictional and historical events are thus revisited and reevaluated, but not consolidated; rather, the experiences function only processually, in translation.

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C onclusion As the failed attempts to juxtapose and superimpose identities show, experiences of migration must be transformed and translated before they can be communicated. One such strategy of translation is metaphor, and another is fictionalization. Madgermanes chiefly presents an attempt to translate cross-cultural experiences and encounters into a coherent story. Both metaphor and fiction can, of course, only constitute attempts to portray these experiences and not straightforward documentation. Rather, Weyhe seeks to represent the individual subjective experience. Taking liberties as the author and cultural translator, Birgit Weyhe goes to great lengths to establish herself as trustworthy and qualified. Accordingly, she reveals the relevant aspects of her own life story and her private experiences. At the same time, the autobiographical prologue establishes a frame of reference for the reader that clarifies how Weyhe portrays the accounts related to her through the prism of her own experience. This conglomerate of fiction and nonfiction thus allows Weyhe to employ translation as a strategy that does not adhere to any particular principle of ‘fidelity’ to the original, but rather highlights its creative potential and also the special responsibility that resides with the translator.

R eferences Bassnett, Susan (2002): Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge. Benthien, Claudia/Klein, Gabriele (2017): “Praktiken des Übersetzens und Rahmens: Zur Einführung.” In: Claudia Benthien/Gabriele Klein (eds.), Übersetzen und Rahmen: Praktiken medialer Transformationen, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 9–23. Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2009): “Introduction: The Translational Turn.” In: Translation Studies 2/1, pp. 2–16. Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2012): “Translation—A Concept for the Study of Culture.” In: Birgit Neumann/Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Benjamin, Walter (1972): “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” In: Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. IV/1, edited by Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 9–21. Böger, Astrid (2017): “Kreative Zwischenräume: Medienästhetische Strategien des Rahmens und Übersetzens in Graphic Novels.” In: Claudia Benthien/Gabriele Klein (eds.), Übersetzen und Rahmen: Praktiken medialer Transformationen, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 75–88. Forceville, Charles (2009): “Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agendas for research.” In: Charles J. Forceville/Eduardo

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Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal Metaphor, Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 19–44. Frow, John (2006): Genre, London: Routledge. Genette, Gérard (1997): Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, translated by Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George/Johnson, Mark (2003): Metaphors We Live By, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Weyhe, Birgit (2016): Madgermanes, Berlin: avant. Wirth, Uwe (2013): “Rahmenbrüche, Rahmenwechsel: Nachwort des Herausgebers, welches aus Versehen des Druckers zu einem Vorwort gemacht wurde.” In: Uwe Wirth (ed.), Rahmenbrüche, Rahmenwechsel, Berlin: Kadmos.

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Translation as Entanglement Staging Cordelia’s Survival in She She Pop’s King Lear Adaptation Testament (2010) Martin Jörg Schäfer

1. S etting the scene The German feminist performance collective She She Pop received wide acclaim for its 2010 production Testament: Verspätete Vorbereitungen zum Generationenwechsel nach Lear. The production has become broadly popular in German-speaking countries (and beyond) due to the way that it discusses the meaning of kinship and care. Its title roughly translates as ‘Testament: Belated Preparations for Generational Change Following Lear,’ but could also mean ‘generational change according to Lear.’ The point of reference is William Shakespeare’s 1606 drama The Tragedy of King Lear, a play about succession gone horribly wrong: King Lear’s attempt to transfer power to his favorite daughter Cordelia fails spectacularly. The older generation’s plans to receive care from the younger one after passing on the baton is thwarted; the play ends with the catastrophic death of Lear and all three of his daughters. In contrast, She She Pop’s rather free adaptation is more of an examination of and confrontation with Shakespeare’s Lear. The production presents a story line in which the catastrophic attempt to transfer power is prevented in the first place: the performers are joined by their ‘real’ fathers on stage in order to discuss how to avoid the catastrophic and fatal conclusion to Shakespeare’s play. In the closing image, all of them join together to form a rather cozy-looking pile of entangled bodies, taking the place of the heap of corpses presented at the end of The Tragedy of King Lear. Several notions of translation are at stake in Testament: for one, the tragedy is adapted into a both humorous and moving mixed-media performance piece, but the unsuccessful attempt to transfer power in the Shakespearean play can also be read as an allegory of a ‘failed’ translation. (M. J. Schäfer 2010: 59–61). By adapting Shakespeare’s Lear, Testament aims to transform a ‘failed’ translation into a ‘suc-

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cessful’ one. At first sight, this analogy of notions of translation, adaptation, and the transfer of power seems somewhat imprecise: the two generations are shown finding common ground at the end of the She She Pop production, which makes it impossible to neatly distinguish between an ‘original’ (King Lear) and its ‘translation’ (his daughter Cordelia). Instead, the two sides end up entangled in mutual family affection. However, the following reading of the She She Pop adaptation proposes a formal notion of translation as entanglement: as a practice relating and linking various contexts to one another both reciprocally and in an open-ended fashion.1 In this vein, the image of affectionately entangled bodies at the end of Testament also offers a transformed or at least displaced model of translation. Such a displacement is already at work in the ironic ways that the production pays reverence to the traditional trope of staging a text, in particular to German discussions about how to adapt Shakespeare for the stage. After situating the performance within contemporary theater as well as within the German-speaking tradition of Shakespeare adaptations, the following considerations will offer an analysis of the different modes of translation on display in Testament.

2. S ituated in theater She She Pop emerged from the first generation of what is now referred to as the Gießen Institute of Applied Theater Studies, one of the leading export hits of the German theater system, which includes names like Rimini Protokoll and René Pollesch. The members of the group were students of Hans-Thies Lehmann, whose 1999 study Postdramatic Theatre gained international influence after its 2006 English publication by providing an alternative to the use of vague concepts such as ‘postmodernity.’ The book was not only read as a concise description of what international theater since the 1960s had become, but—against its own stated intentions—was also received as a prescription for what ‘state-of-the-art’ theater and performance should look like: a theater that exposes the mediality and materiality of its own media and materials instead of staging dramatic texts. Although these descriptions and supposed ‘norms’ have increasingly been replaced by overtly social works, activist works, and media hybrids since the early 2010s (Lavender 2016: 7–32), it is nevertheless worth remembering that many of them make use of notions of translation and transfer: theater and performance at the turn of the millennium, as Lehmann wrote in 1999, tended to explore the aesthetic codes of the classical Western avant-gardes (from 1900 to the 1930s) in order to probe and conceptualize 1 |  E lena Basile proposes “entanglement” as a term to describe ‘queer’ and traditional concepts of translation as well as their sexual implications. While this notion is in no way excluded in this article, the following use of ‘entanglement’ is more interested in the structural dimensions of translation, which, in turn, are also at stake in the concept ‘queer’ (cf. Basile 2018).

Translation as Entanglement

gestures deemed fit for the emerging age of global information (Lehmann 2006: 16–18). In Postdramatic Theatre, overt or implicit reworkings of Brecht’s defamiliarization techniques figure most prominently (ibid: 32–33). They also account for many of She She Pop’s theatrical and performative strategies. However, the evocation of Shakespeare’s King Lear in Testament opens up an additional field of reference as well as an additional sphere of translation. Testament enters into a complex relationship with one of the most prominent ‘traditional’ plays (from the genre Lehmann would call “dramatic” theater [2006: 29–31]): since World War II, the King Lear endgame about the destruction of kinship, the state, and, ultimately, of bare life itself has been widely considered to have replaced Hamlet as the “greatest” of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Foakes 1993: 1–11). Whenever King Lear is staged, what is still (albeit sometimes ironically) called “the Western canon” (Bloom 1994) is also on display and is reaffirmed, retranslated, reframed in one way or another—not so much as a fixed canon but as a canonization effected by constant circulation through different translations and media: from plays to the stage to the visual arts to film and back again (Damrosch 2003; Apter 2013). She She Pop’s Testament thrives on its ambiguous relationship with the process of canonization. The production plays on Shakespeare’s status as an author of ‘world literature’ while clearly positioning itself against the understanding of the theater of which Shakespeare has become the epitome. Testament was created outside of the state-sponsored German theater business as a part of the independent theater and performance scene, which also relies heavily on state subsidies (Fülle 2016: 241–272). The production was quickly canonized in its own way: Testament received several national awards. Above all, it was invited to attend the Berliner Theatertreffen, a festival of what are considered to be the most outstanding German-speaking productions of a single season (Archiv Theatertreffen 2011). Under the aegis of the Goethe-Institut, another supertitled version of the production also toured internationally, both within and beyond the European Union (Goethe-Institut 2018). As the standard bastion of ‘German culture’ outside of Germany, Goethe-Institut apparently considered Shakespeare’s King Lear to be universally known and a free German adaptation therefore to be a particularly accessible piece of ‘German culture.’2 2 |  T he work of Goethe-Institut reaffirms the international significance of the German theater and performance business. Even after the 2008 financial crisis, it is still the best-funded theater business in the world. Due to Germany’s economic hegemony, but also due to the long-standing German tradition of state sponsored art, the system as a whole can still afford to work without being completely beholden to commercial considerations. It is thus able to attract international artists (albeit for guest performances), it is able to adapt and appropriate their work and aesthetics, and is then able to reexport their aesthetic codes, and in turn becomes highly influential for what has been called the interwoven international performance scene. On the one hand, despite the success

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3. S ituated within the context of the ‘G erman S hakespeare ’ Knowingly or unknowingly, the Testament production is also part of the tradition of the German-speaking Shakespeare reception. The ‘deutscher Shakespeare’ has achieved proverbial status (Blinn 1993): the phantasms of nationality and a national literature that emerged in the 18th century went hand in hand with the idea that Shakespeare was, in his heart, not so much an English as he was a German author. German intellectuals tried to construct something resembling a national literature by imitating, adapting, and translating Shakespeare. Inevitably, the name Shakespeare itself had to be claimed as something that had belonged to a cultural German nation from the start—although this nation was yet to manifest (Paulin 2003: 371–435). In 1797, Shakespeare’s seminal German translator, August Schlegel, wrote to his seminal German biographer, Ludwig Tieck: “Ich hoffe, Sie werden […] beweisen, Shakespeare sey kein Engländer gewesen. Wie kam er nur unter die frostigen stupiden Seelen auf dieser brutalen Insel? […] [D]ie englischen Kritiker verstehen sich gar nicht auf Shakespeare.” (Blinn 1988: 64)3 The first chair of the German Shakespeare society stated in 1867: [W]ir wollen den Engländern Shakespeare gleichsam entenglisieren, wir wollen ihn verdeutschen, verdeutschen im weitesten und tiefsten Sinn des Worts, d.h. wir wollen nach Kräften dazu beitragen, daß er das, was er bereits ist, ein deutscher Dichter, immer mehr im wahrsten und tiefsten Sinne des Wortes werde. (Ulrici 1867: iii) 4

The fantasy of Shakespeare’s cultural assimilation lingered on as a stereotype until well into the 1930s and only faded away after the catastrophe of nationalism. In its tautological absurdity, the German claim to Shakespeare hints at the power dynamics inherent to translation: What is considered worth translating? How is it reframed during the process of translation? Who can claim credit for its results? The cracks in translation that would become visible from 20th and 21st century postcolonial and decolonical perspectives (Bhabha 1994: 303–337; Spivak 1993: 179–200; Spivak 1999: 312ff.) were already on display among the competing nationalisms of the 19th-century Western sphere. of productions like Testament, the independent, freelance work of groups and collectives such as She She Pop is still precarious for its members. On the other hand, a production like this plays a part in the creation of something resembling a ‘global’ hegemonic standard. 3 |  “I hope you will be able to prove that Shakespeare was not an Englishman. How did he end up among the frosty and empty-headed souls on that brutal island? […] The English critics do not understand Shakespeare at all.” (My translation, MJS)  4 |  “We want to de-anglicize Shakespeare; we want to Germanize him, that is: we want to make every effort for him to become what he already is, a German poet, in the fullest and most profound sense of the word.” (My translation, MJS)

Translation as Entanglement

The German claim to Shakespeare’s cultural assimilation has hardly ever stood the scrutiny of practice. Above all, Shakespearean obscenities and brutalities bear witness to the proximity of Shakespeare’s globe theater to the local bear hunt arena in the entertainment district south of the River Thames. However, they hardly fit in with the notions of high art that Germany’s emerging bourgeoisie was determined to use to distinguish Shakespeare’s text (M. J. Schäfer 2018). The Tragedy of King Lear is perhaps the most prominent case in point. This play about the absolute king who falls from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows—i.e., nakedness, madness, and death—has often been considered to be unplayable for the actors and also unbearable for the audience. Moreover, it lacks a distinctive German translation like the one Schlegel provided for Hamlet. At the turn of the 19th century, it was only staged in heavily redacted versions; up until the 1840s, generally with a focus on the disintegration of a bourgeois family instead of the state; and, moreover, usually with a happy ending (Drews 1932: 27–122). After all, the scandal of the play is the death of the Jesus-like, ‘good daughter’ Cordelia contrary to all the versions of the Lear-plot Shakespeare made use of. At the point where everything seems to have made a turn for the better, Lear makes a shock entrance with the dead Cordelia in his arms. Cordelia’s father, who has just recovered from his madness, then dies from grief (Weiß 2004: 29–48). The 18th and 19th-century stage versions all have an at least partly happy ending: Cordelia always survives, even when her father does not. The first German production of King Lear, staged in Hamburg in 1778, was a case in point. On the stages of London, Shakespeare’s Lear had by this point been displaced by a popular romance loosely based on it (Tate 1681). Shakespeare’s Lear only made it back in the late 1830s. In Germany, Friedrich Ludwig Schröder presented a heavily redacted German translation of the original in the late 18th century (Schröder 1778). However, Schröder followed the English critic Samuel Johnson in believing that Cordelia’s death unnecessarily offended middle-class sensibilities: Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause contrary to the natural ideas of justice […]. […] I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor. (Wimsatt 1960: 98)

Schröder devised a family play in the mold of the German Trauerspiel (‘mourning play’) in place of Shakespeare’s political tragedy. His shortening and the happy ending he wrote for King Lear were adopted in various subsequent German adaptations of the play. It remained popular on the German stage until well into the 1840s, by which point Shakespeare was already a well-established literary figure (Drews 1932: 219–225). This was when the ‘tragic Lear’ reasserted itself, while the older versions were cast aside and seen as an embarrassment to the ‘German’

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Shakespeare. It was not until She She Pop’s 2010 Testament that Cordelia managed to survive once more.

4. R ehearsing translation She She Pop’s Testament puts various notions of translation to the test. All these notions reframe the contexts that are taken up, displaced, and presented in a different light. The ‘translation’ never appears as something separate from an ‘original’ that is either overcome or hypostasized. Rather, the different modes of translation remain entangled with that which they translate in that they draw attention to their source and therefore to the process of translation itself. Testament does not care about the body politic of the state but finds the political in the private: as in Schröder’s version of the play, it is all about the family. Although mothers are already conspicuously absent in Shakespeare’s King Lear, She She Pop moves beyond Schröder’s bourgeois family, and Shakespeare’s play is examined by a self-proclaimed ‘collective’ instead. Tongue in cheek, She She Pop take up the vocabulary of the alternative Western culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing loosely on idiosyncratic notions of Marxism and Anarchism, people formed economic, political, and artistic ‘collectives’ to practice lifestyles that went beyond Western consumer culture—which also meant beyond the restraints of the biological family (A. Schäfer 2015: 80–88). Moreover, this style of feminism clearly seems to have been understood in a post-feminist way: one of the performers is biologically male; his stage persona identifies as gay. The double ‘She’ in the name of the collective not only doubles the female pronoun but also evokes the word ‘chichi,’ which is German slang for unnecessary extravagance, fiddle-faddle, even nonsense. The ‘Pop’ in ‘She She Pop’ was a strong statement at the time of its establishment in the late 1990s: She She Pop work with popular culture and take their source material from popular culture (and thus from the very consumer culture that the collectives of the 1970s took up arms against): their work goes against notions of high art (Groß/Lehmann 2012). After producing performances for more than a decade, She She Pop’s King Lear was their first foray into high art or at least into an examination of high art: Shakespeare’s supposedly greatest play. Nevertheless, in his own time, Shakespeare was the most popular playwright of popular culture. She She Pop’s examination of King Lear uses pop—with a lot of movie references and pop songs—to reappropriate something that was once popular culture within its original context before it was canonized. A self-proclaimed collective adapts a play about family issues; feminism and post-feminism meet a literary text notorious for Lear’s misogynist outbursts and his hatred for his two evil-minded daughters. Testament uses a hybrid aesthetics that intermingles codes and draws its mostly humorous effects from their confrontation and interconnection with one another.

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The premise of Testament is that the performers meet their fathers on stage in order to prevent the Shakespeare play from becoming a tragedy, instead retrieving the playfulness. The reference to (and reverence for) 1970s feminist performance art is more than just a nod to the trope of ‘authenticity’ (Goldberg 1979: 98–124): in their performances, the members of She She Pop expose themselves at an autobiographical level that is both physical and verbal. There is always a lot of talking in a She She Pop production. Shakespeare’s Lear provides both a point of reference for Testament and material that they can talk about throughout the performance. At the same time, She She Pop productions emphasize that this kind of authentic self is always framed by cultural codes. It is a ‘cultural performance’—fluctuating over the vast spectrum between Richard Schechner and Judith Butler’s approaches (Schechner 1993; Butler 1999), but never leaving their playfulness behind. Annemarie Matzke, a She She Pop member and also a professor of applied theater at the University of Hildesheim, states: Wir zeigen Rollen, aber die werden aus uns selbst entwickelt: Es ist ein Spiel mit Selbstentwürfen auf der Bühne, mit Fiktionen und Bildern der eigenen Person. Dabei geht es nicht darum, sich selbst darzustellen […], sondern eine Projektion seiner selbst zu entwerfen […]: Ich selbst als etwas anderes. (Matzke 2005: 94) 5

In Testament, these stage personae, who are all in their mid to late thirties, comment and reflect upon the relevance of the generational conflict presented in King Lear for their current lives. They also put the possibilities of circumventing the tragedy’s catastrophic ending to the test: instead of succumbing to the tragic advance of Shakespeare’s Lear, in She She Pop’s Testament, things are halted in the manner of a Brechtian Lehrstück (“learning-play”). Five times (in five acts), an iconic Lear scene is presented in a way that makes fun of the grandiosity and showmanship ascribed to traditional Shakespearean acting. Afterwards, this scene is talked over, rehearsed in a different manner, and then rerehearsed: how can the catastrophe looming on the horizon be prevented? Sometimes, alternatives like this are put to the test as well. There is a specific notion of ‘practice’ at stake here: practice is conceived as trying something out, as rehearsal, as taking something up, playing it through, and thus opening it up to a potentially different future (Buchmann/Lafer/Ruhm 2016; Matzke 2016). In many of their early productions, She She Pop worked and experimented with audience participation. In Testament, instead of the audience, they bring autobiographical material onto the stage: the fathers of three of the four performers are dressed up in what seems to be their Sunday best, but for an occasion that is  5 |  “We do present roles, but they are developed from within ourselves: it is a play with self-sketches on stage, with fictions and images of one’s own person. It is not a question of presenting oneself […], but of designing a projection of oneself […]: I myself as someone else.” (My translation, MJS)

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not too special. These men in their late sixties and early seventies enter to great fanfare and take their seats stage left in armchairs that seem to take up the familiar German trope of the armchair as a throne. Three screens in the middle project images of these three kings, but are used to display all kinds of effects and symbols. The stage floor in the middle is reminiscent of both an arena and a 1970s bourgeois living room. Stage right, a German King Lear text is projected using an overhead projector and can be written on using a permanent marker. The ruffles worn by the four She She Pop performers pay tribute to the costumes that the characters of noble men and women have been stuffed into in countless historical German Shakespeare productions since the 19th century. The rest of their outfits range from athlete to soldier. At some points, in place of live discussion, the performers reenact email conversations and their rehearsal work with their fathers: the whole group seems to use headphones to listen to transcripts, which are then repeated, seemingly by the person who uttered them in the first place. At another point, emails that were supposedly exchanged before the show are read out. One of the fathers seems to repeat his own point of view regarding his daughter’s performance work: “Was mich am meisten stört, das ist die Art und Weise, wie ihr Leib und Seele auf der Bühne entblößt. […] Das ist Exhibitionismus; sonst nichts.” (She She Pop 2011: 1:12:00– 1.12.33)6 She She Pop take an ironic approach toward exhibiting that which is supposedly private. After all, the man on stage plays himself and exposes himself by complaining. This exhibition of what is supposedly private also goes hand in hand with multiple levels of defamiliarization: the performers presumably hear the reading of a supposedly authentic text through headphones and then simultaneously repeat it—which shows that the text was memorized beforehand anyway. The ‘authentic’ people in front of us are quintessentially staged; their staging is presented as a reframing of the rehearsal process.

5. D oing theater , undoing the ‘G erman S hakespeare ’ In the German tradition, there is nothing as ‘natural’ as the characters in Shakespeare’s plays: “Natur! Natur! nichts so Natur als Shäkespears Menschen,” as a famous saying by the young Goethe goes (Goethe 1987: 285)7. The influence of this ideology can be felt all the way up into Harold Bloom’s 1998 study Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human and beyond. According to Bloom, Shakespeare’s characters create and reveal the essence of humanity, at least in the Western world (Bloom 1998: 1–18). In contrast, She She Pop play with the very theatricality of 6 |  “What bothers me the most is the way you expose your body and soul on stage. […] That is exhibitionism nothing else.” (My translation, MJS) 7 |  “ Nature! Nature! Nothing as natural as Shakespeare’s human beings.” (My translation, MJS)

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Shakespeare’s theater. According to a prominent reading in the vein of Goethe and Bloom, the mad Lear in act III is ‘man’ in the twofold sense of the word, reduced to the bare life of his creaturely core: naked in a storm on the heath, exposed to the forces of nature (ibid: 476–543). An interpretation like this overlooks Lear’s exposure not only to nature, but also to theater: Lear has met Edgar, who feigns being a madman in order to survive and manages to fool his audience: “[T]hou art the thing itself,” Lear comments, as he begins to undress (Shakespeare 2001: 279). His nakedness is, firstly, imitation and, secondly, the imitation of theatrical pretense. Lear’s nakedness is all about theater and has nothing to do with authenticity. This will also be true of the near-nakedness of the fathers presented toward the end of Testament. This kind of defamiliarization pervades She She Pop’s production. Based on the five Shakespearean acts, the She She Pop performers (who sometimes play Lear’s daughters) and their fathers (who sometimes pose as Lear) play out five problems that relate to the issue of taking care of aging parents: disputes about inheritance, housing in old age, fear of physical decay, the possibility of reconciliation between the generations, and, at the very end, the inevitability of death. Shakespeare’s text emerges as material in the literal sense: the production makes use of Wolf Graf von Baudissins Lear translation from the Schlegel/Tieck-edition. These translations of ‘Shakespeare’ were canonized as the third German classic alongside Goethe and Schiller in the 1860s (Paulin 2003: 429–435). Schlegel and Tieck’s Lear is printed on single leaves of paper, which are glued together as a text scroll. During the course of the evening, the performers work through this scroll and gradually accumulate a pile of paper and texts in the rear corner of the stage. They discuss each of the sections they read, address, or reenact while projecting them onto a large screen. The performers use a permanent marker to make entries and to highlight important passages, the number of the act, or the location of the scene in question. This projection is always visible to the public as a printed text, which the performers comment upon, divide up into material components, send using different media, and then reassemble, but also discard during the course of the evening. They quite literally present a textual scene. One of the images that comes up within the first few minutes seems to set the agenda: the body of one of the performers comes to stand in front of the projection of the canonized Shakespeare text; the text is projected onto a body that plays a Shakespeare-infused stage persona of itself. The German Shakespeare tradition is pervaded by a stereotypical discussion of whether it is better to read Shakespeare than stage Shakespeare. The older Goethe believed that every staging of a Shakespeare play was in need of heavy redactions or was not apt for the stage at all (ibid: 377–380). She She Pop thwart this tradition and play with it at the same time. They distinctly separate the text from the performance and highlight the momentum as well as the mutual entanglement of performance, play, and theatricality. However, throughout the evening, Shakespeare is

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paid consistent (albeit ironic) reverence as text. Herder claims in the 1770s: “Wenn ich ihn lese, verschwinden Theater, Akteur, Koulisse!” (Herder 1891: 217)8 —and the world opens up. Whereas Herder introduces a Shakespeare who transcends his staging, it is the other way around in She She Pop: when they read Shakespeare, the theater itself, the actors, and the stage set appear in the first place. The set is partly produced on stage during the performance, most prominently in the form of the paper and text pile in the corner. In the last few minutes of the performance, the text scroll is taken off and the sheets of paper are placed center stage. At the end of Shakespeare’s King Lear, as in most of his so-called ‘great tragedies’—most notably in Hamlet—there is a pile of corpses. Walter Benjamin famously considers this pile to be the theatrical exposition of mortality in the modern ‘mourning play’ as opposed to the ancient tragedy (Benjamin 1998: 136–138). To Benjamin, this notion of modernity was inaugurated by Shakespeare. In She She Pop’s Lear, Shakespeare’s pile of corpses has turned into a pile of paper, which is a textual pile of King Lear. One by one, the performers place themselves both in front of and inside of this pile of paper while chanting catchphrases and uttering short quotations taken from the end of the play (such as Lear’s pained “howl, howl, howl, howl” when he carries the dead Cordelia onstage). In front of the pile of paper, the performers become entangled with one another as a corporeal ball of thread. Shakespeare’s pile of corpses has become a cuddle pile of the readers and performers of Shakespeare’s Lear: their joint examination of the text formed the basis on which they translated it into a stage performance. Now, the performance comes to a standstill in front of the material version of that very text.

6. E ntangled bodies of translation In an idiosyncratic way, the She She Pop production takes its own place within the German history of staging King Lear. Their Lear is neither a political tragedy about the disintegration of the kingdom nor is it the theater of the absurd that Jan Kott reads into it in the spirit of Beckett (1964: 127–167). As in the early bourgeois tradition, but also as it was for many members of Shakespeare’s original audience, the conflict is about family, about a legacy, about the question of care and dignity in old age (Greenblatt 2004: 87–117). However, all of this takes place in a fairly well-off bourgeois milieu. All of the father and daughter figures forgive each other at the end: “Ich verzeih’ dir, dass du […] keine akademische Karriere angepeilt hast”; “Ich verzeih’ dir, dass du Theater als Studium und dann auch noch als Beruf ausgeübt hast.” (She She Pop 2011: 1:35:49–1:36:04)9 Consequently, the character 8 |  “When I read him theater, actor and stage set disappear!” (My translation, MJS) 9 |  “I forgive you for not aspiring to pursue an academic career”; “I forgive you for studying theater and taking it up as a job afterwards.” (My translation, MJS)

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of Cordelia does not have to die. She can stay alive, just like in the early bourgeois Lear productions. The slow emergence of the pile of bodies and paper is accompanied by the fleeting happiness experienced by Shakespeare’s Lear and Cordelia when they are reunited shortly before their death (Shakespeare 2001: 364–366). One of the performers and her father sing along to a pop love song performed by another father and daughter duo: Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s Something Stupid. Instead of being looked at and lamented as a corpse by the male characters, this version of Cordelia will be the last to join the cuddle pile and of her own free will: independently, not carried by her father, not murdered as a last spectacular shock effect. She is still singing “I love you” with the Sinatras, and, by this point, all the other performers have joined in, too (She She Pop 2011: 1:48:58–1:50:03). The last sequence of She She Pop’s Testament takes up and translates the catastrophic opening of King Lear: the old man holds a mock competition in which each of his daughters has to prove how much she loves him in order to inherit her part of the kingdom. The one who truly loves him, Cordelia, lacks the words and is banished. The catastrophe takes its course. In She She Pop, the performers pose the question of the appropriateness and magnitude of love at the beginning of the performance and then endlessly negotiate it and talk it over. The last image exposes this question as an unnecessary one: ​what remains in She She Pop is the fact that there is love, the mutual entanglement implicit in the “I love you” that is still in question at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play: Shakespeare’s pile of corpses becomes something visibly breathing, like a chorus, something that sings about itself and sings to the audience, a cuddle pile of entangled living and loving bodies that left hardly a dry eye in the house when I attended a performance of Testament in 2010. The exposition of mortality and violence in Shakespeare is transformed into a display of entangled stage life. Tongue in cheek, the image of Cordelia’s corpse is transformed, if not transfigured: the audience does not just see a reconciliation taking place between two generations: it is an image of reciprocal entanglement. Against a backdrop of the German text of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the closing tableau demonstrates how these mutual relationships must be constantly renegotiated, reframed, and retranslated.

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R eferences Apter, Emily (2013): Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, London/New York: Verso. Archiv Theatertreffen 2011, February 20, 2018 (https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/ de/chronicle/archiv/production/testament-2011). Basile, Elena (2017): “A Scene of Intimate Entanglement, or, Reckoning with the ‘Fuck’ of Translation.” In: Brian James Baer/Klaus Kaindl (eds.), Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism, New York/ Oxon: Routledge, pp. 26–37. Benjamin, Walter (1998 [1928]): The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne, London/New York: Verso. Bhabha, Homi (1994): The Location of Culture, London/New York: Routledge. Blinn, Hansjürgen (ed.) (1988): Shakespeare-Rezeption: Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in Deutschland. II. Ausgewählte Texte von 1793 bis 1827, Berlin: E. Schmidt. Blinn, Hansjürgen (ed.) (1993): Der deutsche Shakespeare: Eine annotierte Bibliographie zur Shakespeare-Rezeption des deutschsprachigen Kulturraums (Literatur, Theater, Film, Funk, Fernsehen und bildende Kunst)/The German Shakespeare: An Annotated Bibliography of the Shakespeare Reception in German-speaking Countries (Literature, Theatre, Mass Media, Music, Fine Arts), Berlin: E. Schmidt. Bloom, Harold (1994): The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace. Bloom, Harold (1998): Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, London: Fourth Estate. Buchmann, Sabeth/Lafer, Ilse/Ruhm, Constanze (eds.) (2016): Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Butler, Judith (1990): Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London/New York: Routledge. Damrosch, David (2003): What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Drews, Wolfgang (1932): König Lear auf der deutschen Bühne bis zur Gegenwart, Berlin: E. Ebering. Foakes, R.A. (1993): Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fülle, Henning (2016): Freies Theater: Die Modernisierung der deutschen Theaterlandschaft, Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Goethe-Institut (2018): She She Pop, February 20, 2018 (http://www.goethe.de/ kue/the/pur/ssp/deindex.htm).

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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1987 [1771/1849]): “Zum Shäkespeares-Tag.” In: Goethes Werke: Große Weimarer Ausgabe. Abteilung I. Band 41/2, Munich: dtv, pp. 254–259. Goldberg, RoseLee (1979): Performance: Live Art Since 1960, London: Thames & Hudson. Greenblatt, Stephen (2004): Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, New York/London: Norton. Groß, Martina/Lehmann, Hans-Thies (eds.) (2012): Populärkultur im Gegenwartstheater, Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Herder, Johann Gottfried (1891 [1773]): “Shakespear”. In: Sämtliche Werke. Bd. 5, edited by Bernhard Suphan, Berlin: Weidmann, pp. 208–231. Kott, Jan (1964): Shakespeare: Our Contemporary, London: Methuen. Lavender, Andy (2016): Performance in the 21st Century: Theatres of Engagement, London/New York: Routledge. Lehmann, Hans Thies (2006 [1999]): Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen Jürs-Munby, London/New York: Routledge. Matzke, Annemarie (2005): “Spiel-Identitäten und Instant-Biographien: Theorie und Performance bei She She Pop.” In: Gabriele Klein/Wolfgang Sting (eds.), Performance: Positionen zur zeitgenössischen szenischen Kunst, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 93–106. Matzke, Annemarie (2016): “Contingency and Plan: Working in Theater.” In: Sabeth Buchmann/Ilse Lafer/Constanze Ruhm (eds.), Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics, Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 58–70. Paulin, Roger (2003): The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682– 1914: Native Literature and Foreign Genius, Hildesheim/Zurich/New York: Georg Olms. Schäfer, Alfred (2015): 1968: Die Aura des Widerstands, Paderborn: F. Schönigh. Schäfer, Martin Jörg (2010): “Machtübertragung, Metaübersetzung: Wielands Das Leben und der Tod des Königs Lear.” In: Bettine Menke/Wolfgang Struck (eds.), Wieland/Übersetzen: Sprachen, Gattungen, Räume, Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, pp. 57–79. Schäfer, Martin Jörg (2018): “Verschleierte Obszönitäten im deutschsprachigen Shakespeare von Wieland bis Baudissin.” In: Pawel Piszczatowski (ed.), Diálogos: Das Wort im Gespräch, Göttingen: V&R unipress, pp. 53–72. Schechner, Richard (1993): The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London/New York: Routledge. Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig (1778): König Lear: Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen. Nach Shakespear, Hamburg: J. M. Michaelsen. Shakespeare, William (2001 [1606]): King Lear: The Arden Shakespeare, edited by R. A. Foakes, London: Thomson Learning.

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She She Pop (2011): Verspätete Vorbereitungen zum Generationenwechsel nach Lear, Berlin: self-published, (DVD). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1993): Outside the Teaching Machine, London/New York: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999): A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Tate, Nahum (1681): The History of King Lear: Acted at the Dukes’s Theatre. Reviv’d with Alterations, London: E. Flesher. Ulrici, Hermann (1867): “Jahresbericht 1865.” In: Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 2, pp. ii–iii. Weiß, Wolfgang (2004): King Lear, Bochum: Kamp. Wimsatt, William K. (ed.) (1960): Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, London: Macgibbon & Kee.

Sensory Impressions as Imaginations of the Real On the Translatability of the Immediate in Political Documentaries Thomas Weber

1. S ensory impressions

Figure 1: Seagulls orbit the ship Shrieking gulls plunge up from the dawn-slashed sky in vertiginous, inverted scenes as the cameras tumble upside-down. Starfish float beneath the surface like coral-coloured confetti. On deck, scarred, tattooed men eviscerate fish dragged up from the depths. In one shocking sequence, a skate dangles from a chain as its wings, the only edible parts, are excised—a scene not far from the notorious trade in definned sharks. Meanwhile, an indeterminate heavy-metal track grinds out from a radio, sounding more like the knell of an aquatic apocalypse. (Hoare 2013)

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This confusing scenario marks the beginning of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s award-winning documentary Leviathan from 2012, one of the most striking examples of documentary films that have been talked about in recent years under the heading of sensory documentaries, presenting new, unusual camera angles and sound recordings that give the viewer an immediate sensory impression of what is happening. The term “sensory documentaries” primarily designates the works of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab,1 i.e., films by Ilisa Barbash, Castaing-Taylor, and Paravel. Nevertheless, there are also other films that, in recent years, have been focusing on recording and conveying sensory impressions that give the viewer the feeling of immediate copresence at the scene of the event, often provoking instant affective reactions such as disorientation, dizziness, shame, or disgust. In this article, I would like to not only refer to sensory documentaries in a narrow sense, but also to films that rely on the effect of sensory impressions in their aesthetic construction, such as Darwin’s Nightmare by Hubert Sauper and Workingman’s Death by Michael Glawogger. In the following, I am less concerned with precisely defining sensory documentaries in terms of their classification (a recent catchword used by the press to characterize a new trend in international film festival operations) or even extending their definition, than I am with the question of which entirely new possibilities of expression can be created by documentary films that focus on sensory impressions. Is the generation of sensory stimuli and the evocation of emotions through close-ups just a fashion in the media industry? Are these films merely following the trend in international cinema towards a cinéma du corps (cf. Kaczmarek 2012), as has been observed in France, for example, since the 2000s? Are sensory documentaries coming closer to reality with new camera technologies than ever before? Are they succeeding in creating more direct, even more authentic representations of reality? Do they translate the real into new aesthetic forms? Or do they even open up a completely new, complex dimension of meaning? It can hardly be denied that documentary films that rely on sensory impressions are in vogue. However, filmmakers have always sought the spectacular, the new visual or audiovisual kick for viewers. So, the fact that they want to move viewers emotionally is hardly anything new. The cinema of attractions is as old as the cinema itself. Nevertheless, it is surprising that films that find success at international film festivals by focusing on sensory effects are turning their attention to complex socio-political topics. Strikingly often, the films deal with—mostly inhuman—working environments. In doing so, they penetrate areas that only those who are exposed to the strains of this work are familiar with. They enable new perspectives that, support1 |  Cf. https://sel.fas.harvard.edu

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ed by new camera technologies, and calm and careful camera work, bring previously unknown aspects of the subject matter to the viewer. In the following, I would like to concentrate on just a few films that address inhumane working environments. I will focus on three questions: 1. What is the meaning of ‘immediacy’ and ‘authenticity’? 2. How we can describe a form of cinematic translatability? and 3. Are new complex possibilities of expression emerging?

2. I mmediacy as authenticity If the question of authenticity is linked to immediacy, the idea of authenticity is usually characterized by the fact that new camera technologies are penetrating into areas that filmmakers have thus far been unable to film for technical or social reasons (e.g., to protect privacy). In fact, this is the first impression we gain when watching sensory documentaries. A film like Sweetgrass by Castaing-Taylor follows a herd of sheep and their shepherds into the mountains of Montana. The filmmaker has attached dozens of small cameras to the animals and thus made visible what is outside the field of vision of humans and the human cameraman. The careful camera work that she uses to get close to her objects creates additional proximity to the actors—‘actors’ as described by Bruno Latour, meaning people, animals, and things (cf. Latour 2002: 102)2 —who evoke a feeling of immediacy in the viewer and thus also seem to have an effect of authenticity. The film is strictly chronological and begins in spring with the shearing of the sheep. In this way, the camera not only gets close to animals and humans, but above all focuses on their activities. Andrew Schenker writes: In the early, preparatory scenes, the emphasis is strictly on process: the way an [sic!] ewe is made to feed a newborn, how a row of hands shave [sic!] their charges. The men themselves are beside the point; if any faces emerge from the mechanical process, it’s those of the sheep, striking dryly humorous expressions. But as the party sets out on its trek, the film’s attentions gradually transfer to the workers […]. (Schenker 2010)

Meghan Ratner is also impressed by this focus on the activities and the multi-perspective immediacy of the presentation. She writes: The film begins in the early spring, as the flock is moved into the barn to be shorn of their winter coats. In the metronomic, calm shearing, the penned sheep are yanked up one-by-one, subdued by no more 2 |  T he notion actor is here used in the sense intended by Bruno Latour, who describes human and non-human beings as parts of an actor network (cf. Latour 2002: 102).

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The camera also gets close to the shepherds and watches as they do carry out their back-breaking work. Christiane Peitz notices what the camera captures: The old rancher with the tanned face sleeps sitting against a tree trunk, talking to the sheep as if they were a flock of sexy girls, singing country songs and a sheep lullaby. They all talk to themselves; with the bleating of the sheep the monologues mix into a natural sound poem. The wind pulls at the lapel microphone when the younger one unleashes a tirade of sheep curses, and the third one talks to his mom on the phone and howls at her because the dog has sore paws, his knees are broken and he starts to hate the mountains, the fucking job anyway. (Peitz 2017) 3

The perspective constantly changes and shows people and animals from their respective points of view. We feel like we are accompanying the actors directly, not least because the proximity conveyed by the images also evokes affective and emotional reactions from the viewer. So, are sensory documentaries more authentic than other documentary films? Although it may seem so at first glance, it should be noted that, ultimately, what we understand by “authenticity” is not an ontological but merely a cultural or discursive effect. Because what is meant by authenticity changes over time. Authenticity is based on conventions. In their book on the subject of authenticity (Knaller/Müller 2006), Knaller and Müller describe various concepts of authenticity, for example as immediacy or truthfulness, as something unadulterated, as a reference to an author or to an original document, or as a certain notion of art that is connected with the idea of originality. Mostly, authenticity is used within a social context as a label for a person’s self-identity with the image that others have of that person or a certain group to which that person belongs. In this respect, the meaning of authenticity always depends on the assignment or attribution of meaning. In the context of film, authenticity often refers to the impression of immediacy that is constructed using technical aids (see also Bolter/ Grusin 1999). But this is deceptive, since the media gesture of immediacy is ultimately also a staging. In recent years, immediacy has been increasingly replaced 3 |  U nless otherwise specified, all original German quotes have been translated into English by Thomas Weber.

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by the emotionalization of the viewer; the spontaneity of one’s own emotions then serves as a form of directness or as a replacement for authenticity. Documentary films always construct a reference to reality, regardless of how they shape this reference. As different as these referential practices may be, they always have a common denominator: they seem to be motivated by a longing for authenticity. The problem with our idea of authenticity is that it is closely linked to our cultural, social, and media experiences—without us always being aware of it. Every understanding of authenticity changes depending on the way these experiences are configurated. Every media milieu has its own idea of authenticity. What is more, authenticity is not a fixed category; rather, it is elastic, flexible, with a wide range of meanings. The idea of the documentary film is characterized by an understanding of the meaning of authenticity and the conditions that characterize that meaning. Historically, the criteria for determining a documentary film’s authenticity have often changed. The desire for authenticity is repeatedly taken up by the media, although media always have a mediating character. The desire for authenticity can therefore never be satisfied by the media. We can gain a temporary impression of a kind of media authenticity through new technologies and an innovative aesthetic that expresses a media gesture of revelation (cf. Groys 2000) —something that gives the viewer the impression of being closer to reality than ever before. Such a gesture of revelation was constructed, for example, by the Direct Cinema of the 1960s using a lightweight handheld camera, the “Arri,” which enabled moving outdoor shots to be taken with synchronous sound.4 With this new technology, Direct Cinema sought direct access to people and events; the filmmakers were able to accompany the protagonists at rock concerts or election campaigns, for example. They simply recorded what the camera recorded, assuming that this directness showed reality as it was.5 This becomes particularly clear in Primary, filmed by Richard Leacock and Robert Drews in 1960 about the Democratic Party’s pre-election campaign in Wisconsin. They accompany the candidates Humphrey Hubert and John F. Kennedy with their handheld camera and accept oblique, blurred, and shaky images as well as unclear sound recordings and all kinds of errors and disturbances that have the connotation of being an expression of immediacy or authenticity.

4 |  F or more on disrupted pictures in Direct Cinema and reality TV see Weber 2018a and Weber 2018b. 5 |  At this point, it should be noted that it is more about the representation of immediacy than really about a direct representation, as might be assumed in a live television program, because the necessary processing of the film material alone can no longer be considered to be actual immediacy. But even if a live transmission were possible, there would be no real immediacy from the outset due to the selection of the setting as well as agreements about the course of an event or about the recording strategies.

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Figure 2: Primary 1960 Poor, disrupted images are interpreted as a sign of authenticity—but this reading is limited to a certain community. Here I am referring to a certain era of documentary filmmaking, when this concept of Direct Cinema—at least since the Vietnam War—was widely spread and understood as the concept of documentary film itself (although it is only one specific variant of documentary film).

Figure 3: Lenssen & Partner 2011 If we change the media milieu, e.g., if we look at more recent reality TV, then the same disrupted images appear again, but this aesthetic stands for something completely different. In reality TV, the defective images are no longer a sign of authenticity. Especially in scripted formats (from which these screenshots were taken), they merely have the dramaturgical function of increasing the tension, as the disruption creates the impression that they were taken under difficult recording conditions. The ultimate goal is to evoke emotions from the viewers in order to keep their attention. In documentary films, the focus on sensory impressions also has the goal of evoking emotions, which are not just meant to be achieved by means of disrupted, but also by spectacular, carefully composed images that grant access to physical reality. This approach is taken by a new school of Austrian filmmakers that

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includes Michael Glawogger (Workingman’s Death), Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare), Erwin Wagenhofer (We Feed the World; Alphabet), Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Abendland), and Georg Misch (A Road to Mecca), and even Ulrich Seidl (Import-Export), and others. Their common denominator is their tendency towards aestheticization, even or especially when they are portraying inhumane working conditions.

3. S ituatedness in translation The search for particularly spectacular, eye-catching images is not a new trend in documentary film. What is new are the technical means and the strong focus of the perspective on humans and animals as actors. Is this a translation of earlier concepts of documentary film into a new aesthetic, made possible by new technologies? Is the quest for authenticity itself translated into a new form through the representation of sensory impressions? This actually seems to be the case if one looks at the explicit and implicit references made by newer films to their predecessors: Glawogger’s film Workingman’s Death begins with an explicit reference to Dziga Vertov’s film Enthusiasm (1931), and Leviathan by Castaing-Taylor suggests a comparison with John Grierson’s Drifters (1929), as both films deal with the same subject, the work on a fish trawler. The question that arises here, then, is whether the concentration on sensory impressions observed in more recent films is a translation of an aesthetic from around 1930 that incorporates new camera technologies into an aesthetic of the present. It should be borne in mind that immediacy cannot be equated with authenticity without further ado, and that views of authenticity are constantly changing. Before I come to the obvious parallels between documentary films of historical importance and more recent documentary films, I would first like to ask about the conditions that make cinematic translation possible, which are by no means self-evident and which therefore seem to depend on specific media milieus.6

3.1 Conditions of cinematic translation If we ask what translation in film means at all, we have to clearly distinguish between ‘cinematic translation’ and ‘linguistic translation,’ as they are fundamentally different operations. When one film picks up on another, it is not about trans6 |  I n English, the term “media environment” is used more often, especially in the context of a media ecological approach; nevertheless, I would like to stick to the notion of the “media milieu” here, as it is used both in German and French as well as in previous translation practices (see Weber 2013; for detailed explanations of the concept of the media milieu, see also Weber 2017, Weber 2018a and Weber 2018b).

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lating one medium into a completely different medium, e.g., about translating a literary text template into a photo or a film, which would occur through an absolute break with the sensory domain of phenomena; in fact, it would rather have to be interpreted as transmission or adaptation rather than as translation (cf. Mersch 2004, 2010, and 2017). The problem is that films—despite their reproducible character—embody a singularity that cannot be reduced to mere signs. Unlike a sign, you cannot simply translate something that is there. You can only ever transform it. Or you can put it in a new context, which then transforms its meaning. One and the same film sequence can mean different things in different contexts (e.g., by using montage or by putting it into a different context in a new film). Finally, what we see (and of course hear) depends on different credibility criteria. It is therefore about how we give credibility to an enunciator or not.7 The problem in a mediatized society is that there are different, overlapping notions of credibility, which means that different credibility criteria compete with one another. You can consider something to be ‘true’ (I use the term ‘true’ here in the everyday sense of describing a reliable reference to reality) because you have read it in a renowned daily newspaper. Or you think it is true because you saw it on the TV news. But if you saw it on YouTube in a video clip, of whose origin you were uncertain, you would not necessarily think that it was true—it would probably be true because you saw it, but you would not be able to rule out the possibility that it had been manipulated. What one implicitly does as a user of such information is to evaluate the credibility of the enunciator. This always includes evaluating practices that you do not need to know about in detail to make a judgement. Media practices vary considerably and so do the criteria for credibility that apply in each case. A daily newspaper works differently to a television station. And even within the same station, documentary practices can vary considerably: television news is produced according to completely different credibility criteria than those of, for example, a reality TV format at the same station. In everyday life, this usually causes no problems. But a distinction should be made between the different media milieus, which are characterized by different media practices that are based on different credibility criteria. Is it possible to translate the cinematic material of a certain media milieu into another media milieu? 7 |  S ee Roger Odin’s semio-pragmatic approach (Odin 1998). Odin looks at the audience reception and distinguishes between different “reading modes”, which can be adopted by the spectator when watching a film. The enunciator is the instance of utterance constructed by the spectator (Odin 1998, p.290). According to Odin in the “documentary reading” the reader, i.e., the spectator, presupposes the reality of the enunciator. Thus, what substantiates this reading mode is not the reality of what is presented (Odin 1998, p. 291). Instead Odin focuses on the expectations and decisions of the reader whose reading mode is mainly programmed by institutions and paratexts.

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In fact, a filmic translation can only be a transfer—a transmission in the mediological sense—from one media milieu to another, e.g., as an adaptation (which implies a change of medium); as the use of other film material as footage (in a compilation or an archive film); as a remake, reboot, or reenactment (which amounts to the restaging of a film); or as an homage, a parody or resonance. This works in a different way to linguistic, character-based translation, because this type of ‘translation’ is always dependent on the situatedness of the thing in a certain media environment. Without this situatedness, the thing is just a thing, it gets its meaning from its situatedness. If the situation changes, i.e., the frame of reference, then the meaning of the thing also changes. Thus, by transmitting something from one media milieu to another, differentiated statements can also be constructed: the question is no longer simply about whether the film represents reality or not; instead, by playing with the credibility criteria of different media milieus, the film can also represent possible worlds that only exist under certain conditions. Credibility can be ‘modalized’ by playing with the material and its framings, i.e., films do not only depict reality as it is, but also as it could potentially be.

3.2 Media milieus Media milieus describe not only the differences between media and media dispositifs,8 but above all the differences within media or media dispositifs. They result from the self-stabilizing play of the actors, who develop an ensemble of repeatable practices that can be clearly distinguished from other ensembles of practices that are specific to each media milieu (or at least their concrete combination), through which they express a specific meaning. It is thus possible for very different documentary practices with very different credibility criteria to establish themselves within one and the same dispositif such as television: from standardized news formats (TV news, magazine, and report formats), to reality TV formats, from documentary dramas to documentary films that are produced in collaborations between television broadcasters and individual authors. Media milieus comprise very different actors: objects and programs can be as much a part of a media milieu as conventions, institutions, or people. (In this regard they are similar to what Foucault initially once understood by the term “dispositif ”). In contrast to a dispositif however, it does not describe the general arrangement, but the processuality of specific practices that can be clearly distinguished from other practices of the same medium or media dispositif. In contrast to the concept of the dispositif which primarily refers to the viewers’ relationship to 8 |  T he concept of the dispositif is sometimes—especially in anglophone countries—better known under the term “apparatus theory”.

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a spatial arrangement,9 the concept of the media milieu encompasses all practices of production, distribution, and reception, as well as presentation (or ‘exhibition’). Media milieus within one and the same dispositif can create completely different meanings using the same aesthetic forms of expression. (Incidentally: they should not be confused with genres or formats, because they do not describe an aesthetic form, but an ensemble of different practices.) On television, for example, on the television news, disrupted images regularly lead to excuses being made for the poor quality; in the media milieu of committed documentary filmmakers, they are seen to indicate difficult shooting conditions and provide proof of authenticity; and in reality TV, they are staged as an exciting means of presentation, because they allow the producers to build on and play with the viewer’s expectations. Translations that take place from one media milieu into another can therefore occur within the same media dispositif. And there is no need for temporal synchronicity: cinematic material from ages long gone can easily be remediated in current films. In each translation from one media milieu to another, however, meanings are rewritten, i.e., the processing attributes new meaning to the material, which in each case opens up in the milieu that forms the frame of reference (in contrast to the milieu of origin).

3.3 Translation as a discourse of difference When we speak of translation in the context of film, we mean above all different forms of transmission—adaptation, remediation, remake, resonance, homage, etc. In fact, focusing on the aspect of translation opens up a productive figure of discourse that suggests a comparison between two different versions.10 In the case of documentary films that focus on sensory impressions, it is possible to compare more recent documentary films with older ones as they deal with the same subject, but realize it using different techniques and aesthetic means. Such a comparison of two films dealing with the same subject highlights above all the differences between the newer and the older film: a different way of looking at the same subject, made possible by new technologies, and also using a new aesthetic to react to the changing expectations of the audience, which expects a different kind of affective and sensory address in a changing media world. Several examples lend themselves to comparison: Leviathan and Drifters, which are both concerned with the fishing industry of their time, and Workingman’s Death and Enthusiasm, which both reflect the conditions of hard physical work.

9 |  Cf. for cinema as dispositif see Baudry 1974/1975 and for television Hickethier 1995. 10 |  Cf. project mediology as a new discipline. With its focus on transmission, mediology has already stimulated an analysis of transmission and translation processes, with its main focus on the way that media knowledge is transmitted through other media. See also Weber 2008.

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3.3.1 Drifters and Leviathan Drifters was made in 1929 and is one of the early productions of John Grierson, who was commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) to make what we would now call an ‘image film’ about the British fishing industry. The EMB’s mission was to facilitate scientific research and analyses of the national economy, and to promote national products. Grierson fulfilled this task, even though his main focus was on describing the hard-working conditions of the fishermen. Drifters begins as the Scottish fishermen are making their way to the cutter, which is heated with coal, and then leaves for the North Sea. Once on the high seas, they cast their nets, and while they wait for them to catch the fish, they carry out everyday activities on board. The next day they pull in the full nets during storms and rough waters, stow the catch below deck, and return to port, where the fresh fish is sold and processed directly at auction, i.e., gutted, packed in ice, salted in barrels, and packed in crates, before it is transported on to consumers all over the world. Grierson is interested in the circumstances in which people live and work and soberly observes the activities being carried out by the fishermen. Nevertheless, the presentation becomes more complex due to its montage. Thus, images of nature are used again and again: waves brandishing at the cliffs and seagulls circling the sea.

Figure 4: Drifters 1929 This creates the impression of a specific environment that shapes the living and working conditions of the fishermen. Grierson pays special attention to the machines, whose function he records in detail, and to the way they interact with people in particular: the loading of the fish drawler, the heating of the engines, the departure of the ship, the work carried out below deck at the engine. Grierson does not deny the harsh working conditions, but it becomes clear that they are determined by the rhythm set by the machines, which people have to follow.

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Figure 5: Drifters 1929 The people seem to merge with the machines, as Grierson makes clear using a fade:

Figure 6: Drifters 1929

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At the same time, the way the fishermen struggle with the elements always remains in the foreground: the work on board the fishing cutter is hard and it is determined by the capitalist conditions of the international markets. Leviathan begins already on the high seas. The spectators are thrust into the midst of the action and, at the beginning, have difficulty finding their bearings within a flood of unknown sensory impressions. The film critic Kai Mihm reports: In the first few minutes, you don’t even know what’s going on. The screen remains almost completely black, movements must be guessed in the dark, only the striking soundtrack means that enormous machines must be accessible there. Gradually, the scenery takes on contours, the short flashing spots of paint become recognizable as the raincoats of a ship’s crew. Leviathan throws you right into the middle of the action: At dawn on stormy seas, the men seem to pull their nets out of the water by means of a huge steel construction. The soundtrack is a sound thunderstorm of engine roar, chain clatter, and the roar of the waves. The camera, apparently attached to the head of a foreman, follows all looks and movements, yet much remains unclear. There are no offstage explanations, the mutual commands of the men can only be heard as a croaking roar. (Mihm 2013)

Compared to Drifters, in Leviathan, not only the technique has changed, but also the method of observation: the order of looking. What is still embedded in Drifters in a temporally and spatially comprehensible plot dissolves in Leviathan into a multitude of micro-perceptions, which at first do not result in a story. The mini DV cameras, which are usually used for extreme sports videos, are mounted everywhere on board, including on the shoulders of the sailors. The cameras record sensory impressions that evoke a disordered world. Drifters already contains all the essential elements that can also be found in Leviathan: photographs of nature, animals, machines, humans, and the interaction between man and machine. If Drifters is all about showing the audience the hard work of the fishermen in industrialized conditions, Leviathan aims to evoke an affective reaction in the viewer through the use of spectacular camera work. Ultimately, Drifters is an anthropocentric, sociological portrait of fishermen, where people find their place between nature and machines. Leviathan, on the other hand, deconstructs an anthropocentric perspective and replaces it with a physiocentric perspective, according to which the human being is just one of many actors. The human being’s actions are controlled by the invisible hand of capitalism and lead to the creation of an almost incomprehensible order. Through their use of camera perspectives and the depiction of the atmosphere thus generated, both films construct a kind of non-linguistic, ‘non-narrative’ form of narration, a kind of meta-narrative. Drifters describes an order that shows tough conditions, but that is transparent and therefore criticizable. Leviathan tells of a world in which order has been fundamentally disrupted by industrialized, exploitative interests.

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The feeling of disorientation and the play with close-ups evoke immediate emotions such as disgust, while simultaneously documenting the subjection of humans and animals. The film critic Daniel Benedict writes: In its uncommented montage, the masterpiece then places all perspectives equally side by side: just a moment ago we are torn to heaven with the dying fish, then we plunge with the seagulls into blood and spray. Sometimes the trawler is a workplace, sometimes a food source, sometimes a predator. Within minutes all self-confidence collapses: Man becomes a mere environmental phenomenon and his intervention in nature appears as wild and chaotic as nature itself. (Benedict 2016)

The actors interact, but they are also victims of a globalized system of maritime exploitation. This feeling of disorientation becomes an expression of the complexity of a system that subjects people and the environment to its rules without being able to see through them.

3.3.2 Enthusiasm and Workingman’s Death A comparison of Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm from 1931 and Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death from 2005 is an obvious choice for two reasons: firstly due to the way they thematically examine the working world, in which workers earn their living under extreme conditions, and, secondly, because the first episode of Glawogger’s film contains a direct homage to Vertov’s: sequences from both films are set in the Donbass region in the Ukraine and accompany the miners to the coal mines. Moreover, Glawogger uses some of the same film sequences that Vertov had already used. What is more, both films pursue a concept of aestheticization in their presentation of the work. Nevertheless, they differ considerably in terms of their technology and aesthetics. Wheras, in his time, Vertov tried to find a new cinematic form for the first sound film of the Soviet Union, playing with the asynchrony of image and sound, as well as with a method of montage that lent the image sequences a rhythm that visually evoked sound, Glawogger was primarily concerned with making the physical reality of the work itself visible. Enthusiasm is considered to be the first sound film of the Soviet Union. Vertov was interested in the machine-influenced working environment, which builds a better human being in socialism. The film contrasts shots of believers following Christian rituals and drunken people on the one hand with different groups of workers in mines and steelworks, and agricultural workers moving across the fields with tractors on the other. Enthusiasm was created as part of the celebrations of Stalin’s five-year plan and aimed to achieve several goals: firstly, to develop a visual presentation suited to the sound film using an appropriate type of montage as a new art form and, secondly, to create the ‘new man’ who is in harmony with the rhythm of the machines. This goal was in line with the principles he proclaimed in his 1922 writings:

Sensory Impressions as Imaginations of the Real Revealing the soul of the machine, falling in love with the workbench, the farmer in the tractor, the engineer in the locomotive! We carry the creative joy into every mechanical work. We connect the human to the machine. We’re raising new people. The new man, freed from clumsiness and awkwardness, will be a grateful object for filming with the precise and light movements of the machines. With open eyes, aware of the mechanical rhythm, enthusiastic about the mechanical work, recognizing the beauty of chemical processes, we compose the film poem of flames and power stations, we are enthusiastic about the movement of comets and meteorites and the rays of the headlights that dazzle the stars. (Vertov 1973: 8-9)

Figure 7: Enthusiasm 1931 The contrast between the churchgoers and the workers stands for the difference between the old and the new human being. As believers sink into their misery, saying helpless prayers and performing pointless rituals, workers enthusiastically turn to machines to improve their lives.

Figure 8: Machines and workers in the steelworks, Enthusiasm 1931

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The portrayal of the working world constitutes the main part of the film and shows people positively adapting to the machines in order to help socialism to victory. Vertov uses the camera to make the dynamics of the rhythm of the machines visible. The machines represent the progress of all mankind (not yet exploitation or environmental destruction).

Figure 9: Enthusiasm 1931 Vertov’s camera therefore shows workers imitating mechanical movements that follow the rhythm of industrial manufacturing processes. This rhythm is intensified by the montage (Bulgakowa 2006: 232ff). Moreover, rhythm acts as a disciplinary force that regulates the economy of movement and, at the same time, as a mobilizing inspiration for revolutionary enthusiasm.

Figure 10: Workers practicing movements using the pickaxe, miners using the pickaxe, Enthusiasm 1931

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Vertov’s film is interested in both: in the physical dimension of work and in its glorification. Uniform movements like the swinging of the miners’ pickaxes or the machining of the glowing steel using long iron tongs in the steelworks result in an idiosyncratic rhythm, precisely due to the multitude of filmed workers who are always carrying out the same movements in the same way, which seems to adapt to the machines’ rhythm, even merge with it.

Figure 11: The best worker from shaft 9, Enthusiasm 1931 Vertov shows workers in tune with their working conditions, looking confidently into the future, and celebrating the arrival of the machines as a new achievement. I would like to emphasize here the attitude towards the “Best worker from shaft 9,” who proudly announces her production successes in front of the camera. Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death begins where the main plot of Vertov’s film takes place: in the Donbass in the Ukraine. In the first introductory sequence, he uses material similar to Vertov’s, at one point even the same sequence, the “best worker from shaft 9”:

Figure 12: The best worker from shaft 9, Workingman’s Death 2005 However, Glawogger expands his perspective and follows very different workers in six episodes worldwide: 1. mine workers going to the mines in the Donbass

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in the Ukraine, 2. sulfur carriers in Ijen in Indonesia, 3. butchers at an open-air market in Port Harcourt in Nigeria, 4. welders at the Gadani shipwreck site in Pakistan, 5. steel workers in Liaoning in China, and 6. young people in the Duisburg-North Landscape Park in Germany. In fact, Glawogger spends a lot of time planning the settings of his films. The results are very precise shots by his cameraman Wolfgang Thaler, which are perceived by many to be aesthetic. One example of this is the sulfur mine in Indonesia:

Figure 13: Workingman’s Death 2005 Yellow clouds of sulfur vapors initially cover a greenish shimmering landscape. Gradually, the contours of a worker appear, who has a stick balanced on his shoulders and carries baskets containing heavy chunks of sulfur. The load is heavy and cuts deep into the bearer’s flesh. The camera comes close to the bearer, you hear his breathing, the squeaking of the load with each step. In an interview Glawogger says in reference to this scene: Images I would merely term precise are always called esthetic. You could say that just because I’m not sloppy when filming doesn’t mean that I estheticize something. We’ve become used to shooting on film and taking the time to do it. I think out a concept for each part, about how something can be depicted, such as when I follow the path of a sulfur miner. This path begins in a volcano at a semi-mythical place, the smoke underlines this atmosphere, and then the “new world” enters step by step. The workers trudge with their baskets full of sulfur from the crater to the weighing station, that’s a path from A to B, a complete transformation of the location and the subject. (Glawogger as cited in Schiefer 2005) 11

Glawogger’s concept differs from Vertov’s, even though the fact that both films have been aestheticized seems similar at first glance. Glawogger is looking for a 11 |  G lawogger also says: “Physical work can be made visible. You can show someone carrying something, shoveling, mining coal, but it’s very difficult to portray as work how someone sits in an office and thinks.” (Glawogger as cited in Schiefer 2005)

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sensory, physical impression of human work, is less interested in the rhythm of machines, and is certainly not looking to glorify the workers. Rather, he is interested in the emotions of human workers exposed to inhuman working conditions. Glawogger says: One aspect that interested me a great deal during preparations was the question of how physical labor can be depicted. I also watched various old documentaries and fiction films about workers or their heroism and realized that the work itself was almost never shown. Even in newsreels that were merely intended to idolize workers, the actual labor process was nearly always absent. Work was interesting only as a way to introduce the worker, who in fact served in the classic worker film as an ideological vehicle. In contrast I’ve always been interested in making physical labor itself the subject of a film, and by means of this sensual experience determine its social and political position. (Ibid.)

Figure 14: Workingman’s Death 2005

Figure 15: Workingman’s Death 2005 In addition, he shows not only the workers and their tough working conditions, but also their overall living conditions, which are influenced by their working conditions. He talks to them among their colleagues and visits them at home with their families to learn about their lives.

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4. C omplexity Brecht’s theorem about the photograph of a factory still reveals the complexity of (audio-) visual forms of expression: The situation has become so complicated because the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says less than ever about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG reveals almost nothing about these institutions. Reality as such has slipped into the domain of the functional. The reification of human relations, the factory, for example, no longer discloses those relations. So there is indeed ‘something to construct’, something ‘artificial’, ‘invented’. (Brecht 2000: 164f.)

At the time, Brecht was concerned with emphasizing the necessity of artistic alienation in order to adequately describe reality with sufficient complexity. At the same time, he distrusted a naive image-based realism that said nothing about reality and how it works. The first aim of representing sensory impressions is (like Direct Cinema) to directly represent reality by constructing proximity using technical means with the confidence that you will thus be able to show reality more authentically than you would without this proximity. And since the focus here is above all on evoking affects and emotions, one might at first glance be inclined to assume that a naive image-based realism is at work here as well. Sensory impressions alone would therefore be utterly unsuited to describing complex processes in reality. However, it is not that simple. Direct Cinema had already developed a method of penetrating areas of reality that had previously been completely closed off to the general public, e.g., when Leacock filmed the nervous Kennedys in their hotel room as the voting results of the constituencies arrived by telephone. He would later say that he was the “fly on the wall,” taking these pictures and providing insights into the running of an election campaign that had not been possible before. With new miniature cameras attached to animals or on drones floating above the scene, sensory documentaries also penetrate areas that have so far escaped public view and even the human gaze in some cases. New perspectives are being developed and new areas of reality have now been made publicly visible. But do these means also succeed in grasping and depicting the complexity of reality? What does ‘complexity’ mean in this context? The focus of Brecht’s objection to photography was based on the functioning of the factory, on the processes both mechanical and administrative, on the exploitation of the workers, and the pursuit of profit that structures the employment relationship. None of this is visible in photography. But how do audiovisual media succeed in constructing complexity? Cinematic complexity arises either through linguistic explanations (e.g., expert interviews or OFF comments); through the montage of conflicting visual motifs which, taken together, result in a new synthetic expression (in the Eisensteinian sense); or by modifying the frame, i.e., usually by remediatizing the same mate-

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rial in a different media context. These operations create new, usually complex meanings that clearly go beyond what can be seen in the picture. A fourth variation is artistic alienation, as Brecht proposed it as a means of going beyond naive image-based realism. In documentary films that focus on sensory impressions use such artistic alienation to construct complexity. The films do not depict reality one-to-one; they are not really direct documents of reality, but artistic adaptations that use the stylistic means of alienation. In particular, extreme aestheticization creates a strong contrast between what you see in the picture and the way you see it. Paolo Pasolini was one of the most well-known users of this method, aesthetically elevating misery in his films without trying to gloss it over. By utilizing unusual perspectives, the sensory impressions seem to make familiar things foreign to the viewer while managing to make them so sensually attractive by means of aestheticization that the viewer is prevented from simply looking away or looking over them. More recent documentary films broach the issue of the repressed, dirty sides of globalized, inhumane working environments. This becomes clear in films like Darwin’s Nightmare by Hubert Sauper, who deals with the effects of fishing on living conditions at Lake Victoria in Tanzania. At the heart of this fishing industry is the Victoria perch—a non-native predatory fish found in the lake, once abandoned by the British, and now displacing native species and ecologically polluting the lake. At the same time, fish forms the basis of life for many people, including the fish factory workers who receive wages above the national average and prepare the fish to be exported to Europe according to European hygiene standards. But it also includes the people who live off the waste of this industry and either feed directly on the meat of the unusable fish heads or process the filleted fish carcasses. They continue to live in—by European standards—poor conditions and pay the price for cheap fish fillets in European supermarkets by self-exploiting their labor, but also by destroying their environment. Sauper also focuses on people who are only indirectly involved in the fishing industry, such as the pilots at the airport where the transport planes take off and land, who spend their money in the bars and brothels in the nearby city. And yet another question is growing: do the planes perhaps bring weapons into the country when they land in Tanzania? This economy based on the Victoria perch turns the theory of evolution as it was once developed by Darwin upside down: Darwin’s Nightmare demonstrates the new rules of evolution: it is no longer the species that are best adapted to their environment that survive, but the ones that promise especially high profits in the worldwide process of capitalist exploitation. This seems to apply to fish as well as to humans. Only a few locals make a really good profit from this business. Not much more than participating in leftovers of this industry remains in order for most people to survive.

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Sauper translates this perverted economy into impressive images. The film was mostly shot illegally, and Sauper shot many of the scenes himself using a hand-held camera, unafraid of getting close to his subjects. Cristina Nord writes: The camera—Sauper guides it himself—zooms in on the objects and does not shy away from drastic effects. For example, a close-up shows the feet of a worker standing in a mud of bones, fish heads and maggots. When these fish heads are blown around by ammonia vapors a while later, you get the impression of looking straight into hell. (Nord 2005)

Figure 16: Darwin’s Nightmare 2004 Sauper focuses on a corporate dimension of this perverted economy. The camera does not let go of the deformed bodies. It focuses mainly on the bad skin of malnourished children and looks at the dismantled fish carcasses. In a way, Sauper follows the corporeal logic of a splatter film. He shows how bodies lose their integrity. “The boundaries of disgust are crossed by mixing different areas.” (Ibid.) Sauper shows the dirty side of the dirty deals that are often suppressed by society. The film plays with the sensory impressions of disgust, garbage, odors, the smell of fish, and the effort required to preserve one’s own human dignity under these inhumane conditions. The aestheticization of disgust prevents us as viewers from simply turning our gaze away. The media industry and the viewers that have been conditioned to it are experienced at looking away and dealing with the film’s symbolic reduction to clichéd images of misery. However, the logic of the corporeal evokes negative affects and emotions, and the question arises of whether this kind of representation of the subject matter is at all appropriate. The limits of this mode of representation are reached where other potential perspectives are no longer even being addressed, and the power of the images develop their own pull, which does not allow the question of alternative perspectives to arise. Despite their critical attitude, the images then threaten to reinforce the negative stereotypes of Africa in the Western media, because they concentrate only on the depiction of misery.

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Roger Peltzer—who has many years of experience financing projects in Africa – objects to Sauper’s film by claiming that he fades out the efforts being made by the Tanzanian government and the fishing industry to improve the living conditions of the population: “In Tanzania, fish has become the most important source of foreign exchange after tourism and gold.” (Peltzer 2006) It is true that the Victoria perch is displacing native fish species and putting great strain on the environment. How­ever, at the same time, there is progress to be seen: “Since Tanzania banned the use of trawlers, many thousands of small fishermen have been able to build a livelihood. The fish factories on Lake Victoria must work to European hygiene standards, and men and women working in filleting are all paid well above the average income of their country. […] At the same time, Tanzania has banned the export of local, traditional fish species, which are also spreading once again thanks to the increase in the amount of Victoria perch being caught, so that fish continues as an important part of the diet of the population living at the lake.” (Ibid.) In fact, in Sauper’s film there are also some bewildering scenes. For example, one woman walking barefoot through the fish carcasses gives an astonishing answer to Sauper’s question about her life: “My husband has gone away. Before this job, I was a normal peasant. I’m better off now. My life is good. I’ve got a job.” And she smiles proudly into the camera.

Figure 17: Darwin’s Nightmare 2004 So, will Sauper now succeed in adequately portraying the complexity of the topic? It seems so. Even if Peltzer’s objections seem justified, an impressive documentary remains, which shows an Africa that goes beyond the big clichés. In the shadow of the Rwandan Civil War, Sauper succeeds in taking a sensitive look at a complex, previously unnoticed topic. Starting with the observation of the Mzwana airfield in Tanzania, where planes with UN aid supplies arrive at the same time as planes are being loaded with fish fillets for the European market, he successively reveals the complex economy based on the Victoria perch fishing industry and, in particular, the logic of a perverted business model.

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5. C onclusion The question of whether the representation of sensory impressions is also suitable for representing complex interrelations can hardly be answered conclusively, since the type and manner of complexity can vary. By focusing on sensory impressions, it is therefore possible to open up and communicate new worlds of experience. Complexity comes into play when filmmakers show different facets and perspectives of an environment in which the actors and their actions are connected. The focus on sensory impressions conveys above all the experience of the interdependence of the actors. It is no longer man or a single creature who has the power to act; rather, all actors in a system are subject to rules set by the ‘invisible hand of the market,’ which determines their actions to the point of physical sensations. The focus on physicality in documentary films draws attention to corporeal, sensory perception. The impressions of loads cutting deep into shoulder flesh, of repetitive, monotonous and painful movements, or of contact with slimy substances, maggots, and worms, or poisonous vapors, are almost physically transferred to the audience. What this representation has in common with cinéma du corps is that the body shows what has shaped its life: the traces of hard physical work. Closeups of these traces create a kind of authenticity that is difficult to recreate. At the same time, they open up an affective, emotional—or rather, empathic—approach to the actors depicted (whether they be people or animals). Compassion for the creature is at the center and yet is broken by the multiplicity of perspectives. Sensory impressions in documentary films do not provide a mere image of reality like the photo of a factory; rather, they alienate what is depicted through the many perspectives that make simple ‘empathy’ impossible. What dominates is the impression of disorientation, of being lost, of being exposed to forces that are no longer controlled by the individual creature. Complexity is translated here as powerlessness in the face of circumstances whose complexity is neither manageable nor controllable. In this sense, sensory impressions actually offer a new quality of expression. This allows discourses to be opened up (but perhaps not pursued in more depth) about what and how this is depicted. They not only offer a form of sensory attraction or translate concepts of authenticity into a new aesthetic strategy, but also show new, complex forms of meaning. In particular, the inhumane working environments shaped by abstract market mechanisms become tangible through the representation of sensory impressions, as they reveal the impact on humans, animals, and the environment to be a complex system, and present them in a sensorily comprehensible form.

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R eferences Baudry, Jean-Louis (1974/1975): “Ideological Effects of the Basis Cinematographic Apparatus.” In: Film Quarterly 2, pp. 39–47. Benedict, Daniel (2016): “‘Leviathan’: die Fischerei-Doku ist ein Meisterwerk.” In: Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung September 10, 2016 (https://www.noz.de/deutschland-welt/kultur/artikel/770670/leviathan-die-fischerei-doku-ist-ein-meisterwerk). Bolter, Jay David/Grusin, Richard (1999): Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Brecht, Bertolt (2000): “The Threepenny Lawsuit.” In: Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, edited and translated by Marc Silberman, London: Methuen, pp. 147–199. Bulgakowa, Oksana/Bordwell, David (2006): “The Ear against the Eye: Vertov’s ‘Symphony’ [with Response].” In: Monatshefte 98/2, pp. 219–243. Cox, Rupert/Irving, Andrew/Wright, Christopher (eds.) (2016): Beyond text? Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Groys, Boris (2000): Unter Verdacht: Eine Phänomenologie der Medien, Munich/ Vienna: Carl Hanser. Hickethier, Knut (1995): “Dispositiv Fernsehen: Skizze eines Modells.” In: montage/av 4:1, pp. 63–83. Hoare, Philip (2013): “Leviathan: the film that lays bare the apocalyptic world of fishing”. In: The Guardian November 18, 2013 (http://www.theguardian.com/ film/2013/nov/18/leviathan-fishing-film-moby-dick). Howell, Peter (2013): “Leviathan a fish-eye view aboard a commercial trawler: review.” In: The Toronto Star March 14, 2013 (https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2013/03/14/leviathan_a_fisheye_view_aboard_a_commercial_trawler_review.html). Kaczmarek, Ludger (2012): “Cinéma du Corps.” In: Lexikon der Filmbegriffe October 13, 2012 (http://filmlexikon.uni-kiel.de/index.php?action=lexikon&tag=det&id=6893). Knaller, Susanne/Müller, Harald (2006): Authentizität. Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs, Munich: Fink. Latour, Bruno (2002): Die Hoffnung der Pandora, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Mersch, Dieter (2004): “Medialität und Undarstellbarkeit: Einleitung in eine ›negative‹ Medientheorie.” In: Sybille Krämer (ed.), Performativität und Medialität, Paderborn: Fink pp. 75–95. Mersch, Dieter (2010): Posthermeneutik, Berlin: Akademie. Mersch, Dieter (2017): “Plastizität: Zur Frage der Übersetzung im Visuellen.” In: Claudia Benthien/Gabriele Klein (eds.), Übersetzen und Rahmen: Praktiken medialer Transformationen, Paderborn: Fink, pp. 39–58.

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Mihm, Kai (2013): “Kritik zu Leviathan.” In: epd Film May 1, 2013 (https://www. epd-film.de/filmkritiken/leviathan). Nichols, Bill (2001): Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nord, Cristina (2005): “Die Bilder sind so aggressiv wie Barsche.” In: taz March 17, 2005 (http://www.taz.de/!634463/). Odin, Roger (1998): “Dokumentarischer Film—dokumentarisierende Lektüre.” In: Eva Hohenberger (ed.), Bilder des Wirklichen: Texte zur Theorie des Dokumentarfilms, Berlin: Vorwerk 8, pp. 286–303. Peitz, Christiane (2017): “Das Schweifen der Lämmer.” In: Der Tagesspiegel April 15, 2017 (https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/kino/der-film-sweetgrassdas-schweifen-der-laemmer/1606032.html). Peltzer, Roger (2006): “Filetstücke für den Weltmarkt.” In: taz February 9, 2016 (http://www.taz.de/!383381/). Ratner, Meghan (2010): “Once Grazing, Now Gone: SWEETGRASS”. In: Film Quarterly 63, pp. 23–27 (http://sweetgrassthemovie.com/2010/06/once-grazing-now-gone-sweetgrass/). Schenker, Andrew (2010): “Counting Sheep.” In: art forum January 1, 2010 (https:// www.artforum.com/film/andrew-schenker-on-sweetgrass-24493). Schiefer, Karin (2005): “Michael Glawogger-Interview.” In: Austrian Films. com  (http://www.austrianfilms.com/news/news_article?j-cc-node=artikel&j-cc-id=13521). Vertov, Dziga (1973 [1922]): “Wir: Variante eines Manifests.” In: Schriften zum Film, edited by Wolfgang Beilenhoff, Munich: Carl Hanser, pp. 7–10. Weber, Thomas (2008): “Mediologie und Medienwissenschaft.” In: Birgit Mersmann/Thomas Weber (eds.), Mediologie als Methode, Berlin: Avinus, pp. 123– 148. Weber, Thomas (2013): “Documentary Film in Media Transformation.” In: InterDisciplines: Journal of History and Sociology 4/1, pp. 103–126 (http://www. inter-disciplines.org/bghs/index.php/indi/article/view/79). Weber, Thomas (2017): “Der dokumentarische Film und seine medialen Milieus.” In: Carsten Heinze/Thomas Weber (eds.), Medienkulturen des Dokumentarischen, Wiesbaden: VS, pp. 3–26. Weber, Thomas (2018a): “Glaubwürdigkeitskriterien und Deutungsmacht dokumentarischer Bilder.” In: Martina Kumlehn/Philipp Stoellger (eds.), Bildmacht/Machtbild: Deutungsmacht des Bildes: Wie Bilder glauben machen, Würzburg: Königshausen + Neumann, pp. 297–321. Weber, Thomas (2018b): “Mediale Milieus des Dokumentarischen und ihre epistemologische Relevanz.” In: Delia Gonzáles de Reufels, Rasmus Greiner, Stefano Odorico, Winfried Pauleit (eds.), Film als Forschungsmethode. Produktion—Geschichte—Perspektiven, Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, pp. 110–118.

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I mages Figure 1: Seagulls orbit the ship. Source: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/ movies/2013/03/14/leviathan_a_fisheye_view_aboard_a_commercial_trawler_review.html Figure 2: Screenshots Primary, USA 1960, D: Robert Drews. Figure 3: Screenshots Lenssen & Partner, Sat 1, September 20, 2011. Figure 4. Screenshots Drifters, GB 1929, D: John Grierson. Figure 5: Screenshots Drifters, GB 1929, D: John Grierson. Figure 6: Screenshots Drifters, GB 1929, D: John Grierson. Figure 7: Screenshots Enthusiasm, USSR 1931, D: Dziga Vertov. Figure 8: Machines and workers in the steelworks, screenshots Enthusiasm, USSR 1931, D: Dziga Vertov. Figure 9: Screenshots Enthusiasm, USSR 1931, D: Dziga Vertov. Figure 10: Workers practicing movements using the pickaxe, miners using the pickaxe, screenshots Enthusiasm, USSR 1931, D: Dziga Vertov. Figure 11: The best worker from shaft 9, screenshots Enthusiasm, USSR 1931, D: Dziga Vertov. Figure 12: The best worker from shaft 9, screenshot Workingman’s Death, D/AUT 2005, D: Michael Glawogger. Figure 13: Screenshots Workingman’s Death, D/AUT 2005, D: Michael Glawogger. Figure 14: Screenshots Workingman’s Death, D/AUT 2005, D: Michael Glawogger. Figure 15: Screenshots Workingman’s Death, D/AUT 2005, D: Michael Glawogger. Figure 16: Screenshots Darwin’s Nightmare, F/AUT/B 2004, D: Hubert Sauper. Figure 17: Screenshots Darwin’s Nightmare, F/AUT/B 2004, D: Hubert Sauper.

Films Drifters, GB 1929, D: John Grierson. Enthusiasm, USSR 1932, D: Dziga Vertov. Lenssen & Partner, Sat 1, September 20, 2011. Leviathan, USA 2012, D: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel. Primary, USA 1960, D: Robert Drew. Workingman’s Death, D/AUT 2005, D: Michael Glawogger. Darwin’s Nightmare, F/AUT/B 2004, D: Hubert Sauper. Sweetgrass, USA 2009, D: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ilisa Barbash. Foreign Parts, USA 2010, D: Véréna Paravel, J.P. Sniadecki. Import—Export, AUT 2007, D: Ulrich Seidl.

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Situated Between Cultures The (Im-)possibility of Translation in Ghassan Salhab’s Films Michaela Ott

Belonging to only one culture—which is still considered normal and desirable by many Germans today—reveals a self-understanding that is about to become an exception in the mondializing world of today. The more people live in countries or on continents that are exposed to long-lasting ethnic and religious conflicts or territorial quarrels (as has been the case in the Middle East since time immemorial), the more normal it becomes for them to have an orientation that inevitably straddles different cultural codes, resulting in a composite cultural identity. The situation of being forced to get by in different languages and contradictory cultural codes is mirrored in the feature films and film essays of Ghassan Salhab from Lebanon. The narratives and aesthetics of his films are called forth by an atmosphere of political and psychological unease, of war, of fleeing. They can be read as seismographic recordings of a constant state of alertness and of the necessary recalibration of personal and social orientation using aesthetic-symbolic signs. Situated between Arabic, African, and European languages, as well as between different written and visual codes, Salhab develops a filmic oeuvre which incessantly reflects upon the (im)possibility of translation and coherence, exposes its own contingency, and repeats its expression of rootlessness.

D eviation from the genealogy of A rabic film In his extensively biographical film 1958 (2009, 66 min.), Salhab recreates 1958, the year of his birth, in a one-hour composition of a distinctly peaceful nature, consisting of analog photographs, non-static exterior images of Beirut mixed with documentary archive material, and interviews conducted by the director himself. In this rhythmically uniform sequence of (frequently static) shots, he examines two incidents that are both meaningful and disquieting to him: his own birth and the first Lebanese civil war, as Salhab refers to it. It is as though Salhab, in this carefully considered montage, were trying to create a counterweight to something

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still in progress today that has been present throughout his entire filmic career: war in the Middle East. War haunts his films and might be what originally set his filmic quest in motion. Each new version poses the same questions, translating their non-answerable nature into phantoms, ambiguous moods, and mysterious narratives. The film 1958 can thus be read as a paradigm of Salhab’s working method, and of the composition of his feature films and those that he designates film essays: more or less heterogeneous connections of associatively linked images, texts, and sounds from a variety of audiovisual sources. Like numerous contemporary filmmakers in the Arabic world who, since the 1970s, have been opening up new cinematic paths and working against the standardized film genres of Egyptian cinema in particular through their personal style as auteurs, the starting point for Salhab is his own experience. Youssef Chahine’s 1971 feature film The Sparrow translated autobiographical experiences into non-linear narrative forms that mixed past and present in contravention of the widely accepted realist credo. The filmic works of Chahine, the doyen of Egyptian film, were trailblazers for these kinds of biography-based narrative forms. According to Viola Shafik, “new Arab cinema”—a term coined by the film critic Claude Michel Cluny and the publication CinémAction in the 1970s—has become established as a name for this kind of cinema. The Tunisian filmmaker Férid Boughédir praises this new cinematographic approach in his documentary film Caméra Arabe as anti-authoritarian cinema, while Shafik characterizes it as an “artistically ambitious and individualistic current” (Shafik 1996: 58), as auteur cinema in the French model, subject to no clear themes or genres, moving away from previous political messages, socialism à l›arabe, and pan-Arabism alike.1 Although Salhab does not concede any affinity with this new Arabian cinema—not even in his innovative approaches—he situates his films in a specific political/geographical framework that, in light of Sartre’s recognition of the “situatedness of existence” in times of war (in Satre’s case, the Second World War), has a specific expression that nonetheless also applies more widely.2 Salhab’s auteur films inevitably resonate with their social context, but still more with artistic works like those of the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, which endeavor to reconstruct and present the largely unknown iconography of the Arabic world using photographs from the Arab Image Foundation. In their audiovisual sequences—characterized 1 |  In History of Arab Cinema, Mostafa Messnaoui talks about a “New Wave” of Egyptian cinema in the 1970s, which then spread out into neighbouring countries and their nascent cinematographies (cf. Messnaoui 2014). 2 |  Early on, in 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre states in Being and Nothingness “that being-in-situation defines human reality by accounting both for its being-there and for its being-beyond […]. And the situation is the organized totality of the being-there, interpreted and lived in and through being-beyond.” (Satre 2012: 549).

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by pronounced gaps—Salhab’s films offer fragmentary insights into the visual character of this region. However, unlike Zaatari’s slightly nostalgic reconstruction of images, they emphasize the disorientation and continuing psychological trauma caused by war. The essay form that he frequently chooses does not conform to the playful/ experimental-militant/expressive montages of Jean-Luc Godard or Chris Marker – his distant influences—so much as it proclaims an involuntary relationship with film essays of a feminist character, possibly with those of Angela Melitopoulos or Trinh T. Minh-ha. Their films, based on personal experience, conduct similar filmic research into questions of identity, exile, and composite cultural sensitivities.3 Melitopoulos’ film Passing Drama (1999) is visibly affected by the historical expulsion of the Greeks from the Middle East in the early 20th century and the enforced search for a new homeland; however, this film maintains a more analytically distanced attitude to the political crisis, hedging it about with philosophical concepts. Salhab’s film 1958, however, is similar to her film in the sense that they both begin with testimonies from members of their parents’ generation and expand to encompass wider social diagnoses. Additionally, both espouse an aesthetic process of “minorizing the filmic articulation” (Ott 2011: 189), insofar as their attention is directed toward unobserved and neglected testimonies (some of which are material), with a different perspective in each case. These small documents are translated into series of “affection images” 4 and close-up shots, which demonstrate that everything that can possibly migrate—by no means only human beings—does migrate and becomes culturally displaced. Melitopoulos’ films do not so much speak “about” something as “with” various agents such as raindrops, looms, and stones, combining their inconspicuous/processual articulations to create a spatiotemporally specific structure, which is modelled on Penelope’s web in that it appears as though it could be configured in a different way, with different contingencies. Salhab’s films are similar in that they can be read as psychoanalysis-like processes of working through collective experiences: after all, they are intended as a means of conducting audiovisual research into context-dependent, (non-in)dividual impregnations and creating portraits of them as obsessions and recurring questions.5 They begin as situated expressions, with images of public places and with aphorisms appropriated from different authors; they present no linear narra3 |  A more thorough analysis can be found in: Ott 2011.  is a term used by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema I: The Movement-Image (1986: 26; cf. 4 |  “affection-image” Ott 2015). 5 |  The term “dividual” is developed by Gilles Deleuze in connection with the filmic “affection-image” (Deleuze 1986: 14) and “of the refrain” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 341) as a special form of the way that aesthetic signs share and participate in one another and the impossibility of fixing and individualizing a single image due to time. Ott develops this term toward a more personal, non-individual participative relationship (cf. Ott 2018).

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tive, no dramatic structure, no political or social engagement, no intention to make a statement, and, above all, no recognizable image of the ‘Orient’. Resisting predefined artistic paths is the main motif of Salhab’s filmic activities, reinforcing the irreparable, existential catastrophe, and extending that which Maurice Blanchot presented as “écriture de désastre”: “Characters in film live in a sort of solitude, either poetic or prophetic, within the human community: each lives a catastrophic episode of the destiny of mankind as his own historical curse.” 6 In spite of his previous political involvement with the “Palestinian question,” Salhab does not, as the Palestinian director Michel Khleifi does in his documentary film Fertile Memory (1980), oppose the predominantly Palestinian discourse by creating a portrait of two Palestinian women of different classes and ages, and their battles for emancipation in order to denounce “the traces of a double occupation” (Shafik 1996: 244) by the state and the patriarchy. Nor is the anti-colonial resistance that Malek Khoury perceives as an integral element of New Arabic Cinema (2005: 12), as translated by Michel Khleifi’s film Wedding in Galilee (1987), the main driving force behind Salhab’s filmic reflection. Instead, he views himself as the product of (post-)colonial and identity-destabilizing circumstances, as someone who has experienced these as milestones in his biography and must thus address them in his films. Proceeding from philosophical/existentialist questions and from the premise that the canvas of the world is full and that, in order to stimulate attention, unexpected collages, but also omissions and erratic combinations are required, he begins with loose, random-looking connections of texts and single takes and, in particular, works in a tone whose aesthetic ranges from surprise to uneasiness. He presents himself as being affected from multiple directions, but not directly influenced by anybody. Like other Lebanese auteur filmmakers, such as Borhane Alaouie in Beyroutou el lika (1981), Heiny Srour in Leila and the Wolves (1984), and Jocelyn Saab in A Suspended Life (Ghazal el-Banat, 1985), he takes the civil war as the starting point for his filmic treatment. Unlike the latter feature film, his film essays do not create any connection to an imagined Lebanese audience by playing with the standard Arabic language and its dialects in a way that closely approaches the audience. Instead, Salhab contrasts Arabic with French, embedding lines of Arabic text within certain film images whose meaning is not identical to that of the French voiceover text: he tries to underscore the impossibility of simple translations. He deviates from Arabic filmmakers in that, in Shafik’s words, he does not, as they do, trust “the significance of words” more than “the image design.” (1996: 96) Although aphorisms, both literary and philosophical, certainly play a significant role, music and song are used sparingly—a significant departure from many Arabic films, which often reverberate with local musical traditions, 6 |  This is Salhab’s own brief description of his films, which can be found at www.hfbk-hamburg.de/ crossculturalchallenges/

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such as Assia Djebar’s film La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (1982; cf. Shafik 1996: 158). Instead of being restricted to local perspectives and identity discourses, Salhab’s filmic research endeavors to create a psychogram of today’s “composite cultural”7 identities that applies beyond the Lebanese context, which, as Stuart Hall says, “are not [no longer] fixed, but are suspended in transition between different positions which draw on different cultural traditions at the same time; and which are the product of those complicated crossovers and cultural mixes which are increasingly common in a globalized world.” (Hall 1992: 120) Achille Mbembe has extended this composite cultural mode of existence in the direction of “Afropolitan” forms of existence (Mbembe 2010: 285), which, in their turn, are characterized by the intermeshing of different worlds, of “here and elsewhere” (ibid.). Inquiries into endangered existences and a life both between and with different cultures provide the background to Salhab’s filmic artworks, to the extent that he sees himself, biographically speaking, positioned between three continents: the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, as demonstrated here using the example of the feature film 1958. This position in-between, this culturally transversal mode of existence, is also the reason why he tends to disregard the difference between feature film and film essay.

1958 It initially seems implausible to call 1958 a feature film (2009). After all, like a number of Salhab’s film essays, it depends upon a biographically-motivated image-and-sound composition, while some of his other feature films involve stronger narrativized and fictionalized quests. As a whole, his six feature films and dozen film essays and short films are dominated by a melancholic mood and are characterized by dramaturgies of the evocation and situative defining of problematic constellations. They all deal with war-related psychic disturbances and phantom-like manifestations—frequently, as can be recognized, through the strange behavior of the protagonists. As with 1958, these situations—defined more by their atmosphere than by their plots—are almost exclusively peopled by male protagonists, who are thus recognizable as the filmaker’s alter egos. Taken as a whole, Salhab’s feature films and film essays are a united and continuous articulation of images and sounds in the minor key, which, here and there, crystallizes into a narrative, picking up on and heightening past motifs—all in all recognizable as variations on similarly-montaged filmic symbols structured around recurring questions. The quest for meaning and the need to explain provide a continuous subtext. 7 |  This term is the adjectival form of Edouard Glissant’s expression “cultures composites,” which he uses in his text Traité du monde (1997: 195; cf. Ott 2017).

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1958 (Ghassan Salhab, Lib 2009)

In 1958, the director, looking back at the last 50 years, examines the coincidental connection between his birth and political events in Lebanon that, in hindsight, appear to him to be symptomatic of the country. He resurrects these events through spoken eyewitness accounts, archival images, and audio recordings. He weaves together documents from 1958 and more recent 21st-century scenes to create a portrait of society. The very first take shows the cone of light from a torch being used to search a finely-detailed painting in which, little by little, warships can be made out. This is followed by a long shot of the open sea, with Beirut a faintly-suggested presence on the horizon, succeeded by close-ups of a sleeping, audibly breathing baby, rotund and healthy-looking, against edits of black-and-white documentary images of US soldiers, who, having landed on the coast of Lebanon, rush forward across its beaches. This is followed by a rather erratic car journey through Beirut, intercut with black-and-white photographs showing the director as a child: motifs of a prelude to a film that presents itself—in its subtitle—as a “self-portrait of yesterday.” The car journey is accompanied by a female voice telling us that, during this period, she was told something in a letter that she did not understand at the time. In the shot that follows, this voice is paired with the face of Salhab’s mother, looking into the camera, shockingly up-close and with a Medusa-like rigidity. Her biographical narrative provides the common thread running through the film, with her portrait regularly recurring in large-scale or close-up images, albeit at steadily increasing distances. In an ongoing interweaving of narrative fragments and audiovisual elements, the film progresses through an affective translation of war and other agents of instability: an adult Salhab passes through the city of Beirut with the camera at his back at shoulder height, trying to get to know it by collecting aesthetic symbols  – accompanied by comments—that are somewhat mystifying, as they accumulate abstract substantives such as “body wish reason alienation.” All in all, the message is one of alienation and of the difficulty of filmic translation: the director comes from somewhere else, barely speaks Arabic, and is never entirely

Situated Between Cultures

at home in the city, which he—notwithstanding—repeatedly makes the central character of his film. We see his mother in static close-ups intercut with documentary images of war events in Beirut, hesitantly reporting on the past and, as she speaks, becoming more and more immersed in her own memory. The family narrative thus unfolds as one that, as a translation of various cultural and linguistic situations and their framing, must continually restage itself and set itself in opposition to an unrelenting threat to its identity. His mother’s account begins with her marriage. Her relocation to Dakar in Senegal with her Lebanese husband “in order to be somewhere else” emphasizes her increasing confusion in the year of Ghassan’s birth: her time with the Lebanese diaspora in Dakar is portrayed as an economically strained existence, living in a room behind a shop. She, the mother, was apparently the only one who spoke proper Arabic among the Lebanese population, which generally spoke a broken version of the language, getting by with the aid of French. She had been adversely affected by her first pregnancy with Ghassan and by family pressure. With her skeptical gaze filling the whole screen like an icon, powerful and almost too intimate, she explains her growing feeling of security in the unfamiliar surroundings, while the war in Lebanon increasingly and inescapably manifests in the interspersed documentary images. But then, that was something people barely heard anything about in Dakar … The inserted media reports on the first Lebanese civil war—never officially acknowledged—show black-and-white TV images of battles between government soldiers and rebels. In the audio, we hear a call for UN police intervention. These archive testimonies are in turn interrupted by images and accounts from contemporary eyewitnesses, including a Lebanese soldier whose machine gun can still be seen in the living room. He provides commentary on the documentary images of Christian and Islamic militias, on the injured and dead on the streets, accompanying them with descriptions of his own participation in the armed uprising and of his loyalty to the leader of the forces hostile to the government, Kamal Jumblatt: “Weapons arrived from Syria, the whole thing escalated, then people called it revolution … We could not stay silent. We had to defend ourselves.” The various voices connect with each other or transition into one other, and the accounts of the eyewitnesses and the TV journalists overlap with that of Salhab’s mother, creating a woven fabric of voices, using audio to suggest the impossibility of disentangling the different simultaneous threats. Nevertheless, the camera remains calm, passing at a regular speed over military hardware in modern-day open-air Beirut, also showing more equipment underwater, relics of a war that has always already taken place. As the film progresses, Salhab’s mother speaks more freely and passionately; she tells of her return to Beirut, of the high esteem in which she holds Egyptian president Nasser, and of her adherence to the ideal of pan-Arabism. When Nasser

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1958 (Ghassan Salhab, Lib 2009)

1958 (Ghassan Salhab, Lib 2009)

died, she thought her heart had stopped beating and wept bitterly. As she speaks these words, her image grows faint—as if it is also losing its power—after which the outlines of her face slowly return. She is forced to recognize that the Arabs cannot unite behind a single leader: her final words on the subject are: “the poor Arabic world.” Montaged in a ponderous rhythm, sometimes accompanied by classical European music and sometimes Arabic music, these images allow the director’s basic feeling to emerge: that of a general sense of homelessness. A photograph of mother and son from later years is repeatedly inserted into the image, a break or exclamation mark in the filmic text. Over and over again, we encounter close-up views of destroyed buildings, of burnt-out tanks in urban wastelands, of the military in the streets, all of which demand audiovisual translation, challenging the faculties of interpretation. The voiceover commentary of the authors, words like “loss, disorientation, despair” work like a refrain, underscoring the lack of clarity and of any possible explanation for this continuing situation. According to Salhab, the first civil war is still not a part of the national consciousness of present-day Lebanon because, within Lebanon, there are no archive images of it. They can still only be found among the former colonists, in the archive of France’s INA or Britain’s ITN, from whom Salhab acquired some of the pictures. Many of them, however, he found by trawling the Internet. So far, he has been the only one to remember this war, which floats like destiny above his birth …

Situated Between Cultures

Salhab’s approach to this world, which is reflexive rather than veristic, is not suited to providing details about or reporting on the theaters of war, which is why, in all of his films, the presence of war is a background event, a diffuse threat. He seems to undermine every aesthetic composition, giving the montage a contingent and reversible status. In narrative terms, the inconsistency of the real thus evoked translates into accidents, into alienating incidents, and into increasingly pronounced gestures of withdrawal on the part of the protagonists. And yet the film proves to be an antidote to this unpredictable reality: the expanded close-up views and reflexive commentaries represent a certain symbolic foothold, a minimal spatial reference point in the fragile present day. At the end of the film, Beirut is shown, viewed from the sea: initially only seen as a thin line on the horizon—from, as it were, the Dakar perspective—it gradually draws closer. The director travels in a boat toward the city, toward an imposing silhouette of skyscrapers, as though now, after passing through the collected image and audio testimony, he can finally become acquainted with it. Perhaps it is because of this quality—this minimal identity-fostering function—that he describes this reconstruction as a feature film. As this expanded self-portrait makes clear, Ghassan Salhab was born between different languages and cultures. He understands Wolof, but prefers to speak French, because this is the language that unites Dakar and Beirut and opens up the European world to him. This film, like his other films, translates personal and social conditions into aesthetic signs and outlines (non-in)dividual life journeys. In all of his films, the protagonists appear to be equipped with special senses and to be select embodiments of social suffering. The war also appears in these short films.

R ecurring phantoms Places frequently provide the starting point for Salhab’s filmic research and their fairly vaguely defined quests—as the titles of the feature films La Montagne/The Mountain und La Vallée/The Valley reveal. Strikingly, it is often Beirut that compels him toward ever new investigations. In Salhab’s films, this former “Paris of the East” is portrayed as wounded, bewildered, and inscrutable, always distorted by roadblocks and detours, plagued by death. His films chart the territories and research aesthetic qualities within them, thereby adhering to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s hypothesis that art begins with the spatial markings of sensory symbols and gains power through their repetition and displacement (cf. Deleuze/ Guattari 1987, 342–386). Poststructuralist theory also incorporates the idea that walking and driving reveal more about collective states of being than physiognomical studies. However, pedestrians strolling around Beirut encounter frequent restrictions, with routes blocked, and are stopped and asked to produce papers.

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Beyrouth Fantôme (Ghassan Salhab, Lib 1998)

These detours—hated, according to one commentator—cause the Lebanese people to speak of Beirut as both their beloved and a whore, without whom, however, life would not be possible. And yet, everybody wants to leave and, having left, the majority return to find out what ultimately keeps them in the city. This city is the unofficial protagonist of many of Salhab’s films. It is reflected in various characters—mostly male—and it appears as a phantom thanks to the various layers of the past that operate within it. In his first feature film, Beyrouth Fantôme (1998, 115 min.)—which already resides somewhere between documentation and fiction—women speak as well. Once again, they are placed frontally within the picture. They speak about their positive relationship with the war, in this case, the well-known, later Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1976 to 1990. In spite of its official end, a woman named Hanna, who appears to be both cultured and sad, explains that, “for me, the war is not over.” During the war, she says, life on the whole was better for her, as she was able to live life to the full in every moment. Everything was easier, people were more considerate of others, loved more, whereas now it was every man and woman for themselves. After the war, they were forced to acknowledge that their dreams and wishes were too big to be realized. The war and its return are evoked afresh, both fictionally and in documentary terms. One visible phantom is a protagonist named Khalid, who, believed to be dead and venerated as a martyr, returns to Beirut and is accused of certain crimes, such as stealing war funds. Hanna says that, since there are too many dead, you should not unbury the past and think of revenge: after all, it is hard enough to deal with the living. Khalid replies that he has money. Interwoven with the dreamlike (or nightmare-like) feature film plot are fresh documentary images of the civil wars, of battles on the barricades, and burned-out cars, accompanied by shooting that disables a record player and silences its music. They suggest drug and weapon trafficking. People live in cellars like the undead. Two more women recount in interviews how the war caused them to abandon their ambitions, as it proved that nothing was safe or enduring. The war destroyed them, made them into ruins. On the other hand, one man speaks of how he once wished to become a general, while another compares Beirut to a lover; on a per-

Situated Between Cultures

Beyrouth Fantôme (Ghassan Salhab, Lib 1998)

sonal level, the war was positive for them. Another man confesses that: “We are all murderers, and we have traversed an ocean of blood.” By the end, the phantom Khalid has vanished again, possibly abducted or once again dropped out of sight. The film’s cyclical structure, like the scenes from the war, shows that nothing is ever completely over, and this appears to be the real tragedy. The three feature films that more accurately fit this description—they follow a fictional narrative, although, once again, they operate in a way that is situation-specific—intensify the expression of psychic disturbance in individuals. Probably the most provocative of these is Le Dernier Homme/The Last Man (2006, 102 min.), which, loosely based on Murnau’s Nosferatu, shows a man turning away from society and fleeing into solitude. The film makes it very clear that Salhab is seeking suggestive narratives that help translate the difficult-to-comprehend reality. Mysterious processes are more strongly narrativized in this film than in others; they find an iconic emblem, a kind of bracket that holds the narration together and, as someone says in the film, increases its delineation. The iconic emblem: a vampire bite on the throat of various persons who are presented as dead. The search for the perpetrator, the bloodsucker, drives the narrative and even creates a certain detective-story-like tension. However, although forensic examinations confirm that the bites are the cause of death, it remains unclear to the last who the perpetrators are and what manner of process we are actually dealing with here. Is there more than one bloodsucker, and is the bite an expression of collective psychosis? The curious thing about this narrative is that a doctor (Carlos Chahine) might be the vampire. Suspiciously, when he is confronted with the deaths, he increasingly behaves out of the ordinary, neglecting his professional duties, failing to react, and fleeing from sunlight. His mouth comes close to some characters’ jugulars. His environment very much places him squarely within the context of the vampirized. And yet, it remains uncertain whether or not the bite is a hallucination—or wish-fulfilment on the part of someone who comes into contact with the vital fluid in a medical capacity and is now becoming a victim of contact with its magical powers.

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Le Dernier Homme/ The Last Man (Ghassan Salhab, Lib 2006)

Even the opening shot evokes unease: a medium shot, it shows a Christ-like image, head fallen to one side—the first person to die of the vampire’s bite. That Christianity has a close relationship with blood is plainly demonstrated by the doctrine of transubstantiation and its need to display the blood of Christ. But what is this image doing here? And why, in the next shot, is it replaced by a flamenco-­dancing woman, who later shows up again and becomes one of the victims of the vampire? The doctor’s hobby is diving, and he is repeatedly seen beneath the water, where he appears to escape his peculiar impulses: “toujours sous l’eau” (“always under water”). When, having surfaced, he passes a small fishing boat, the painter calls the red color he is applying to the boat “devil’s blood.” This is followed by an aesthetically arresting weave of media images—seemingly seen from the doctor’s perspective—showing Israeli attacks on South Lebanon combined with X-ray images of patients and computer images of the dead, exteriors of Beirut, and day-to-day clinical scenes. The same thing happens with the audio: radio reports about a Muslim woman being molested alternate with telephone calls and media reports concerned with the discovery of the perpetrator. It is repeatedly claimed—and lamented—that the situation has remained the same since the Civil War began in 1975. Like so many other protagonists in Salhab’s films, the doctor no longer wishes to know anything. He withdraws to his home, to his bed, does not answer calls, and lives in semidarkness, foreshadowing the protagonist in the feature film La Montagne. The frames also have a tendency to freeze, so that they reflect only a single visual obsession: red, dead flesh in freezers and morgues, and blood that the doctor greedily sucks and licks from the floor. Images of his motionless face accumulate, staring into space for ever-longer periods, lost in vague musings. When he goes for a medical eye test, the comment is: “We overuse our eyes.” Suddenly, he collapses, appearing to be in worse health than his patients and encountering his own image in multiple exposure: the boundaries between interior and exterior dissolve. Just like in the two feature films that follow, a significant car accident takes place. In this case, it is caused by a vampirized person. Ultimately, the doctor discovers a potential perpetrator: he sees an older man sucking blood from someone

Situated Between Cultures

else. When the two of them finally come face to face, vampire to vampire, they seem to be tempted to attack each other for a moment. Instead, they part. It is an endless story, like the war: blood stolen, transferred, and poured out for no reasonable purpose? The two most recent feature films are both set in distant locations. In La montagne/The Mountain (2011, 84 min.), we do not see the titular mountain until the end of the film. Instead, the protagonist mutates into a kind of mountain: impersonal, slow to respond, inexpressive. He is shown getting ready for a journey and telling a colleague that he will be away for a month. At the airport, he stands in front of the desk, does not receive any assistance, and ultimately rents a car. From this point on, he is alone with the camera, which continuously looks into his inexpressive face, becoming a kind of mirror—even during shaving. The protagonist occasionally talks to himself and recites texts and poems in English—at some point, he sings a song by Johnny Cash: “The man comes around …” Reports on Hezbollah and on the celebration of the 10th anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon can be heard on the car radio. This is interspersed with repeated close-up shots of snow, both lying on the ground and falling. Its coolness is echoed by the coolness of the narrative and the images: sparingly lit, in a minimalist style, with little sound or text. It is a reduced drama with the subtitle “Detour”: an encounter with another car at a petrol station that, shortly afterwards (in a hard cut) is shown wrecked by the roadside. The protagonist stops, turns off the continuously sounding horn, and looks at the dead figures behind the windscreen. When the car catches fire, the flames are reflected on his body as he recoils and on his expressionless face. This form of multiple lighting, which also occurs elsewhere, appears to reveal psychological disturbance. Or does it show a shock image being burnt into his psyche? Afterwards, we are told only indirectly that the protagonist must have seen many similar shock images to be rendered so incapable of reacting. Above all, he wishes to be alone: he rents a hotel room off the beaten track, pays in advance, and avoids being disturbed by the hotel staff. He shuts out the image of the outside world and the snowy landscape, creating a hermit’s cell. In this sensory isolation, he begins to write: on white paper, using a fountain pen, in Arabic script. The first sentence is: “I am my own witness. I know it.” The camera researches this self-witnessing, its aesthetic details, the white wall—then once again zooms in on the paper, which displays sentences such as: “I break words as if someone would break a lock” against the background of the snowy landscape. Following this, the camera does more than look at him (in close-up)—it watches him engaged in the process of watching himself. Since all we hear is a mobile ringtone now and again, the film is also an experiment in sensory minimalism, taking aesthetic reduction to its maximum extent. We see the protagonist from the front, in profile, and from behind; unmoving, brooding, lying on the bed, smoking, looking at something from which we hear a certain sound. At some

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point, the telephone dies. Every tiny movement and elevation is registered: water swirling round a plughole, corresponding with a hole in the snow. Like the protagonist, the audience has become sensitized to minimal sensory input, to peculiar scratching sounds. Finally, the last human being puts his head in his hands and looks into the camera. During this negative climax of encountering the self, a storm brews outside: window panes rattle, a cedar hangs crookedly over the balcony. He says things like: “I could have spoken to her, about alcohol, desire, vanity, endlessness.” The author’s philosophical tone is reiterated in the mouth of his alter ego. The film reveals itself to be a possible self-portrait of the filmmaker, something that is also evident in the writing. Ultimately, this proves superfluous: the words “enough of this” write themselves, the fountain pen runs out, the protagonist smears the ink on his body. Finally, he manages to step out into the open air; he walks beneath trees, in the light. Then we hear a shot. There is a man lying on the ground, his face bloody. The dramatic framing, which encompasses the accidents and acts of killing, appears to draw to a close here, and yet this is identified as an “as if”: just one cited possibility for a narrative conclusion. The film’s style is reminiscent of the distanced descriptions used in the French nouveau roman, where the object that is positioned is simultaneously absorbed. In the end, almost nothing comes into being: barely more than a fold in time between two shock images that do not come together to form an image of action. Instead, a “purely optical and acoustic situation” 8 has been created, dictated by minimal elevations beneath the abstract white surface of the snow which, like the wall of a white cube, interrupts the dark close-ups of the unmoving face. In Salhab’s final feature film La Vallée/The Valley (2014, 134 min.), which was shown at the 2015 Berlinale, this quality of narrative minimalization and this state of everything coming to a standstill is translated into a film lasting over two hours. Once again, the setting is a remote location. The narrative structure is effected by both amnesia and by the associated gaps in memory. The events take place in the Beqaa Valley. A man—once again involved in a road accident—pulls himself upright and staggers along the tarmac road with an injury to his shoulder. A snake cut in two on the asphalt tells the tale of car tires and of disassociation, mental and psychical, that the male protagonist will enact (once again Carlos Chahine). This time, he portrays someone who is not merely disturbed, but who does not recognize anything of his surroundings.. More radically alien to himself than previous protagonists, he is unable to provide any information about himself. He encounters two men by the side of the road, collapses, and is taken by the men and 8 |  T his is an expression used by Gilles Deleuze at the beginning of Cinema II. The Time-Image (1989: 294) to reflect the psychic constitution of the protagonists and audiences in cinema after the Second World War.

Situated Between Cultures

by two women to an isolated house. A long shot shows the outspread Bekaa Plain, a place devastated by war. Soldiers occasionally appear, and media reports mention the threat of an Israeli attack. It remains unclear what the five people who live together in the house actually do. A chemical laboratory is shown, where a new compound is being produced. Is our location a farm for food production, for medicine production, or for chemical weapons? The nameless man is referred to as an act of providence, a mechanical angel. He stares at himself in the mirror and sings a song that includes the line: “I am tired of all this passion.” The question of social pathology is raised in one conversation and is connected with the cultural differences between Christians, Shiites, Sunnis, Druze, and others. If it was not already clear before, it now becomes clear that this team of people want both themselves and their actions to remain secret when they decide to dispose of the intruder (who has gone outside and promptly fallen into the hands of a patrol of soldiers) by shooting him. As the amnesic patient appears to know nothing about himself (all he does is write enigmatic sentences in a notebook, and he is only able to say, near the end of the film, that he is certain that he does not come from this area), they suspect that he is a spy. They stage a tribunal, but before they can kill him, the war breaks out. Long shots show jet fighters shooting over the house and dropping bombs nearby, destroying a village. As much as these events refer to political circumstances, and as much as they also play a role in determining the lives of the individuals—the manner of their concealed existence, the way they keep watch over the patient lest he exhibit treacherous behavior, the conspiratorial atmosphere of a terrorist cell—the film is also intended to be read as an allegory uncoupled from time and space and to suggest a state of existential up-rootedness. When the nameless man says, “I lost my way,” it can be understood as a general diagnosis for life and the world. This protagonist recurs throughout these films, an individual overwhelmed by the intolerable who has been rendered immovable and largely without feeling. In his most recent, 2016 film essay, L’encre de Chine/Chinese Ink—named after a painting by the French painter and author Henri Michaux—this indeterminate peregrination is transferred to a Berlin setting. Once again, personal photographs are used to create a personal/impersonal mood based on the sentence: “I hesitated for a long time.” True to a statement made by Yoshishige Yoshido about Ozu, “In order to change the world, one must change the montage,” a French forest landscape is montaged against a desert landscape from Pasolini’s Porcile. Both are intended to point to senseless murders beneath their visual surface, as the accompanying quotation from Celan’s poem Die Todesfuge (read by the poet himself) reveals. The landscape is suspected of having unassuaged guilt. Celan’s poem, however, has by now largely forfeited its shock value through its role as a German schoolbook text and literary Holocaust critique.

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More frequently than other films, this film relies upon abstract black and white images, from which figurative images slowly emerge: a face, a photograph showing several people, landscapes in fog, an insect falling on its back. New voiceover commentaries speak of human beings as a denaturized lifeforms, responsible for both the beginning and the end of the world. Lines from poems by Sylvia Plath and Anna Akhmatova are recited, speaking of self-destruction, heightening a diffused atmosphere pregnant with meaning. This is combined with minimalist music, jazz by Archie Shepp, and Arabic compositions. In summary, one can say that in every singularization of his narrative flow, Salhab is concerned with presenting existential rootlessness and psychic disruption, the vanishing possibility of any sensory attachment to reality, and the identity-fostering formation of trust. This preoccupation becomes more radical with each film. Feeding upon the world and yet not at home in it, his films are reminiscent of the cinematographic situation of West European cinema in the post-Second World War era. We know that Deleuze perceived it as an aesthetic transformation and a new type of image that he associated with war trauma. According to his understanding, the war shook our belief in the comprehensibility and translatability of what is real in such a lasting way that the inevitable consequence was a kind of silencing of the cinema of the pre-war era that had depicted movement and action. He sees it as having been replaced by a cinema of sensory disaffection, distanced seeing and hearing, in which the protagonists become the audience of their inexplicable life journeys and, unable to react, become mere recorders, just like the film camera itself. He describes the new aesthetic thus introduced and its “time-image” as being characterized by a loosening of the sensory-motor synchrony, by forms of the self-exhibition of temporal processes and intervals occasioned by montage, as in the typical Salhab film. According to Deleuze, temporality no longer proceeds from diegetic movement; it is concretized in metamorphoses and audiovisual translations between actual and virtual states of expression, in semiotic acts of time creation, and lends the filmic sign overall a contingent status. Salhab’s films primarily present time in a mode of obsessive return, rendering any linear structure and any coming-to-an-end of the narrative quite impossible and including in the succession of signs their filmic revival as a refrain. In contrast to European post-war cinema, the traumatized protagonists, incapable of reacting, are primarily grown men who can no longer act and or make decisions, who are alienated and cannot relate to themselves. They withdraw into themselves, becoming introverted. In a certain sense, Salhab’s films are themselves introverted, refusing to simply translate perceptions into plausible images of reality. They de-individuate themselves through the continual dividuation of the films, which participate in one another, blurring the boundaries of the single film, and tending toward indistinguishability. Continually shaken by events of war that, because they cannot be concluded, take on inconceivable dimensions, the films exhibit, in

Situated Between Cultures

ever more radical variations, the consequences of trauma as the near zero point of expression and translation. The sojourn of a nameless person to whom, as in the film La Vallée, we lend names we choose ourselves, asking questions about whether he is Christian or Muslim, ultimately signals not only the loss of a person’s individuality, but of filmic expression as a whole. After all, this depends upon mutual testimony: the references films make to one another, by virtue of which they are semantically crystallized, expose the threat of nonexistence while fending it off at the same time. Thus, they meet Deleuze’s aesthetic demand to translate the social unconscious into aesthetics through moments of sensory subtraction and semiotic minimization, thereby making audible and visible something of the murmuring of the many who do not get a voice or a visual profile—and thereby deriving symbolic relevance. Salhab’s films evoke the unsettled sojourn of all those who cannot be absorbed into a specific social context and yet are bound to that context and its continual upheavals. In multiply referential and laterally connected film composites, they translate the personal and material constellations that, affected by encounters with war and unknown to themselves, become participants in overarching social and symbolic changes and, consequently, in their turn dividual. After all, these upheavals go beyond affecting individuals confined to a region; they also affect countless multitudes who are indefinite, in transit, and who are coopted into processes of becoming alien to themselves. In this sense, Salhab’s films provide diagnoses of contemporary psychic constitutions in globalized predicaments, which are by no means only to be encountered in Lebanon.

R eferences Deleuze, Gilles (1986): Cinema I: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix (1987): A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Glissant, Edouard (1997): Traité du monde, Paris: Gallimard. Hall, Stuart (1992): “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In: Stuart Hall/David Held/Tony McGrew (eds.), Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 274–316. Khoury, Malek (2005): “Origins and Patterns in the Discourse of New Arab Cinema.” In: Arab Studies Quarterly 27/1-2, pp. 1–20. Kuhl, Annette/ Westwell, Guy (eds.) (2012): A Dictionary of Film Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbembe, Achille (2010): Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l‘Afrique décolonisée, Paris: Ed. La Découverte.

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Messnaoui, Mostafa (2014): “History of Arab cinema (Introduction to Understanding and Interpretation).” In: Contemporary Arab Affairs 7/2, pp. 195–208. Ott, Michaela (2015): Affektionsbilder: ihre transkulturelle Migration, Hamburg: AVINUS. Ott, Michaela (2018): Dividuations: Theories of Participation, London/New York: Palgrave. Ott, Michaela (2011): “Essayfilmen heißt leben lernen. Weibliche Artikulationen im Essayfilm.” In: Sven Kramer/Thomas Tode (eds.), Der Essayfilm: Ästhetik und Aktualität, Konstanz: UVK, pp. 189–200. Ott, Michaela (2017): “Interdependent—binarisiert—kompositkulturell: Zu begrifflichen und ästhetischen europäisch-afrikanischen Übersetzungen.” In: Claudia Benthien/Gabriele Klein (eds.), Übersetzen und Rahmen: Praktiken medialer Transformationen, Paderborn: Fink, pp. 257–278. Sartre, Jean-Paul (2012 [1943]): Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Open Road Media. Shafik, Viola (1996): Der arabische Film: Geschichte und kulturelle Identität, Bielefeld: Aisthesis.

Diasporic Culture and Colonialism Katherine Dunham and Berto Pasuka’s Dance Translations Ramsay Burt

Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born sociologist whose work was central to the early development of post-colonial studies, used the idea of translation to explain the significance of African cultural forms in the Caribbean. “Every significant social movement and every creative development of the arts in the Caribbean in the 20th century,” he argued, “has begun with or included [a] translation-moment of the re-encountering with Afro-Caribbean traditions” (Hall 1999: 14). This involves the translation of surviving African traditions and cultural forms, which include music, drumming, and dancing, into a contemporary Caribbean context of hybridized African, Caribbean, and European cultures as part of an anti-colonial politics. Given the contested nature of this, Hall argued that the translation-moment involved what he called perfidious fidelity. This paper draws on discourses about translation in post-colonial theory to discuss dance pieces made in the 1930s and 1940s by the African-American choreographer Katherine Dunham and the Jamaican choreographer Berto Pasuka. I will show that it is this “re-encountering with Afro-Caribbean traditions” that takes place in Dunham and Pasuka’s work. Both presented pieces to Western audiences in Western theaters that cited dance material from the Caribbean that syncretized African and Christian religious cosmologies and practices. Katherine Dunham was born in Chicago in 1909 to a white mother and an African-American father. She studied sociology and anthropology at the University of Chicago while also becoming involved in the professional dance world outside the University. In 1935 and 1936, with financial support from the Rosenwald Foundation, she spent eighteen months doing fieldwork in the Caribbean. Most of her time was spent in Haiti, where she was initiated into the Rada-Dahomey Vodun cult. On her return to Chicago in 1937, she decided not to continue with her PhD, but instead to develop her career as a choreographer and performer. She did, however, continue giving lectures and publishing essays and books based on her research. The Katherine Dunham Dance Company, which she started at this time, continued to perform until the mid-1960s. Two pieces in particular by Dunham

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that stage the kinds of possession that she had observed in Vodun rituals. These are L’Ag’Ya, which she made in Chicago in 1938, and Shango, which was initially choreographed for a 1945 Broadway musical entitled Carib Song. Berto Pasuka and his company Les Ballets Nègres, which he started in London in 1946 but disbanded in 1953, are far less well-known than Dunham and her company. Pasuka was probably born just outside Kingston, Jamaica, in 1910 or 1911. With his friend Richie Riley, he began working as a dancer and performer in 1931 at Edelweiss Park in Kingston. This was the social and cultural enterprise that Marcus Garvey, in 1927, started as the headquarters for his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) after his deportation from the United States. As Thea Barnes (2016) notes, the performances that Garvey produced there were inspired by the kinds of popular variety shows and pageants he had seen or organized in New York. Their purpose was to promote his view that people of the black diaspora should be proud of their race and needed to return to Africa, their ancestral homeland. Garvey’s ideas formed the foundation of Rastafarianism. His African Orthodox Church called for its black members to imagine the Christian God as black rather than white. After Edelweiss Park closed in 1934, Pasuka and Riley continued to work as dancers in various Jamaican revues and cabarets. It may have been around this time that they met Katherine Dunham, as later letters from Pasuka to Dunham survive. Pasuka travelled to London in 1939, where he continued to find work in popular entertainment. He was a model for the photographer Angus McBean and began to appear in small parts in British wartime films. The best known and most significant of these was Men of Two Worlds, released in 1946, which was set in Africa. Pasuka, now reunited with Richie Riley, who had just arrived from Jamaica, used the dancers with whom he had worked and the money he had earned from this film to start the company Les Ballets Nègres. His piece Blood is set in Haiti and tells a tragic story about a white man who becomes involved in a Vodun cult. They Came is set in Africa and concerns a conflict between modern medicine brought by Western colonists and a native witch doctor—its story is similar to that of the film Men of Two Worlds. A tension runs through these pieces, which demonstrate, on the one hand, an attraction toward the rich heritage of African culture and, on the other, a need to appear enlightened and thus impervious to the affective power of African—or African-derived—religious superstitions. While Dunham discovered what she thought of as African retentions in Caribbean dance practices, Pasuka came across the idea of Africa through working at Edelweiss Park. The social and political context in Haiti and Jamaica at that time was one of colonialism. Stuart Hall has written about “the colonial relationship and the distortions of living in a world culturally dependent and dominated from some centre outside the place where the majority of people lived” (Hall 1995: 4). Haiti was the first Caribbean island to become independent from European exploitation after its revolution in 1795. Subsequent interference from Europe and the

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United States caused it to become socially and politically unstable. Dunham arrived in Haiti a year after the end of nineteen years of military occupation by U.S. marines. As she later observed, among the peasant population of Haiti, “there was a great consciousness of the oppressions suffered by their African ancestors during slavery, and certainly this was reawakened by the disastrous occupation of Haiti by the American Marines” (Dunham 1983: xxiv). She says that she initially suffered the stigma of being an American. The Marines, mostly coming from the southern states of the US, treated all black Haitians as the same, not recognizing the complex social system, whereby the lighter-skinned mulattos, descendants of the white plantation owners, enjoyed higher social status. Dunham herself, although light-skinned, also troubled and disrupted this social hierarchy when she spent time with Haitian peasants in Vodun compounds. In her 1969 book Island Possessed, she writes about her friendship with Dumarsais Estimé, a young Haitian politician who would become President; Fred Alsop, a white car mechanic who had been an American Marine; and Doc Reeser, another white American. The legacy of the American occupation, which was in effect a colonial act, thus complicated Dunham’s fieldwork in Haiti. Jamaica only became independent in 1962, so that, during his formative years in Jamaica and then London, Pasuka was a colonial subject. Garvey’s project of fostering a sense of pride about having African heritage was essentially an anti-­ colonial one, although out of step with the more socialist, trade union-centered independence movement in the British-ruled Caribbean islands. Stuart Hall has discussed how colonial power complicated the ways in which Jamaicans during this period understood their identities: Identities formed within the matrix of colonial meanings were constructed so as to foreclose and disavow engagement with the real histories of our society or its cultural ‘routes’. The huge efforts made, over many years, not only by academic scholars but by cultural practitioners themselves, to piece together these fragmentary, often illegal, ‘routes to the present’ and to reconstruct their un­ spoken genealogies, are the necessary historical groundwork required to make sense of the inter­ pretive matrix and self-images of our culture and to make the invisible visible. This is the ‘work’ of translation that the African signifier performs, and the work of ‘perfidious fidelity’ that Caribbean artists in this post-nationalist moment are required to undertake. (Hall 1995: 14)

These “routes to the present” were illegal because of the ways in which plantation managers and colonial authorities had sought to suppress African cultural and religious practices. For example, they deliberately put together slaves from different parts of West Africa so that they would not have a common language other than that of the plantation managers. Drumming was almost universally banned in the Caribbean. Then, during the 20th century, education in British colonies focused on the same syllabus of English history and literature that was studied in Britain. Caribbean school children were not taught about African or Caribbean history. Thus,

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access to information about ‘African routes’ to the present were always unofficial, unapproved, and hard to access. Pasuka’s choreography for Les Ballets Nègres can be seen as part of this movement to make visible the “cultural routes” from Africa to the Caribbean that Hall discusses. Pasuka’s move to London in 1939 was also a response to colonialism. He was one of many artists and writers from the Caribbean who, between the 1930s and 1960s, decided that they had to migrate to London to realize their full potential as artists. Riley recalled that Les Ballets Nègres were not allowed to participate in the program of the 1951 Festival of Britain, “on the grounds that this was a festival of British culture and not colonial culture” (Riley 1996). They were from the colonies. The problem was that, as Rex Nettleford puts it, “until the independence arrangements of the 1960s […] [Jamaica] played the wily suntanned savage of a Caliban to the magisterial tutelary authority of Great Britain’s Prospero” (Nettleford 1993: 92). Artists from the colonies found that they were ignored and marginalized by cultural institutions that they had been led to believe were enlightened and should therefore recognize and support artistic value wherever it appeared. At issue were problems of translation. Stuart Hall has spoken of “the enormously rich and complex cultural histories to which history has made [Caribbean people] heirs” (1995: 4). The original pre-Columbian Carib people had their lands taken away by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers, who then brought over slaves from Africa and, after the abolition of slavery, indentured plantation workers from India. Both Dunham and Pasuka drew on this rich and complex history in the works their companies performed in Britain and the United States. Discourses around translation are useful for understanding the limited extent to which these cultural histories were comprehensible to many of the white members of their audiences. As I have noted, Hall describes the explorations of African diasporic forms by Caribbean artists like Pasuka in terms of translation that is undertaken with what Hall calls “perfidious fidelity.” Translation always involves an alteration or adaptation of meaning. Hall borrows the term “perfidious fidelity” from Sarat Maharaj’s work on translation, which itself draws on the work of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Maharaj writes: Meaning is not a readymade portable thing that can be ‘carried over’ the divide. The translator is obliged to construct meaning in the source language and then to figure and fashion it a second time round in the materials of the language into which he or she is rendering it. The translator’s loyalties are thus divided and split. He or she has to be faithful to the syntax, feel and structure of the source language and faithful to those of the language of translation. We have a clash and collision of loyalties and a lack of fit between the constructions. We face a double writing, what might be described as a perfidious fidelity […]. We are drawn into Derrida’s ‘Babel effect’. (Maharaj 1994: 31)

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In Maharaj’s terms, when Dunham and Pasuka translated Caribbean movement forms into the language of modern Western theatrical dance, they were inevitably limited by what was possible through the forms and conventions of Western theater. These include in particular the use of a proscenium stage, costume conventions, and electric lighting equipment so that dancers present themselves frontally to the audience rather than dancing with spectators in a circle around them. This inevitably altered the movement vocabularies on which Dunham and Pasuka were drawing. Whereas dancing at a folk or religious ceremony might go on for hours, if not all night, Dunham and Pasuka’s companies presented programs of short pieces with intervals. Whereas in a village square or bush church spectators would demonstratively encourage the dancers while they were performing, applause in a theater is largely kept till the curtain call at the end. At issue therefore is the translation of cultural forms from one very particular context to another very different one. This translation process is further complicated by the fact that Dunham and Pasuka were trying to reconnect through this Caribbean movement material with an older resource of African forms that had been transculturated in the Caribbean through contact with European culture. When Hall implies that all these translations are undertaken with “perfidious fidelity”—unfaithful faithfulness—it is because the clash and collision of loyalties has made literal translation impossible. Dunham and Pasuka were being faithful not to a literal re-presentation of dance movements as they could be found in Haiti or Jamaica, but to their feeling for—and attunement with—an idea of Africa that they reencountered in Caribbean dancing. This idea of Africa was, of course, a socially and historically specific construction. Where Dunham and Pasuka were also “perfidious” was in their refusal to perpetuate negative ideas about Caribbean identities that were being constructed through colonial ideologies. This is what one finds in their choreography. As I noted earlier, Dunham was initiated into the Rada-Dahomey Vodun cult. It is clear from what Dunham wrote about her initiation ceremony that, as a trained anthropologist, she recognized various strategies that were being employed to put her and her fellow initiates into a state of mind receptive to becoming possessed. She mentions drugs, incense, and burning herbs, and repetitions of hypnotic movements in the dances that were dedicated to particular loas (divine spirits). Despite recognizing all this, Dunham knew that she believed that what the Haitian Vodun belief system offered was right for her. She was thus aware of this clash of loyalties, subsequently writing about her initiation: “Where the participant begins and the scientist ends, I surely could not say” (Dunham 1969: 106). The actual experience of dancing itself seems to have resolved the anxieties and contradictions Dunham faced. She herself never became possessed. At first, she seems to have worried about this, but found that the priests presiding over her first initiation and subsequent confirmation ceremonies were satisfied that the gods showed their approval of her dedication by allowing her to dance as well and as

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intensely as she did. Just as she herself never became possessed, neither did she want her dancers to become possessed. This is an example of the way that her works sought not to reproduce the dances she had seen, but to translate them into a theatrical idiom. Similarly, while her knowledge and experience of possession came from Haiti, Shango was set in Trinidad and L’Ag’Ya in Martinique. L’Ag’Ya, created in 1938, was Dunham’s first large-scale work and one that her company continued to perform until it disbanded in the 1960s. Set in the 18th century in the fishing village of Vauclin, it consists of three scenes. First, Loulouse and Alcide are introduced as lovers. Julot, a semi-outcast, desires Loulouse but is rejected. He steals away to the jungle where he fearfully begs for a love charm from the King of the Zombies, which he then uses to magically induce everyone in the village, except Loulouse, to freeze. He forces her to dance for him, but just as he is about to steal a kiss from her, Alcide breaks out of the spell and the two men engage in the Martinican fighting dance, ag’ya—which loosely resembles Brazilian capoeira. Tragically, the ballet ends with them both dead and Loulouse mourning her lost lover. When Julot uses the charm, he waves it hypnotically around Loulouse like a Vodun priest with a sacrificial offering. Dunham described a priest controlling the seizure of a boy possessed by Damballa—one of the loas—in this way using a sacrificed chicken, Damballa’s sacred food. Trapped between Julot and the drummers, her solo resembles that of a Vodun devotee whose possession is being driven by the sacred drums and controlled by the priest. However, rather than representing the way a dancer moves when possessed by a particular loa, Loulouse’s solo clearly refers to Dunham’s sense of release while dancing at the end of her initiation ceremonies. Lara Putnam distinguishes between three different attitudes toward Vodun and related religious practices in the mid-20th century Caribbean. White outsiders saw these as proof that African savagery lived on in black minds. Middle-class people of color did not see these practices the same way, but as a backwardness that modern progress would overcome. Illiterate villagers, however, distinguished between powerful forces used in benign ways and their bad use to cause harm. In L’Ag’Ya, Julot uses the charm to cause harm. Dunham’s view seems closer to that of the villagers than the middle classes. Shango was initially choreographed as the first-act finale of the 1945 Carib Song, a musical comedy written by the Trinidadian writer and dancer William Archibald with music by Baldwin Bergerson. After a four-week season of the play at the Adelphi Theater on West 54th Street in New York, the dance work was performed as a stand-alone piece in mixed dance programs. Shango is a Yoruba God in West Africa, who also has a cult in Trinidad. Early in her field research in the Caribbean, Dunham had unsuccessfully tried to film a Shango ceremony in Trinidad, and her choreography seems to have been largely based on what she saw there, together with her experiences of Vodun ceremonies in Haiti.

Diasporic Culture and Colonialism

Dancers come on stage singing a hymn and carrying benches and the altar for the ceremony. Drummers take up position to one side of the altar. A white cockerel is ritualistically sacrificed and taken round the participants seated on the benches who are all affected by it in a different way At the end of the last bench, a young boy who took part in the sacrifice shows signs of becoming possessed and is held down and looked after by attendants. He crawls across the floor like a snake, making writhing movements in his spine and torso, to the altar, onto which he climbs. When the boy faints, he is caught by the priest who carries him off stage. A few other members of the congregation now come forward and, one by one, dance different dances of possession by other gods in front of the altar before the boy comes back, sitting astride a huge drum being carried on its side above the heads of five men. The action on stage has built up to an almost orgasmic peak of intensity that does not diminish as the lights fade and the curtain is lowered. Dunham wanted to educate both black and white people in the United States about black dance. She later wrote that Téoline, the mambo who supervised her first initiation, had told her that “the welfare of the entire Negro race might be improved if these unfortunates in the north could be acquainted again with the rituals of ancestor worship and Vodun” (Dunham 1983: xxiv). In her writings from the 1940s, Dunham takes a functionalist approach and seeks to explain ritual dances of possession as social phenomena that fulfil biological and psychological needs. She argues that cults use dances to engender a sense of communal identity among cult members and also to build up or release tension in order to motivate participants toward religious ecstasy. She describes how particular kinds of movements can help a supplicant move to a state of being possessed by a loa. Dunham gives two examples. The yonvalou is a dance she learnt in the Rada-Dahomey cult: The movement of the ‘yonvalou’ is fluid, involving spine, base of head, chest and solar plexus. The effect is complete relaxation […] a constant circular flow which has acted as a mental narcotic, and figuratively speaking, physical purgative. The dance is decidedly soothing, rather than exciting, and one is left in a state of complete acceptance. It is in this state most often that contact with ‘loa’ occurs. (Dunham 1983: 195)

In Shango, the boy dances the yonvalou at the beginning of his possession. Dunham’s second example is the zepaules. This stresses shoulder action: But here the ecstasy is of a slightly different quality than in the ‘yonvalou’. It seems that the regular forward-backward jerking of the shoulders, a contraction and expansion of the chest, insures regular breathing, and this regular breathing brings about hypnotism or auto-intoxication, states bordering on ecstasy. (Ibid.)

Dunham’s biographer Joyce Aschenbrenner writes about an incident when a young man rehearsing the role of the boy in Shango showed signs of going into a trance.

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Dunham subdued his seizure and subsequently did not take him on tour (Aschenbrenner 2002: 78). Dunham’s intention was not to make a literal translation of dances of possession but to condense their forms into short, intense pieces of theatrical dance in line with the forms and conventions of Western theater outlined earlier. Just as, during her initiation ceremony, she had found herself straddling the contradictory positions of cult member and scientist, her piece Shango existed in the space between theater and ritual. Giving the appearance of going into a trance on stage but not actually doing so is in effect a compromise that attempts to be theatrical while being respectful towards those who practice these rituals. The “perfidious fidelity” of Dunham’s theatrical translation opened up this in-between space. A newspaper story in the tabloid British newspaper The Daily Mirror in November 1949 has the sensational title “Sacrifice to the gods—in the heart of London.” In this article, Berto Pasuka tells the newspaper’s reporter that, before the curtain rises each time they perform his ballet Blood, they sprinkle some rum as a libation. For the full ceremony, he adds, they should sacrifice a white cockerel, but the theater manager would not like it. “Our rite is something you may not understand. You may laugh at it, but if you do, you should remember there are also some funny things in your religion, such as burning forever in hell” (Anon. 1949: 7). It is likely that Pasuka here is knowingly playing ‘the exotic’ and saying something sensational in order to help publicize his company’s performances. The witty reference to “funny things in your religion” has an edge to it. If white people think black colonials are all primitive savages, they should perhaps reflect on the backwardness of some of their own religious ideas. A program note describing Pasuka’s piece De Prophet is dismissive of religious superstition. De Prophet is set in a Jamaican village where a prophet performs miraculous healings. When he then attempts to fly, he is arrested, and the piece ends with him in prison. It is loosely based on the life of the charismatic Jamaican preacher Alexander Bedward, founder of the Jamaican Native Baptist Free Church who once preached: “The Pharisees and Saducees are the white people […]. The fire of hell will be your portion if you don’t crush the white people” (Putnam 2013: 58). In 1921 he led several hundred followers on a march on Kingston, claiming that, like an old testament prophet, he would ascend to heaven. He was arrested and committed to an asylum. The synopsis in the Ballets Nègres program ends: “The ballet is based on a true incident in Jamaica some years ago when a religious maniac was clapped in prison for trying to impress village converts by flying to heaven” (1952: unnumbered). Pasuka, like Dunham, recognizes a conflict between the idea of the modern, educated black subject and the affective power of African ritual practices. But whereas Dunham appears concerned with finding a modern way of becoming open toward the experiences that Vodun offered, Pasuka seems more skeptical. His early exposure to Garvey’s ideas is significant here.

Diasporic Culture and Colonialism

In Kingston in 1931, Garvey denounced preachers who were “driving our people crazy” (Putnam 2013: 78). I noted earlier that the story line of Pasuka’s ballet They Came resembles that of the 1946 film Men of Two Worlds, directed by Thorold Dickinson. The latter was made during the war in difficult conditions with the propagandistic aim of presenting the British colonial service in a positive light. It tells the story of Kisenga, a brilliant young African composer who, having trained at a conservatoire in London, returns to Africa to help persuade his tribe to accept modern medicine. This precipitates a conflict between modern science and the rituals of the local witch doctor. The film was partly filmed in technicolor on location in what is now Tanzania in 1943. Unfortunately, some of the footage was lost when a U-boat torpedoed a ship carrying it back to Britain. Pasuka helped Dickinson refilm some ceremonial dances in the studio in London. The film was finally released in 1946. They Came, according to its program, is set in “Darkest Africa.” It has two parts. The first, set in the 19th century, shows British missionaries arriving in a jungle village. Backed by soldiers, they impose Western medicine on the villagers. In an explicitly anti-colonial manner, the program states that: “[t]he tribal chief resents outside interference on the part of the church, medical science and big industry” (Les Ballets Nègres 1952). The second part is set during the war that, in 1946, had just ended. Black and white are depicted as equal and seeking common sanctuary. An African soldier is killed while directing them to safety. The fact that modern black soldiers are fighting alongside white ones implies that these colonies are capable of governing themselves. Old newsreel footage shows an extract from the beginning of They Came restaged for cameras. In this footage, African villagers dance ecstatically before a witch doctor. The interactions between dancers and drummers, and the kinds of undulating movements recorded on the film are relatively similar to the dancing in Dunham’s Shango. Pasuka’s representation of possession, however, is quite different. The film is edited with short close-ups to convey a sense of the increasing intensity of the dancing. One, filmed from below, shows a dancer pulling a humorously grotesque face with bulging eyeballs. Whereas Dunham is careful to teach her audiences about African retentions in syncretized Caribbean religious cults, Pasuka is letting his London audiences know that he knows what they are thinking. He shows the kind of exotic behavior they are probably expecting but, by doing this in an ironic way, demonstrates his enlightened, modern detachment from these superstitious ways of behaving. The “perfidious fidelity” of Pasuka’s theatrical translation opens up a space for an enlightened, modern black subjectivity. In conclusion, discourses around translation have been useful for disentangling the complex ways in which Dunham and Pasuka drew on Caribbean dance and drumming traditions. I have argued that they translated these forms from the Caribbean to the United States and Europe, and from village or cultic spaces to modern Western theater buildings. These forms themselves were hybridized from

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surviving beliefs and traditions that the slaves had brought with them from Africa, and the context of that hybridization was that of the plantation and the colony. The forms and traditions that they were recovering were ones that had been repressed and made illegal so that they could only persist in unofficial contexts. Dunham and Pasuka carried out their translations with “perfidious fidelity” because of the social and political circumstances of anti-colonialism in the Caribbean and due to the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, where black artists sought to celebrate the power and beauty of African diasporic forms. The differences I have identified between Dunham and Pasuka’s individual approaches toward ritual and possession are largely a consequence of their different points of view. Dunham traveled from the modern center of the United States to one of the least developed countries in the Caribbean periphery. Pasuka, however, went in the opposite direction, from the colonial periphery to the center, to London, the capital of the ‘mother country.’ Dunham respected the Haitian peasants who offered her their hospitality. In turn, she hoped that her work would give both black and white Americans a greater understanding of the contributions that African American artists were making to American culture. Pasuka expressed his contempt for those uneducated Jamaicans who allowed themselves to be driven crazy by charismatic preachers. By exploring these themes, he hoped to make members of the cultural elites in London and the other European cities in which Les Ballets Nègres performed, gain a greater understanding of the richness of Caribbean cultural traditions. In restaging ritual movement from the Caribbean for Western theater stages, Dunham and Pasuka each experienced a clash of loyalties—to an African idea and to modernity. The “perfidious fidelity” of their translations of African and Caribbean culture lay in the necessary compromises that they had to make based on their understanding both of the cultural context, and social and political significance of the forms and traditions that they were translating, and on their recognition of what white audiences mostly failed to realize that they did not understand about black experience. This is perhaps one of Dunham and Pasuka’s more valuable legacies. This is because, as people in Western countries find themselves living in increasingly multi-cultural societies, the Caribbean offers insights into how to value and respect creolized identities.

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R eferences Anon (1949): “Sacrifice to the gods—in the heart of London.” In: Daily Mirror, November 25th, p. 7. Aschenbrenner, Joyce (2002): Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life, Carbondale: University of Illinois Press. Barnes, Thea (2016): “Presenting Berto Pasuka.” In: Christy Adair and Ramsay Burt (eds.), British Dance: Black Routes, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 15–34. Dunham, Katherine (1969): Island Possessed, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunham, Katherine (1983): Dances of Haiti, Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California. Hall, Stuart (1995): “Negotiating Caribbean identities.” In: New Left Review 209/1 (January-February), pp. 1–14. Hall, Stuart (1999): “Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad.” In: Small Axe 6 (September), pp. 1–18. Les Ballets Nègres (1952): Ballets Nègres, [Performance programme] Twentieth Century Theatre, Westbourne Grove, London. Maharaj, Sarat (1994): “Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other.” In: Jean Fisher (ed.), Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nettleford, Rex (1993): Inward Stretch, Outward Stretch: A Voice from the Caribbean, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Putnam, Lara (2013): Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Riley, Richie (1996): “Richard Theophilus Riley.” In: Black Cultural Archives, London, BCA/5/1/18.

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And so you see … On the Situatedness of Translating Audience Perceptions Gabriele Klein, Marc Wagenbach

1. I ntroduction This text’s guiding premise is that translation is a situational and situated praxis. Both the ‘situational’—in terms of something momentary, performatively generated, ephemeral, always absent—and ‘situatedness’—i.e., context, embeddedness, framing—are constitutive for translation. Translation thus takes place as an ensemble of practices that resituate and generate the configuration of subjects, media, artefacts, and techniques differently in relation to the situation. Using choreographer Robyn Orlin’s piece And so you see… as an example, we want to examine the situationality and situatedness of cultural, medial, and material acts of translation in a specific piece of choreography and in the way it is perceived. Robyn Orlin is a white South African, born in Johannesburg to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. She studied dance at the Contemporary Dance School in London, UK, and visual art in Chicago, USA. She is married to a South African of German descent, who she has been living with in Berlin since 2001, together with their adopted daughter of color from South Africa. Orlin has been working as a choreographer since 1986 and is thus part of the first generation of African choreographers to search for ‘contemporary’ forms of expression. In 1999, she celebrated her international breakthrough with the piece Daddy, I’ve seen this piece six times before and I still don’t know why they’re hurting each other… . Orlin’s works focus on postcolonial issues, usually combined with gender topics,1 which she presents and artistically explores against the backdrop of South Africa’s (post-) apartheid society, which she left in 2001. Her biography, which features a generally hybrid identity as well as several instances where she transgressed biographical and cultural limitations, already demonstrates various steps of translation between 1 |  F or example, Ski-Fi-Jenny and the Frock of the New (2002), which deals with drag queens and the myth of Iphigenia.

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the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. It also opens up a distinct field of inquiry, which fundamentally characterizes Orlin’s choreographies. Like the works of many internationally active choreographers, Robyn Orlin’s artistic work also features various, aesthetically interwoven processes of translation. On the one hand, her pieces2 involve acts of cultural translation: while largely performed for European audiences, they nevertheless negotiate topics of South African society, especially questions of racism and (post-)colonial power. And, moreover, in her artistic projects, she mostly collaborates with dancers and performers who come from formerly colonial or colonized countries. Thus, they bring with them various biographical, cultural, and social experiences, which in turn engage in dialogue with one another during the rehearsal process. Orlin’s pieces are furthermore characterized by the way that they translate material, inasmuch as they not only feature a lavish use of objects, things, and artefacts, but also draw these materials from different cultures and dramaturgically situate them in relationships of varying intensity. Last but not least, her pieces feature multiple translations of media, as can be seen in their use of video installations and thus in the way that they translate between different medialities: the theatricality of the stage situation, the presence of the performers, and the co-presence of the spectators on the one hand, and the mediality of the image and video installations, and projections on the other hand. In philosophy and art theory (Rancière 2010; Bourriaud 1998), but also in dance and theater studies, even before the concept of the ‘artistic body of work’ came under attack and processual approaches to artistic development and reception began gaining in significance, the realization had begun spreading that spectators are of particular importance for the architecture of a piece (Whalley/Miller 2017; Harpin/Nicholson 2017). This realization has also affected the academic analysis of theater and dance. Weiler/Roselt (2017) have shown that non-participatory observation, a method long established in qualitative social research, can be sensibly applied to performance analysis in order to accommodate audience perspectives. In this text, we will broaden the strict theater studies approach suggested by Weiler/Roselt to include intersectional methodology. We will thereby compensate for the fact that their method does not take into account nor incorporate into its methodical considerations the further developments that have taken place in qualitative research, such as praxis theory and ethnomethodology. “Praxeological production analysis” (Klein 2015) combines ethnomethodological methods with performance analysis. Orlin’s solo piece And so you see… our honourable blue sky and ever enduring sun… can only be consumed slice by slice…3 from 2016, 2 |  h ttp://www.robynorlin.com (accessed: February 28, 2018). 3 |  Concept/choreography: Robyn Orlin, dance: Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza, costumes: Marianne Fassler, lighting: Laïs Foulc, Technical Director: Thabo Pule, administration and production: Damien Valette, assistance and coordination: Marion Paul; production: City Theater & Dance

And so you see …

developed in collaboration with South African performer Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza, will serve as an example for us to expound our hypothesis that performance pieces are (also) created by the perceptions of the audience. We will describe the way the audience perceives two distinct scenes and then use these scenes to delineate the central topics of the piece. This process not only allows us to focus on artistic practices of cultural, medial, and material translation, but simultaneously also gives us the chance to reflect—in a two-fold sense—upon practices of academic translation. These are, on the one hand, practices of transcribing aesthetic perception into written artefacts and thus into ‘data’ and, on the other, the academic practices of interpreting and analyzing this same data. Our data pool will consist of observation logs. We will first outline the methodical basis of the praxeological approach, then introduce the academic translations—starting with the descriptions in the observation logs and then in the form of a “thick description” (Geertz 1973). The exemplary basis is therefore the analysis of two scenes from Orlin’s piece, which received particular mention in the observation logs. In the two last sections, we will relate these descriptions to one another and reflect on them as practices of academic translation.

2. O n the situatedness of artistic performance and academic research

Dance research on the one hand and social research on the other have developed different understandings of ‘situativity’ and ‘situatedness’: in the case of dance and performance, the situational commonly stands for the momentary, the unrepeatable, the irretrievable, and the ephemeral, that which is always already absent in its moment of appearance. It is not embeddedness within a situation, but rather the non-availability of the situational, its non-graspability, that which cannot be categorized and which predominates here. Accordingly, the situational poses a number of epistemological problems, such as permanent absence (Siegmund 2006) and that which is consistently non-present, which can only be grasped via “presence effects” (Gumbrecht 2004), i.e., that which can never be directly observed. Also neglected here are the framings of the situational, be they social or cultural, based on knowledge systems and bodies of knowledge, or spectators’ viewing experiences. However, sociological praxis theory considers the situational itself to be socially structured, i.e., permeated by patterns of the social. It emphasizes that situatedness, i.e., that which embeds and frames, is what constitutes the situation. Group, Damien Valette, co-producers: Festival Montpellier Danse 2016, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Kinneksbond, Centre Culturel Mamer, Luxembourg, Centre Dramatique National de Haute-Normandie, la Ferme du Buisson, Scène Nationale de Marne-la-Vallée, supported by Arcadi Ile-deFrance. World premiere: Théâtre de la Bastille, Festival d’Automne Paris, September 14, 2016.

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Accordingly, the basic assumption of praxis theory is that practices reveal themselves in their situatedness. Thus, the momentary, ephemeral, performative can only be observed precisely because of its situatedness in the practice. Although praxis-theoretical approaches (Hirschauer 2004; Reckwitz 2003; Schmidt 2012; Schatzki/Knorr-Cetina/Von Savigny 2001; Kalthoff/Hirschauer/ Lindemann 2008; Shove/Pantzar/Watson 2012; and others) differ in detail (Klein/ Göbel 2017), the basic presuppositions of praxeological research, as translated to dance and performance research, can be summarized as follows (Klein 2014): a praxis-theoretical perspective does not primarily examine ideas, values, norms, the semiotic and symbolic systems of dances, scenes, or choreographies, but rather attempts to locate them in practices, i.e., in their situatedness. In doing so, this approach focuses on the material entrenchment of ideas, values, norms, and semiotic and symbolic systems in human bodies, but also in things and artefacts (e.g., in spaces, materials, props, sets, costumes). In addition, praxis-theoretical analysis does not use methods that analyze productions in terms of their choreographic structure, i.e., the narrative or the intention of the artists. Instead, its performance analysis takes into account the singularity of every single performance in terms of its temporal and spatial contingency. Moreover, it applies an intersectional approach by including and understanding audience perceptions with the help of ethnographical methodologies. In this respect, praxeological production analysis can be considered a mixture of methodologies from praxis theories and performance analysis techniques, combining the methods of performance analysis used in theater studies with the qualitative research methods of social science. A praxeological perspective is thus not primarily interested in analyzing the intentions and motifs of choreographers. Instead, it concentrates on activities, actions, performative acts, and configurations on stage. However, this perspective does not focus on the movements of individual actors, but rather on various observable interdependent activities, which cannot be traced back to individual motifs or intentions. Instead, choreography here is understood as embodied, materially conveyed performance, organized by collectively shared, practical forms of knowledge. Choreography and dance practices should therefore be understood as a bundle of physical and mental activities, whereby the assumption is that practices register, ratify, confirm, and make mental acts visible. A praxeological perspective thus concentrates on the act of doing and thus also always on the performative dimensions, i.e., the ways in which a performance takes place—in other words: how the performance is executed and how individual ‘scenes’ are performed. The praxeological focus lies not on whether an idea or a narrative, i.e., a connotation, is perceived in ways that the choreographer intended, but on what actually happens during a performance and how this is perceived and in turn authenticated by the audience. Simply put: a praxeological perspective is interested in how cultural, material, and medial translations are situationally performed and perceived by the audience. Praxeological research thus means adopt-

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ing a research position that takes an open approach of inquiry and uses methods that can record both the performative execution as well as the audience’s perception and authentication of the performance. Part of the process of praxeological production analysis is non-participatory observation, which translates the aesthetic experience of a ‘piece’ into writing, thus rendering it as ‘data’ (Schäfer/Schindler 2017). Observation logs (Brüsemeister 2008) provide a methodological tool that can be used to understand that which is “basically incomprehensible” (Hirschauer 2006: 424) about what is being observed. As in other academic methods, observation logs may not be able to capture the ‘piece’ as a whole, since they are characterized by being incomplete, imperfect. Thus, they also always testify to the blanks in perception and memory and document what was not translated or maybe cannot even be translated into language and writing. But even when transcriptions constitute a linguistic reduction of the aesthetic complexity and polyvalence of perceived material, what has been translated into writing should not merely be considered incomplete residue, as Reichertz argues (Reichertz 2014). Instead, the act of translating into writing is productive in its right (Klein/Leopold/Wieczorek 2018). It produces new contexts, which enable further reflection upon the perceived ‘piece’. Observation logs resituate the piece anew, insofar as new readings open up in and through translation: In a similar fashion, ethnographic observers have to transform whatever they perceive through their senses (what ears and eyes “tell us”) into speech—a completely different form of signification. This process is reinforced when verbalization takes the shape of the written because the urge to put something down has an interesting impact on perception. On the one hand, together with the already mentioned mnemonic state of consciousness, it supports the objectivation of the perceived. Just as novelists register their lives as subject-matter or photographers use their environment as their “subject”, ethnographers who are compelled to write view their field as empirical “material.” On the other hand, already crafted protocols provide a template for further observations: they structure and focus whatever is observed during the next day. The categories used have already conceptually decomposed the gestalt of impressions and memories or the sense synesthesias. The “verbatim” of the spoken and the “literality” of the written create an analytic relationship to one’s own sense perceptions. (Hirschauer 2006: 428)

In this sense, it is precisely this very corpus of data that emphasizes new contexts. These observation logs with their heterogeneous practices of textualization, reflecting the socio-cultural differences of their writers—i.e., their age, gender, social status, cultural knowledge—as well as their respective practices of transcription, reveal differences, but also structural similarities and patterns of perception. Ludwig Jäger describes this process of transcription as “reframing” (Jäger

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2013: 79). For unlike the use of the term “transcription” 4 in music ethnology and linguistics, which Jäger accuses of understanding transcription as the “translation of performative, transitory events into static, scriptural notation systems” (Jäger 2012: 306), he sees in transcription a “logic of disruption” (Jäger 2013: 83) that reveals itself in permanent “remediations, reframings and reconceptualisations of cultural semantics“ (Jäger 2013: 83).5. What follows from these considerations is that the “logic of disruption” is also visible in the methodological tool of the observation log: logbooks are remediatizations of perception, reframed into writing and reconceptualized within academic contexts. They resituate the piece and constitute a body of data that can be used to reflect upon the situational performance event. This reflection produces context, creates a new approach to what was perceived, and facilitates alternative interpretations of the performed choreography. From this perspective, observation logs can therefore be understood as data that demarcates a playing field of contradictions, blanks, and incomplete spaces (Jäger 2012: 306). In this sense, observation logs are tools that can be used to translate something that has passed, something that exists as no more than a trace. Observation logs will therefore never be able to represent more than an approximation of what has passed. But they do help to prevent the past from freezing into a single state, instead comprehending it as something mobile, transitory, dependent on the respective situational framing, the situative interpretative context. Moreover, as a result of their fragmentary and selective nature, they reference the situational contextuality of the performance. Finally, due to the heterogeneity of transcription, they provide a starting point for further interpretation, which not only documents differences in the way a piece is perceived, but also records similarities, thus producing a “thick description” (Geertz 1973) of the piece, as will now be presented in the following section.

3. The “logic of disruption ”: practices of translating ‘gender ’ and ‘race ’ Our body of data is made up of twenty-eight observation logs dealing with Orlin’s piece And so you see… our honourable blue sky and ever enduring sun… can only be consumed slice by slice… . Twenty-five of them are based on a video recording 4 |  I n the context of media studies, ‘transcription’ is defined as a group of methods that significantly determine the operational mode of communicative media—the scriptural as well as the pictorial, the analogue as well as the digital—in the semantic household of cultures. Medial methods of this type are ‘transcriptive’ inasmuch as they yield moments in which meaning is generated as intramedial and intermedial references made by signs to other signs, or rather by media to other media (Jäger 2012: 309). 5 |  Translation by Elena Polzer.

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of the piece (1:06:36 min) by Eric Legay from the year 2016. The logs were written by master’s students studying Performance Studies at Hamburg University on October 26, 2017, directly after viewing the video recording. Like the other three logs written directly after live performances, the students had thirty minutes to note down their observations.6 Two observation logs were written after the performance of the piece on September 28, 2017, at Depot 2 in Cologne, Germany, while one log was noted after a performance of the piece in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on July 4, 2017. We thus have a body of data that is heterogeneous inasmuch as it can be attributed to various performances of the piece in different cultural and situational contexts, as well as one video recording. Moreover, the logs were written in German and English, as the students came from different international backgrounds. This heterogeneity of the data corpus allows us to reflect on the question of whether the theatrical performance and the co-presence of the spectators create a more differentiated perception of the piece than a video performance, which already guides the spectator’s perception via camera focus, editing, lighting, etc. Based on the body of data at hand, this is not the case. Instead, the analysis of the logs illustrates that all of the writers were to some degree experienced viewers in the field of dance and choreography and that this expertise intrinsically influenced their descriptions in the form of embodied knowledge. In the following, we will condense the descriptions of two scenes that almost all of the logs attributed importance to and described in great detail: the ‘oranges scene’ and the ‘Putin scene.’7 This process will also reveal similarities and differences in the transcriptions. Finally, we will attempt to interpret each of the scenes with the help of a scene analysis of the video recording. Both the descriptions in the logs and our own interpretations strongly feature the categories of ‘gender’ and ‘race.’ Both categories are central in this piece, as they are in Orlin’s artistic work in general. As mentioned above, this is most likely due to her biography as a white artist born in South Africa, but also her political attitude as an artist and her position in a contemporary art market oriented toward 6 |  T he aim of the observation logs was explained beforehand and made available to the students in writing using the following words: “The goal is for you to exactly describe what you see. No analysis, no interpretation. Descriptions may also include your position, i.e., describing the effect that something has on you, what you feel. You can hand in the paper anonymously or with your name—as you wish. We will scan all descriptions so that all participants in the seminar can have a copy.” (Klein: unpublished seminar text October 26, 2017) 7 |  C ompiling the logs revealed what we describe as the ‘Putin scene’ (twenty-five logs describe this scene, three do not) and the ‘oranges scene’ (twenty-three texts mention this scene, five do not) to be particularly noteworthy. The ‘oranges scene’ begins in the video recording of the piece at 14:00  min, at the point at which the music sets in, and lasts until 20:03 min; the ‘Putin scene’ begins at 42:23 min, when the music sets in, and lasts until 47:00 min.

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generating attention, in which she and others label her work a “permanent irritation.” 8 We will examine the way that ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are aesthetically translated in the perceptions of both the choreographic configurations and the interactions that took place between performers, artefacts, music, stage elements, and technological media. Our theory is that the performative interactions delineated in the logs constantly resituate an ambivalent playing field of tensions constituted by sex and violence, (post-)colonial power, and economic greed.

3.1 The ‘oranges scene’ 3.1.1 C ondensing the logs into a thick description: translations of ‘gender’ and ‘race’ as sex and violence The performer’s head is entirely swathed in translucent plastic wrap, leaving only the performer’s hair, mouth and nostrils exposed. It is not entirely clear if the person is a man, a woman, or otherwise, as no visible physical features point to a gender.9 He/she is sitting with his/her back to the audience on an old armchair, which is facing backward at the center of the stage’s edge. He/she has a large metal cowbell around his/her neck. Toward the back of the stage, we see a man sitting behind a camera; he is filming the performer. It is not clear whether he is a technician or a performer. Both are dark-skinned, but unlike the person at the back, the gender identity of the performer in front is unclear. The performer’s image is projected live onto a screen that covers the entire back wall of the stage. With his/her left hand, the performer pulls out a bowl of oranges and a large butcher’s knife. He/ she is sitting on a white sheet covering the armchair and is wrapped in plastic wrap from the feet upward. Only his/her hands, arms, feet, and mouth are left uncovered. The hair on the sides of his/her head has been shorn. We see a heavy, black body in white underpants beneath plastic wrap that covers his/her entire body. The performer sings, screams a song in an African language. When he/she moves forward, we hear the clang of the cowbell hanging around his/her neck. He/she takes a large butcher’s knife in his/her left hand and begins peeling an orange. This action is projected onto the screen at the back. Classical music sets in10 —Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem, his last unfinished composition from

8 |  Cf. e.g.: http://fta.ca/en/archive/beauty-remained-for-just-a-moment-then-returned-gently-toher-starting-position/; https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.co.za/article/robyn-orlinreturns-to-sa-with-new-dance; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/arts/dance/12orlin.html (accessed February 26, 2018). 9 |  In the logs, the performer is not explicitly described as male in the beginning. However, some writers formulated their insecurity about the non-visibility of physical gender markers. 10 |  O nly three writers identified the “classical music” as Mozart’s Requiem.

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1791, is a seminal masterpiece of European classical music and is now considered one of his most popular works. The performer cuts the orange into individual sections, which he/she skewers with the tip of the knife. He/she raises the orange pieces to his/her mouth with relish. We see this projected onto the back screen in real time in a close-up. These actions are enhanced by the sounds he/she makes: he/she squeals and makes sounds of pleasure. He/she laughs. A high-pitched male voice can be heard singing in the music as the performer dangerously plays around with the knife in his/her mouth. He/she turns and twists the cutting edge and we see his/her face and open mouth up close on the screen behind him/her. He/she could hurt him/herself. He/ she sticks the knife deeper and deeper into his/her mouth. Just as he/she licks the knife, we hear a female alto voice enter in the music. He/she imitates the female voice, squeaking, howling, and moving the knife faster and faster around in his/ her mouth. He/she laughs. He/she takes a new orange and bites into it. He/she swallows the orange—peel and all. The juices drip onto his/her body. He/she chews, smacks his/her lips, and savors the taste. We hear female and male voices singing together. One after the other, he/she stuffs several oranges into his/her mouth. The music ends. We hear the audience clapping.11 Then the performer makes an arm movement of thanks to the audience, an orange still in his/her mouth, while making grunting noises. Classical music starts up again (a subsequent section of Mozart’s Requiem). The performer’s body is still wrapped in plastic. He/she takes a new orange in his/ her left hand and stabs the orange multiple times with the knife, which he/she is holding in his/her right hand. He/she squeezes out the juice and lets it drip onto his/ her body and face. He/she falls onto an armchair standing at the center of the front edge of the stage. The juices run under the plastic wrap. A camera above the stage projects a bird’s-eye-view image of the performer’s entire body lying on the armchair onto the back screen, thus duplicating and reinforcing it. The performer violently rips apart an orange with his/her teeth, crushes it, squashes it. His/her mouth is full of oranges. He/she puts the rinds aside and takes a new orange into his/her right hand, stands up, and stabs the orange with the knife in his/her left hand. The orange juice drips onto his/her body and the plastic wrap. He/she throws the oranges onto the floor and cuts open the plastic wrap using the butcher’s knife. Now, the performer’s body becomes visible: his beefy chest, his belly, and his thighs. We hear classical music (Mozart’s Requiem) and the performer grunting. Synchronized with his actions, we see the carcass of a cow being slit open and a large butcher’s knife on the back screen. Then we see a heavy, black, sweaty body 11 |  T he logs describing the scene as seen in the video documentation remain unclear as to whether the audience clapping was recorded or actually a spontaneous act of the attending audience. An analysis of the logs witnessing the live performances revealed that the applause came from a tape recording.

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in close-up. He cuts the plastic wrap open at his loins, so that his male genitals become visible under the fabric of his white underpants. He removes the rest of the plastic wrap from his face. The music stops. The orange remnants are still in his mouth. Toward the end of the ‘oranges scene,’ the sweaty face of a man, whose gender could not be clearly identified at the beginning of the scene, comes into focus, with angry brown eyes in close-up, his mouth still filled with oranges.

3.1.2 A nalysis of the logs: the production and framing of sexual desire and colonial violence The following analysis focuses first on what was translated into language (eating the oranges) and then on what was not translated (Mozart’s Requiem) to demonstrate how the narrative of the scene was perceived as a fusion of sexual desire and colonial violence, in spite of a lack of knowledge or information about Mozart’s Requiem being a central element of the scene.

3.1.2.1 W hat was translated: eating oranges at the crossroads of desire and sexual violence The ways in which the observation logs frame the act of eating the oranges, tend to contextualize it in terms of desire and violence: “The next image shows the performer peeling oranges with a knife and eating them ‘with relish.’ This escalates until the performer is basically rubbing the oranges that he is crushing all over himself.” (Log 17)12 Another log does not explicitly speak of oranges; it merely describes the scene as a “feeding frenzy” (log 8), but it does very clearly associate it with pleasure and violence: With gusto and a tender noise, the performer peels fruit with a knife, ending in a feeding frenzy. These elements produced in me an ambivalent feeling between pleasure and violence. On the one hand, the juicy fruit, on the other, the sharp dangerous knife, pulled through the lips. (Log 8) 13

It is worth noting that, in spite of the transcriptions’ heterogeneity, almost all writers mentioned the appearance of sex and violence in this scene: aside from direct references to the terms ‘violence’ and ‘sex,’ the writers translated their perceptions into texts with a striking, almost sexist choice of words (“licks the knife”) and indifferent gender attributes (“he/she”) as exemplified in the following: “He licks the knife several times. She eats the orange with relish.” (Log 19) 14 How are desire and sexual violence, as documented in the observation logs and as experienced by the spectators, performatively generated in this scene? Taken together, the logs trace a dramaturgy that develops from the sensual enjoyment of 12 |  Translated from the German by Elena Polzer. 13 |  Translated from the German by Elena Polzer. 14 |  Translated from the German by Elena Polzer.

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Photo 01: Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza © Jérôme Séron orange slices into a voracious and obsessive act of devouring, stuffing into one’s mouth, and violent penetration of individual oranges. The performer concentrates on his own pleasure, while the objects in use (the oranges and the butcher’s knife) carry antagonistic connotations: oranges suggest flesh, vitamins, health, softness, naturalness, organic matter, color, freshness, life; whereas the butcher’s knife suggests danger, risk, injury, death, metal, hardness, steel, inorganic matter. The choreographic configuration of the objects alone creates a field of tension that demonstrates the dialectics of pleasure and destruction. This tension is not only created by the antagonistic objects (the oranges and the butcher’s knife), but also in the way that they are handled, in a linear dramaturgical escalation of the components of time, space, and intensity, charting a curve from pleasure to destruction. This dramaturgical progression of events generates different modes of pleasure, which reveal themselves both in the manner in which the oranges are eaten as well as in the use of the knife. The interactions on stage and translated into writing in the observation logs—the acts of devouring, rending, and crushing the orange peels, and the biting, squashing, and eating of the flesh, as well as the piercing and perforating of the orange—produce complex sexual connotations that oscillate between desire and pleasure on the one hand and sexual violence on the other. Desire and domination, devotion and submission, victim and perpetrator, servant and master are closely intertwined here. It is the performance of ambivalent practices of pleasure, which create variants of self-empowerment that range from a sensual act or compulsive obsession to a focus on destroying the object of desire. They produce a tension that oscillates between appropriating the

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object of desire and simultaneously being imprisoned by one’s own sexual needs and quest for satisfaction.

3.1.2.2 W  hat was not translated: Mozart’s Requiem as a colonial framing of desire and violence While the observation logs aptly note the connotations of sex and violence in the treatment of the oranges, their linguistic translations of both the ‘oranges scene’ and the ‘Putin scene’ hardly mention the music being used. When it does appear, it is only generally described as “classical music.” Its dramaturgical relevance remains a blank space in the logs, which describe it as, e.g., “music European classical pompous” (log 12), “[a]ccompanied by rapturous music” (log 15) or “resounding choir music” (log 16).15 Why is such well-known music, part of the canon of European classical music, paid so little attention in the logs? Is it because knowledge of classical music is no longer part of the educational canon? Or that most of the writers are international students, less familiar with classical European art music? Or do they consider the music less important for the dramaturgy of the piece? The evening makes mention of a “requiem of humanity” (Dutzenberg 2017: 3); Orlin describes her attempt to “colonize Mozart,” saying that she was “[…] wondering if it is possible, as South Africans, to colonise Mozart and at the same time use the everyday as a vehicle […].”16 She does not see Mozart’s Requiem as an expression of Western high culture, but translates and uses it from an African perspective as a commentary on cultural hegemony. However, this information from the program notes and the press kit was not available to the students writing the logs. Thus, paratexts did not alert them to the dramaturgical relevance and specificity of the music. Their descriptions therefore concentrate on the scenic action, on what appeared to the writers of the logs to be a truly dangerous act of playing around with a large knife in a mouth, an act that provoked unease, even though the students merely saw the scene on video without witnessing the situation in a theater, thus not actually experiencing theatrical co-presence. Meanwhile, the high-pitched male voice of Tuba Mirum from Mozart’s Requiem sings a Latin text, which translates to: Death and Nature shall be astonished When all creation rises again To answer to the Judge.

15 |  Translated by Elena Polzer. 16 |  T his quote comes from Robyn Orlin’s description of the piece, printed in a file used to promote the piece, which she was kind enough to make available for our research.

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A book, written in, will be brought forth In which is contained everything that is, Out of which the world shall be judged.17 This shows that the apparently dangerous act of eating the oranges is heightened by the lyrics, which can be read as a reference to colonial violence, thus situating ‘race’ in the scene. The subsequent musical phrase in the requiem is entitled “Rex” (King)18 and continues the development of the thematic reference. When the music begins, the performer’s body is (still) wrapped in plastic, almost entirely bound up, his black body conserved and on display; only his arms and mouth are free. He stabs an orange and squeezes it dry. The juices drip onto his face and his body, still wrapped in plastic. The logs describe the connotations of juice and blood, desire and destruction, life and death, all legible as colonial violence—as sexual greed and vice versa. However, the scene also shows a moment of liberation from colonial violence: the severing of the cowbell from around the performer’s neck, as well as the act of cutting open the plastic wrap. Men and women’s voices call out “Salve me!” (Save me!”) in Mozart’s Requiem, as the heavy, black body—degraded to animal status by the cowbell—pours forth from the not yet entirely removed plastic wrap. In the context of white colonial rule, as this scene can also be read, the dream of salvation and justice remains unfulfilled. There is no ‘merciful king,’ no Christian ‘redeemer of worlds’ bringing salvation from oppression and slavery. The colonized have freed and must free themselves. Mozart’s unanswered “Salve me!” becomes an outcry against the historical guilt of sustained colonial violence. Synchronous to the cutting open of the plastic wrap, we see a cow’s carcass being slit open and a large butcher’s knife in close-up on the rear screen. These images overlap with the performer’s heavy, black, sweaty body. What is not translated, i.e., the requiem’s Latin text, which is not mentioned in the logs, thus becomes doubly dramaturgically relevant: on the one hand, Mozart’s Requiem symbolizes globalized European high culture and thus hegemonic and cultural assets, which appear as a contrasting backdrop for the scenic presentation. On the other hand, the musical text appears to support the action, insofar as it functions as a colonial marker that poses questions of colonial guilt and personal responsibility. Although it demarcates a cultural European ‘Self,’ the text is not even understood in Europe (any more), not only due to it being sung in Latin, but also because—in the wake of secularization processes—its content is no longer part of a general canon of cultural knowledge.

17 |  http://www.good-music-guide.com/reviews/055lyrics.htm (accessed: 15 May 2018). 18 |  Begins at 17:41 min.

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As that which is not understood and not translated, the musical text is comparable to the African languages (Zulu, Xhosa), the ‘Other’ cultures featured in the piece, languages that white European audiences do not understand either. Thus, Mozart’s Requiem is used ambivalently in the piece itself: on the one hand as an element of what can now be considered globalized European ‘cultural heritage’ and a part of colonial history, and, on the other, as that which is forgotten and not understood even in formerly colonizing countries. The non-mentioning of the music in the logs is thus an expression of a missing translation of the cultural Self, of one’s own European cultural heritage. This blank, this un-perceived, non-transcribed and non-translated element in the logs should be understood as an integral part of the dramaturgy, playing with perceptions of what is commonly considered ‘Self’ and ‘Other’.

3.2 The ‘Putin scene’ 3.2.1 C ondensing the logs into a “thick description”: homophobia and global exploitation The stage is dark. The performer is standing with his back to the audience. A black cameraman sitting on stage projects his actions onto a rectangular screen, which fills the back wall. We see a close-up of the performer’s body. He is wearing a white sheet wrapped around him like a tunic and carrying a small sieve with sunglasses in front of his face like a mask. He has a trapezoidal black hat on his head, featuring a fake braid and rhinestones. We see his painted face—red circles on both cheeks, black lips, strong eyeliner, black stripes on both cheekbones, as well as individually painted black spots—in profile. Beforehand, he was repetitively singing the words: “You jealous me” (video recording 40:29 min). The music starts again. The performer slowly turns his face forward until he is facing the audience. The projection to the rear of the stage shows a larger-thanlife dancing man in a black suit on a white background; he is wearing a bow tie. The performer loudly and affectedly screams: “Oh, Putin” (42:33 min). His voice rises in pitch as he does so. The projected figure has his knees slightly bent, fists clenched; he lightly moves his forearms back and forth, alternately and rhythmically. The figure is standing with his weight on his left foot and his right leg relaxed. The figure rhythmically moves his hips from right to left. The performer turns to the projected figure and calls out: “Putin, you look so beautiful tonight.” (42:47 min) At the same time, the figure continues dancing, repeating the same movements over and over, rhythmically moving his hips back and forth. Now, the performer spins around on the spot several times. A live image of the performer superimposed over the projected dancing figure intensifies this action. The audience sees itself in the background on screen behind the performer’s image. With outstretched arms and his back to the audience, the performer continues talking and walking toward the larger-than-life figure projected onto the rear

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screen. His actions are superimposed live onto that figure. He adopts the rhythms of the projected Putin figure and moves his arms, upper body, and hips while speaking to him. What he says is not mentioned in the logs. The writers only report that this act of communication fails. But why did the writers feel that it had failed when they did not document the text of the conversation at all, not even in excerpts, and thus apparently considered it irrelevant?

3.2.2 Analysis of the logs: the neocolonial dance of domination and wealth The logs describe the underlying communicative structure of the ‘Putin scene’ as follows: “The performer attempts to dance with him and fails […] due to the projection” (log 8); “[…] apparently dances with the video, with Putin” (log 11); “Putin appears on the screen, rhythmically moving, whereupon the performer wants to dance with Putin” (log 14).19 But like the music, the spoken dialogue in this scene receives no mention in the logs. It also remains untranslated, although it plays a central role in the dramaturgy of the scene. This will be shown below using a differentiated analysis of the same scene. The following analysis thus proceeds in a reverse order to that of the ‘oranges scene’ analysis. It first focuses on what is not translated in the logs (the dialogue with the visual figure of Putin) and subsequently describes the translated elements (the acts of dealing with Putin) to illustrate that, in spite of the fact that the writers did not record or register the dialogue as being of elementary importance for the scene, they still perceived a conflation of the associated narrative of global capitalism with (post-)colonial exploitation.

3.2.2.1 T he non-translated: the failed dialogue with the neocolonial rulers While the performer dances with the Putin figure with his back to the audience, he calls out, “Oh, yes. Move your hips” (43:21 min), as if trying to change the video projection: he rotates his left hand: “Because you have been such a good boy, I am going to give you free oil from Africa.” (43:31 min) The performer makes large arm movements, shifting from one leg to another, slightly teetering and rebounding. “I need more weapons. Nuclear weapons” (43:44 min), he calls out to the figure: “If you give me that, I’ll give you all the minerals. I’ll give you gold. Ha. I’ll give you diamonds. For free.” (43:52 min) Still dancing on the spot, he finally calls out: “Get down, Putin. Can you do this?” (44:05 min) And then he adds: “If you give me seven more barrels of weapons, you can dump your garbage anywhere in Africa. What do you think about that? Bring everything to Africa. Shit in all Africa!” (44:17 min) Mozart’s music ends. Only the performer’s voice can be heard. The video projection stops. The performer slows down his dance, he shifts irritatingly slowly from his right leg to his left: “Why would the music stop? Putin, why did you stop dancing? I was just getting into the groove. And then the music stops, and you stopped dancing?” (44:41 min) he angrily asks. And he reduces his 19 |  Translated by Elena Polzer.

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Photo 02: Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza with a projected image of the President of Russia Vladimir Putin (‘Putin scene’) © Jérôme Séron

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movements to making light arm movements with his right hand, emphasizing his words with gestures, his left hand hanging against his body: “What’s happening?” (44:51 min) he asks and takes off his hat. We see his black scalp, his hair cropped on both sides. He removes the sunglasses and the sieve, which had been functioning as a mask, from his face: “I mean, honestly, what is wrong? You don’t want to dance with me, because I’m a man?” (44:57 min) There is a short pause: “Or you don’t want to dance with me, because I am a black man? Which is which, Putin?” (45:03 min) The performer is still standing with his back to the audience, his gaze directed at the projection. He stands still and turns away, lays aside the glasses, the sieve, and the hat: “I mean, Putin, you can’t do this to me. I came here prepared. Ahh! I still have another outfit, Putin. Hm. I mean, what is wrong with you? Do you think you are better than me?” (45:12 min) He changes his costume on stage and puts on a long tiger-print sarong. His torso remains uncovered. He is still talking to the dancing figure: “No, you are not. You are not superior. Fuck that! You are definitely not more superior than me. He? I can’t come here and you stop dancing, when I am getting into the groove.” (45:25 min) The performer goes to the middle of the stage and stands on a chair, positioned at the middle of the edge of the stage with his back to the audience. His arms are hanging beside his body. Turning to the audience, he says: “What’s wrong? Is it because I am not wearing those expensive suits you wear?” (45:41 min) He stretches his arms supportively in the air and calls out: “Look what I wear, Putin.” (45:48 min) Through the live camera on the ceiling, we see the performer sitting on the armchair, white sheets spread out beneath him. We hear Mozart’s Requiem: “You see, Putin. What I wear! It is not the suits you wear.” (45:53 min) He lists off various names of well-known international fashion labels: “See Putin, what I wear is in abundance in my country. And because of that I am not better, Putin.” (46:20 min) Via the live projection on the backstage screen, we see the performer’s painted face, his naked torso, a stick, two African whips, a small wooden bowl and its contents, chains, and a white sheet. He spreads out the large colorful bird feathers hanging from the cape around his hips and picks up two whips lying on the floor beside the chair, then crosses them in front of his chest: “See Putin, where I come from, we dance with our weapons.” (46:40 min) Then he says, laughing: “Putin, try to top this!” (46:53 min) The music becomes more dramatic. He stands up and starts to dance. Unlike the autoerotic practices of the performer wrapped in plastic foil and his sole interaction with objects and the voyeuristic position of the (European) audience in the ‘oranges scene,’ the ‘Putin scene’ situates interaction at the crossroads of language, movement, and projection. The performer talks, dances, and interacts with a projected image; he is communicating with a present and simultaneously absent neo-colonial ruler. The projection of the Russian president Vladimir Putin contrasts with the presence of a black performer in a three-dimensional stage space. The medial situatedness of the present figure (the performer’s presence on stage) and the present-absent figure (the media enactment of the Putin image) is a

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kind of ‘romantic date’ and, as a ‘date,’ it must fail, because the one being called on does not answer, since he is merely being projected into the situation and is thus unreachable. The stereotypical repetition of his dance movements underlines his indifference, his distance, and his elusiveness. The performer’s permanent failure to invoke him demonstrates the helplessness and hopelessness of the communicative act. His questions, reproaches, and accusations come to nothing. They remain unheard. His summons, based on pop songs and underlaid with sexual connotations, fall short: “Oh, yes. Move your hips.” (43:19 min) or “Yes, oh, Putin! Yes, get down, Putin! Can you do this? Get down, get down, get down.” (44:03 min) But the figure does not change its movements; it does not submit. The interaction between the theatrical and medial situatedness of the scene produces the appearance of something shared, which is actually an illusion, and is unmasked as such. It is the illusion of two bodies dancing together, of a white and a black one, a ruling body and a ruled body, a theatrical and a medial body. Presence and absence are thus staged as genuine elements constituting relationships of power and domination. The different situatednesses of the dancers only changes when the dancing figure freezes because the video stops, and the performer simultaneously takes off the mask of the African tyrant (hat, sieve, sunglasses). He manifests as someone injured, making himself vulnerable. “I mean, what is wrong with you? What is wrong with you? Do you think you are better than me? No, you are not. You are not superior. Fuck that! You are definitely not more superior than me. He? I can’t come here, and you stop dancing, when I am getting into the groove.” (45:23 min) What is expressed here is the disruption of the illusion of an encounter between equals. An act of dancing together that never existed and, if at all, was only based on a one-sided invitation. It is a couple’s dance that ends even before it has started.

3.2.2.2 W hat is translated: whips, diamonds and gold—the economic greed for global domination According to the observation logs, the ‘Putin scene’ follows the previous scene of the ‘Nubian queen’ (33:12–42:22 min), which dramaturgically anticipates it: “There was a dance session between the performer and the President of Russia: Putin, him asking Putin to send weapons in exchange for oil and mines (Gold, Diamond).” (Log 22)20. So, even before the ‘Putin scene,’ the piece addresses (post-)colonial trade in African commodities. Via a live projection on stage, the performer as the ‘Nubian queen’ in close-up presents his left hand first without and then wearing various rings. The performance is supported by the words: “Alright, so. I am going to show you my very, very interesting collection. Hmm. One of my favorites has to be this one. Do you like my ring?” (37:31 min) “You jealous of me. Hmm. And then there was this one. And then this one.” (38:00 min) What is being exposed 20 |  Original English.

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here is the exorbitance of material greed and envy, as connected to things (gold, diamonds). And, so, the performer as the ‘Nubian queen’ remarks almost casually: You see the nice thing about where I am come from is that all these resources are in abundance. You know? You know where I come from in South Africa, you just put your hand firmly into the soil, all right. And then you pull it out. And when you come out: voilà. Diamonds and gold. (38:13 min)

The performer pitches rings and other luxury items, thereby drawing attention to himself and the objects. The scene shows ways in which the fetishism of the global circulation of commodities is created and how structures of desire are produced. In the trade agreement between Putin and the African tyrant, in which diamonds and gold are exchanged for weapons, and the natural resources of the country are sold off to stabilize personal power, there are only (male) perpetrators. The correlation between domination and masculinity reveals itself in the transformation of the gender attributes associated with the performer: thus, the logs emphasize that his gender attributes also change in these scenes: he begins as the ‘Nubian queen,’ i.e., as a female African goddess of beauty, and changes into a male tyrant dancing with Putin. The subject of economic greed already introduced in the ‘Nubian queen’ scene is narrowed down in the ‘Putin Scene’ to contact between two men, the ‘African tyrant’ and Putin, to the exploitation of African resources, and the trade in nuclear weapons. The performer in his role as ‘African tyrant’ thus discusses with Putin: Because you have been such a good boy, I am going to give you free oil from Africa […] Oh, what do you think about that? But I need a favor, Putin. I need more weapons. Nuclear weapons. If you give me that I’ll give you all the minerals. I give you gold. Ha. I give you diamonds. For free. (43:31 - 43:57 min)

The projected figure stops dancing: Putin’s image freezes. Dramaturgically, the ‘Putin scene’ resituates the moment of greed, not only by bringing up the subject of impeding catastrophe and potential global apocalypse through the dangerous trade in nuclear weapons, but also because Mozart’s Requiem here takes on another function. Unlike in the ‘oranges scene,’ the requiem has no commentary function in the ‘Putin scene.’ It has an enhancing effect and becomes an allegory for global catastrophe: a requiem for all. By musically enhancing the scenic narrative, greed not only appears as an unrestrained practice of desiring more, but also as a motor for the unrestricted maximum expansion of profits and power. In this respect, the ‘Putin scene’ translates actual political issues (e.g., neo-colonial Russian expansion politics on the one hand and commodities and weapons trade with African countries on the other), whereby the translation into an aesthetic is itself considered an instrument of power. This is apparent, e.g., in the meaning of the dance, which is here more than a purely aesthetic practice as we have in Western European cultures, but rather a powerful act, a male sexual act

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and, as such, a political demonstration of domination and violence. “Where I am from we dance with our weapons,” the performer as the ‘African tyrant’ explains. This is supported by an act of self-empowerment at the end of the ‘Putin scene’: the performer spreads out the large colorful bird feathers hanging from his cape, taking two whips lying on the floor next to the chair into his hands and crossing them across his chest. He dances a traditional, ritual war dance, charged with animist characters: “See Putin, where I come from, we dance with our weapons.” (46:40 min) He laughs and adds: “Putin, try to top this.” (46:53 min) In the ‘Putin scene’ the political can be described on three levels: the aesthetic translation of the political in terms of real-life political and geopolitical issues (commodity and weapons trade in Africa, issues of race and gender), the artistic practice of overwriting cultural symbols, signs, and things within the context of medial translations, leading to the destabilization of established power relationships and the opening up of new contexts, and, finally, the aesthetic translation of an understanding of dance as a political act.

4. The situatedness of political , cultural and medial translations Based on the observation logs, as well as the performance analyses, which fill in some of the blanks in the logs, we will now identify and summarize the basic patterns of the piece as expressed in the logs: Both scenes described here deal with configurations of desire, and practices of taking pleasure and striving for ownership, performatively expressed in interactions and through the creation of a network of players i.e., things, materials, people, projections and presences, languages and music. The way they interact creates an ambivalent fabric of suspense, oscillating between desire and greed, power and violence, unfolding via markers of gender and race. The orange as fruit, juice, nourishment thus represents the feminine. The covetous consumption of fruit in the ‘oranges scene’ is initially staged as gender-indifferent and can be read, regardless of gender affiliation, as an act of empowerment. On the other hand, the joyful consumption of the fruit’s flesh is limited, autoerotic, and destructive in its self-referentiality. The only ones participating in this sexual act are objects (oranges and a butcher’s knife) and a voyeuristic (in our case European) audience. The act of enjoyment ends with the piercing, squashing, and eating of the oranges, and, in this respect, it also involves the destruction of the fruit with the help of a weapon, a knife, thus also signifying the destruction of nourishing elements and of the feminine. The final liberation takes place with the cutting open of the plastic wrap, i.e., demonstrating, on the one hand, that what was desired can only be enjoyed in a restricted and self-referential way, and on the other, that liberation also leads to being unambiguously gendered as male. Liberating oneself from the plastic wrap, which massively restricted the body, but also allowed it to appear gender-neutral,

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queer, and defiant of heteronormativity, is only possible by abstaining from desire and by destroying the object of that desire. The ‘Putin scene’ situates the subjects of desire within a concrete social context, taking pleasure in things and striving for ownership over them. The context is the late capitalist, global, neo-liberally inspired, unrestricted, profit-oriented pursuit of material wealth, power, and political influence, which reveals itself in the handling of luxury items and in the dialogue with the Putin character. The choreographic arrangement, the dramaturgical design, and the handling of objects and projections on stage thus produce a narrative of obsessive desire and intended ownership by interweaving sexual and economic layers, and sexual and economic greed, which surface as a motor for exploitation and suppression in terms of gender, race and neo-colonial domination by new global powers and ‘black tyrants.’ In the ‘Putin scene,’ this greed is presented as uninhibited and infinite, as amoral and male, as greed that (inevitably) leads to global catastrophe.

5. R eflections : academic translations of artistic practices This text combines three different practices of translation: practices of artistically translating (political) issues and world views, practices of perceiving and transcribing those translations, and practices of academically analyzing a body of data. In doing so, we see that artistic practices of choreographing and the associated artistic research that they involve follow a different logic than that of spectators’ practices of perception or academic practices of analysis. Translation practices of observing and transcribing differ in turn from those of analyzing and interpreting, although they are both reflective practices. It is thus not possible to clearly polarize artistic and academic practices, because, e.g., observing and transcribing are not only academic practices, but also common artistic practices in rehearsal processes (together with taking notes, choreology, notation, choreographic outlining; Klein 2017). However, the ‘situational’ and ‘situatedness’ do take on different meanings in art and science. The situational aspect of performance—its fluidity—cannot be grasped in reflection, but only remains a memory, a “presence effect” (Gumbrecht 2016). The situatedness of performance, its framing, i.e., its temporal, cultural, theatrical, or medial horizon of meaning, is what actually allows the past to be visualized at all. A process of perception and realization thus condenses the situational and situatedness into a historically specific constellation. In this respect, not only do various logics of translation practices come together in artistic and academic processes, such as the translation of aesthetic experience into empirical data and the interpretation of said data, as in our case. Rather, this reflection is precisely what allows the interplay of the situational and situatedness, as well as the historicity of the research itself to become visible and accessible. In this

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respect, the simultaneously practical and theoretical perspective chosen here is also a critical analytical project, which, by taking a methodological, empirical, experience-based approach, always also relates the situatedness of academic and artistic practices to one another.

R eferences Bourriaud, Nicolas (1998): Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les Presse Du Rell. Brüsemeister, Thomas (2008): Qualitative Forschung: Ein Überblick, Wiesbaden: GWV Fachverlage. Dutzenberg, Laure (2017): “And so you see … our honourable blue sky and ever enduring sun … can only be consumed slice by slice …” In: Programm Schau­ spiel Köln, Spielzeit 2017/18, p. 3. “Full Text Lyrics to Mozart’s Requiem,” accessed May 15, 2018 (http://www.goodmusic-guide.com/reviews/055lyrics.htm). Geertz, Clifford (1973): “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In: The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, pp. 3–30. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004): Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Harpin, Anna/Nicolson, Helen (eds.) (2017): Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics, London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hirschauer, Stefan (2004): “Praktiken und ihre Körper: Über materielle Partizipanden des Tuns.” In: Karl H. Hörning/Julia Reuter (eds.), Doing Culture: Zum Begriff der Praxis in der gegenwärtigen soziologischen Theorie, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 73–91. Hirschauer, Stefan (2006): “Putting Things into Words: Ethnographic Writing and the Silence of the Social.” In: Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences 29, pp. 413–441. Jäger, Ludwig (2012): “Transkription.” In: Christian Bartz et al. (eds.), Handbuch der Mediologie: Signaturen des Medialen, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 306–315. Jäger, Ludwig (2013): “Reframing: Rahmenbrüche und ihre transkriptive Bearbeitung.” In: Uwe Wirth (ed.), Rahmenbrüche: Rahmenwechsel, Berlin: Kadmos, pp. 77–98. Kalthoff, Herbert/Hirschauer, Stefan/Lindemann, Gesa (eds.) (2008): Theo­retische Empirie: Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Klein, Gabriele (2014): “Praktiken des Tanzens und des Forschens: Bruchstücke einer praxeologischen Tanzwissenschaft.” In: Margrit Bischof /Regula Nyffeler (eds.), Visionäre Bildungskonzepte im Tanz, Zurich: Chronos, pp. 103–115. Klein, Gabriele (2015 [2007]): “Die Logik der Praxis: Methodologische Aspekte einer praxeologischen Produktionsanalyse am Beispiel Das Frühlingsopfer

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von Pina Bausch.” In: Gabriele Brandstetter/Gabriele Klein (eds.), Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft: Modellanalysen zu Pina Bauschs Le Sacre du Printemps, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 123–142. Klein, Gabriele/Göbel, Hanna Katharina (2017): “Performance und Praxis. Ein Dialog.” In: Gabriele Klein/Hanna Katharina Göbel (eds.), Performance und Praxis: Praxeologische Erkundungen in Tanz, Theater, Sport und Alltag, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 7–42. Klein, Gabriele (2017): „Tanz weitergeben: Tradierung und Übersetzung der Choreografien von Pina Bausch.“ In: Gabriele Klein/Hanna Katharina Göbel (eds.), Performance und Praxis: Praxeologische Erkundungen in Tanz, Theater, Sport und Alltag, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 7–42. Klein, Gabriele/Leopold, Elisabeth/Wieczorek, Anna (2018): “Tanz – Film – Schrift: Methodologische Herausforderungen und praktische Übersetzungen in der Tanzanalyse.” In: Christine Moritz/Michael Corsten (eds.), Handbuch Qualitative Videoanalyse, Wiesbaden: VS, pp. 234–256. Rancière, Jacques (2010): Der emanzipierte Zuschauer, Vienna: Passagen. Reckwitz, Andreas (2003): “Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken: Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive.” In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32/4, pp. 282–301. Reichertz, Jo (2014): “Das vertextete Bild: Überlegungen zur Gültigkeit von Video­ analysen.” In: Christine Moritz (ed.), Transkription von Video- und Filmdaten in der Qualitativen Sozialforschung: Multidisziplinäre Annäherungen an einen komplexen Datentypus, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 55–72. “Robyn Orlin,” accessed February 28, 2018 (http://www.robynorlin.com). Schäfer, Hilmar/Schindler, Larissa (2017): “Schreiben.” In: Robert Gugutzer/­ Gabriele Klein/Michael Meuser (eds.), Handbuch Körpersoziologie: Forschungsfelder und Methodische Zugänge, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 471–485. Schatzki, Theodore R./Knorr-Cetina, Karin D./Von Savigny, Eike (eds.) (2001): The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London/New York: Routledge. Schmidt, Robert (2012): Soziologie der Praktiken: Konzeptionelle Studien und empirische Analysen, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Shove, Elizabeth/Pantzar, Mika/Watson, Matt (2012): The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How it Changes, Los Angeles: Sage. Siegmund, Gerald (2006): Abwesenheit: Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes: William Forsythe, Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Meg Stuart, Bielefeld: transcript. Weiler, Christel/Roselt, Jens (2017): Aufführungsanalyse: Eine Einführung, Tübingen: A. Francke (UTB). Whalley, Joanne/Miller, Lee (2017): Between Us: Audiences, Affect and the In-Between, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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But we are in the midst of a ferocious erasure of the lives, experiences, and histories of the marginalized, the oppressed, of minorities. […] When such erasures occur, there is an understandable desire to hold onto something that is your ‘own’, that is not being taken from you or imposed on you for the power and profitability that is achieved at your cost. In such moments, people become possessive—unfortunately even ‘essentialist’—as if to stand up to hegemonic ‘fundamentalisms’ with some alternative foundational identity or belief, with something that belongs to you that is endangered and vulnerable. And this raises the complex and contentious issue of appropriation. (Bhabha 2017)

A symptomatic debate about cultural appropriation was recently sparked by the sculpture Golden Head (Female) in the exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Damien Hirst, Venice 2017). This copy of a bust from the 14th or 15th century represents a toxic amalgamation of the apparatus dispositif of the colonial ethnographic museum with that of the globalized art market—eventually every cultural object and practice is reduced to a commodity. Hirst, his team, and his financiers are aiding and abetting the way that the global academic middle class understands dominant hyperculture in that the male, white artist can still transgressively appropriate the ‘other’ and the ‘traditional,’ which have been hitherto defined and designated as such, and subject them to his narrative of cosmopolitanism and diversity—thus also perpetuating his own musealization within a Westernized canon. In this essay, I take criticism of Hirst’s appropriation, motivated by identity politics, as a starting point for my observations and discuss the contemporary artistic translation of an Ife bronze within the framework of the (post-)colonial exhibition practice of the museum of world cultures. These days, ethnographic museums generally claim to be able to create and describe transcultural relation-

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ships – both in their exhibition displays and epistemologically—in a way that is critical of representation and yet compares cultures by regarding them as separate entities. The fault line of this debate about the Golden Head (Female) is situated within current tensions between a global hyperculture that is interested in ongoing translations and a cultural essentialism that excludes and cleanses. This tension can be observed in the different logics of the exhibition displays within the field of contemporary art and in the logics of the ethnographic museum, both of which are merged together in Hirst’s show. The basic observation of this article is that everything is always situated in translation to begin with. This suggests that—in accordance with the findings that theorists like Stuart Hall, Édouard Glissant, and Homi Bhabha have made about the decolonializing potential of hybridizations to question modern binaries—there needs to be a discussion about whether the multi-directional, multi-perspective hybridization of the means of artistic production has been a dissident response to racists, anti-feminist policies, and class discrimination. Nevertheless, it has become clear in recent years that hopes to combine cultural and social struggles with artistic practices of remixing have not been fulfilled and that, although emancipatory identity politics does lead to greater participation by people from marginalized groups, this recognition of collective differences has not caused any structural change in the field of art or within the neoliberal system, nor has it contributed to an overcoming of the capitalist conditions of domination and exploitation. Now, the field of art is playing the role of precursor to neoliberal logics of cultural valorization and exploitation. Capitalism thus uses appropriation and remixing, copying and pasting as technologies of innovation and the incorporation of diversity to expand markets and reproduce itself. When we begin to consider the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and postcolonial theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. (Hardt/Negri 2000:138)

In effect, the neoliberal complicity between identity politics and capitalism has been amplified with the simple addition of positions and perspectives to the global art market. In my opinion, a critique based solely on identity politics is inadequate when it comes to debating the legitimacy of cultural appropriation. I therefore propose to expand the debate to include Marxist views in order to understand cultural appropriation within the context of global commodification and the valorization of immaterial traditions and cultural goods through hybridization.

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Figure 1: The Ife Head. Made in Ife. Probably 14thC-15thC (early). The British Museum, Registration Number: Af1939,34.1 At the moment, there is fierce debate raging about who may legitimately feed the objects and practices of ‘traditional’ or indigenous archives into the capitalist creation of surplus value within consumer culture. In 2017, one sculpture in particular caused a furor: Golden Head (Female). It was part of an exhibition by star artist Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, held in Venice at the Palazzo Grassi and Punto della Dogana, the private museum of the collector François Pinault, and curated by Elena Geuna. The description next to the artwork reads: “The Damien Hirst work does mirror that of the Ife craftsmen of the early 14th-15th Century. The form of the Hirst head, with its striations, clearly echoes

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those Ife examples which emerged from the sacred shrine at Wunmonije Compound in the 1930s.” The exhibition catalogue elaborates: Stylistically similar to the celebrated works from the Kingdom of Ife (which prospered c.1100-1400 CE in modern Nigeria), this head may be a copy of a terracotta or brass original. Extraordinarily, it is only a little over a century since the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) was so surprised by the discovery of the Ife heads that he deduced that the lost island of Atlantis had sunk off the Nigerian coast, enabling descendants of the Greek survivors to make the skillfully executed works. (Corry 2017: 23)

Hirst’s exhibition concept is based on a fiction: on the ship Apistos (the Unbelievable), which sank 2000 years ago in the Indian Ocean on its way, laden with artefacts, to the private museum of the collector Cif Amotan II (an anagram for: ‘I am fiction’). Damien Hirst was asked to bankroll the salvaging of the treasure and to assemble the objects in an exhibition. To make the story more plausible, spectacular underwater videos of the salvaging operation were made and, since January 2018, a feature-length mockumentary going by the same name and directed by Sam Hobkinson has been available from the online streaming service Netflix. This Objects created by Hirst and his team are on display in Venetian palaces in the style of a Western museum of world cultures. The vitrines contain a miniature model of the Apistos and countless coins, cups, and corroded bowls, as well as jewelry belonging to the sailors. Amotan himself purportedly collected artefacts for a temple in honor of a sun god, Aton. Accordingly, on the sea floor between coral reefs, they also found, overgrown with fake plaster marine animals, statues of monumental mythical creatures: William Blake’s miniature picture The Ghost of a Flea welcomes the audience to the atrium in the form of an 18-meter-high statue: Demon with Bowl. In a diorama, the Hydra (based on the film Jason and the Argonauts [1963] and designed by the cartoonist Ray Harryhausen) fights not against Heracles, but against the many-armed and sword-wielding goddess Kali; the Aspect of Katie Ishtar ¥o-landi, a bust of a Mesopotamian divinity, is modelled on the white South African singer Yolandi Vi$$er from the controversial and racist pop group De Antwoord; a marble head of a pharaoh is based on the musician Pharrell Williams. The sculpture Severed Head of Medusa is the 3D version of a Medusa’s head painted by Caravaggio; another diorama shows Andromeda chained to a rock and being attacked by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws jumping out of Hokusai’s Great Wave. There are also statues of Micky Mouse, a Sphinx, and toy Transformers along with the now infamous Golden Head (Female). The mockumentary shows how Hirst immersed some of these contemporary sculptures—created from a blend of remix, copy, and translation—in the sea, in a land before time, for his own future archaeology. This explains the fake plaster marine animals, barnacles, and coral that supposedly grew over his art, forming a crust over the ‘old’ culture, until the sculptures were ‘rediscovered’ by Hirst,

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brought to light, and consigned to antiquity through the act of salvaging. Hirst assigns the ‘salvaged’ things their value and significance not only through this little story but also by utilizing the display methods of the ethnographic museum and through his own authorship as an art superstar.

Figure 2: Aspect of Katie Ishtar ¥o-landi This intertextual puzzle of visual references to times, places, and societies can be found in almost all of the treasures. Hardly any objects can be traced back to a single ‘origin.’ Manifold resonances between Westernized art history, pop culture, and the diverse traditions of different world cultures are generated. A rhizome of narratives creeps through the exhibition space. Mickey Mouse could still be seen

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as being of US origin, but with De Antwoord, tracing all the references and following all the threads repeatedly results in the viewer going around in circles through the internet of pop culture: the group describes its music—a mixture of the musical styles of various South African cultures combined with eurotrash, rave, and gangsta rap—as “Zef,” more or less the Afrikaans equivalent of ‘white trash.’ By blending this with the pop-cultural aesthetics of the Internet, they have managed to create several viral music video hits, but have also been called out for the appropriation of Black culture and their overall racism. Such remix practices and circular multi-hybridizations constantly generate a meandering rhizome of new connections. In modernity, newness and innovation are generated by translating a third thing into the dominant Western culture, and in post-modernity, repetitions are used to provoke a minimal difference, while in late capitalism “hybridization becomes a central and conditioning element of the formation of circuits of production and circulation” (Hardt/Negri 2000: 317f). Hirst’s appropriations are thus situated within the logic and traditions of modern art production and (post-)colonial power structures. A materialist analysis needs to determine which asymmetries of power and conditions of rule perpetuate themselves in the production and representation of the individual practices of hybridization, and this connection between materialist analysis and identity politics must be inscribed into the concept of situated translations.

Figure 3: Instagram post by Victor Ehikhamenor

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The artist Victor Ehikhamenor (who exhibited in the Nigerian Pavilion) launched his protest on Instagram: “For the thousands of viewers seeing this for the first time, they won’t think Ife, they won’t think Nigeria. […] As time passes it will pass for a Damien Hirst regardless of his small print caption.” Ekhaminor’s criticism is based on his knowledge of the market mechanisms that favor Hirst’s Western, ‘ingenious’ artistic authorship over those of the producers from the Yoruba culture in Ife, whose authorship remains de-individualized. Is it really Hirst’s job to make vague references to the origins of the Ife heads, but ultimately, by describing it as a ‘traditional craft,’ to dismiss this connection with other artists, to display this head in an exhibition with Western pop culture or hypercultural hybrid figures? Is it Hirst’s job to valorize these Ife heads and render them visible as part of a ‘global mélange’? Such practices of appropriation and translation constitute modern art and have been passed down to Hirst, which means that his appropriation seems totally legitimate within this (neo-)colonial framework. In postcolonial discourse in the field of art, actors’ dividual1 affiliations can be seen as the (il-)legitimization to press ahead with the commodification of immaterial and material artworks. Here, illegitimate appropriation is when something is translated from a position of power: a hegemonic position from which there is no connection, or the connection is violent, such as the one between Damien Hirst as a white, male Briton, the former colonial power, and the Ife community based in Nigeria. Curator Chica Okeke Agule identifies a dilemma: if, under the prevailing global hypercultural processes of exchange on the art market, no ‘ancient culture’ of the African continent were shown in Hirst’s Treasures, they would not be visible at all in the global canon, but at the same time, this visibility is established by white, male artists who ultimately profit from the appropriation. “Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, or is Hirst recreating the British colonial power dynamic of the late 1800s?” (Okeke-Agulu 2017) Could Hybridization still be seen as a subversive practice that is challenging hegemonic power or has it become an artistic practice that threatens to reinforce it? At the same time, the aesthetic differentiations and hybridizations of contemporary, neoliberal, global hyperculture are caught up in a self-contradiction: contrary to the objectives of their own networked remix culture, they need self-contained, identity-based, essentialist cultures to be their ‘other.’ Capitalism utilizes this contingent division into the in- and outgroup, as practices and things of the ‘other’ can subsequently—framed as ‘the new,’ ‘the third’—be inscribed into the hyperculture by participants of the outgroup communities through commodification and cooption, thereby contributing to diversity, innovation, growth, and hence the reproduction of capitalism. This means that these potentially valuable practices and objects are produced, authenticated, and passed on in marginalized communities. These elements serve 1 |  See also for a theory of the ‘dividual’: Ott 2018.

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the community, on the one hand, as constituent points of reference for self-assurance, while, on the other hand, being excluded from the hegemonic mainstream by means of othering processes and devalued from a position of power and understood as representative of the entire community—which, thus, is makes them doubly excluded. The exclusion, marginalization and subordination of cultures renders the participants of this culture socially vulnerable and economically exploitable. Cynically, this can be resisted by making visible, commodifying, inscribing, and valorizing the immaterial, cultural goods—in other words, by pushing ahead with the exploitation of the cultural resources. This could also lead to a recolonization of the periphery, where the marginalized and subaltern become mere producers of useable differences; although their production is revalued aesthetically, the producers are either coopted or remain excluded. In the process, identity politics render cultural goods visible—whereby the question of who profits from these inscriptions and who has to fear the existential threats of exclusion makes the class difference clear. Hence, affiliations have their own social hierarchies and reproduce them. This contributes to an erosion of any solidarity between the middle class and the subaltern. Under the prevailing conditions, exclusion is a problem of racist marginalization, and inclusion goes hand in hand with the problems of classist cooption and tokenization. To facilitate this inscription and translation of marginalization practices and productions of the ‘others’ into the hyperculture, archives, commons and communities are constantly being tapped as resources, thereby levelling their differences in the process of commodification. Under the prevailing neoliberal conditions, they are separated from their integration within the value and meaning systems of communities that are not structured for or by capitalism and take on the form of commodities within the capitalist logic, and, in a worst-case scenario, are merely made visible as commercialized folklore. It is only through their transformation into commodities that producers with the appropriate level of participation in the communities of origin can ‘legitimately’ inscribe such resources into the hegemonic culture—or illegitimately appropriate them if the producers are part of the white (!) hegemony. Either way, this constitutes the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism: what is happening here is a change of frame: the cultural goods are no longer understood within their previous context of interpretive patterns, they have been translated interculturally into commodities of hyperculture. Within hyperculture, they can be translated without resistance into one another, remixed with one another, and intra-actively hybridized, as copy and paste, as a repetition that establishes a minimal difference, as “densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, injections, showerings” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 328). Overcoming capitalism and addressing social issues through cultural production obviously requires greater effort, yet cultural elements can be decisive affirmative and strategic assets in conflicts, for example, in the struggle against environmental devastation or invasive development in territories of marginalized and subaltern communities. These needs often give rise to demands being made for the

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restitution of the cultural goods currently owned by Western ethnographic museums not only by indigenous groups, but also by nationalist governments. This is because the “removal of certain objects and images from intertribal, national, and international public spheres is critical to the maintenance of a ‘we,’ with significant degrees of ‘sovereign’ control over the interactions and interdependencies that are part of contemporary life everywhere” (Clifford 2003: 162). The dilemma facing marginalized groups is that, in order to become visible, they must make reference to the difference on which their exclusion is based. In these strategic uses, the a-historicity of objects attributed to the field of art through othering processes is amplified; since references to communal ‘tradition’ and an often only vaguely classifiable past interrupt the idea of these objects being produced by ongoing translations, they thus become representative of an entire community, an ‘origin’ in the sense pointed out by Eric Hobsbawn. These objects are therefore fixed in their meaning so that social demands and political aspirations can be expressed through them. In light of these problems, Ella Shohat claims that “we must also ask whether it is possible to forge a collective resistance without inscribing a communal past” (Shohat 1992: 109). When asked in a CNN interview who was entitled to exhibit the statues—or copies of them—and in what context, the current Oba of the Ife kingdom, Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi II, 51st Ooni of Ife, responded: “We will tell the stories ourselves.” (Ooni Ogunwusi, quoted in Parke 2017) In a similar vein to what Homi Bhabha has said—“Unlike citation or quotation, appropriation assumes a proprietorial sense: Who owns what? In what sense do I own my history, or you own your art? Related to that notion of ownership is the sense of in propria persona: who can speak for it if it is owned” (Bhabha 2017)—the Ooni also articulated a central demand for the return of the statues, which were ‘found’ in 1938 and taken to places like Britain. Since history is constructed and told and genealogies formed using these art objects, which are, however, far-flung and often inaccessible to the Ife, it is difficult for them to write their own history, to use them to speak out against the oppression carried out by colonial power structures and not be spoken about qua representation by these objects in British museums. Being able to secure themselves and their identity as the Ife community with the help of these busts would support their concrete political demands for resources, territory, and autonomy as a means of combatting global, hegemonic asymmetries and existing, real economic conditions of exploitation. The strategies of such identity politics pursued by many local and indigenous communities in the existential battle for resources shares a trajectory with the demands of the Marxist left to combine such particular identity politics with materialist analysis and social struggles: The allegation that identity politics are particularistic and hence undermine the universality of struggles for social justice, misses the original purpose of many social movements labeled “identity poli-

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Today, the struggles of indigenous groups show that the ‘social question’ has become an ‘eco-social question’ that transcends the particular interests of those groups. The redistribution of wealth is therefore an inadequate answer to the urgent issues of protecting the environment and climate justice; instead, we need to radically change the methods of production as a whole. Located between hyperculturtural cosmopolitism and essentialist acculturalization is the debate about the translocation and translation of the Ife head: a debate that could spur on transformative processes in the art world if the connection were to be made to the eco-social struggles of marginalized groups.

A H istory of the World in 100 O bjects According to curator Elena Genua, Hirst was inspired by the catalogue A History of the World in 100 Objects, published by the British Museum London and its former museum director Neil MacGregor (2010), which also presented the Ife head. This book is a compilation of ancient objects from various regions and cultures worldwide, similar to the Amotan collection. In contrast to the jumble of items in the hold of the sunken ship, this catalogue is ordered chronologically and dated meticulously, and is annotated with modest amounts of information about the objects’ provenience. This suggests that both the British Museum and art superstar Hirst, represented by the fictitious collector Amotan, are in a position to tell the tale of a universal global cultural history. In 1997, James Clifford, using the term coined by Marie Louise Pratt, remarked that museums are contact zones in which postcolonial encounters and discussions about their organizational structure could lead to a better mutual understanding (Clifford 1997, 192-193). Twenty years later, this development is making the im2 |  “Der Vorwurf, Identitätspolitik sei partikularistisch und würde damit den Universalismus der Kämpfe um soziale Gerechtigkeit unterminieren, verkennt den ursprünglichen Impuls vieler sozialer Bewegungen, die heute als ‘identitätspolitisch’ gelabelt werden: aufzuzeigen, dass und wo sich universale Versprechen als machtvolle Verallgemeinerungen der partikularen Interessen bestimmter sozialer Gruppen erweisen. Identitätspolitik bedeutet in diesen Fällen gerade nicht, ‘dass sich eine gesellschaftlich abgesonderte Gruppe mit ihren spezifischen Problemen beschäftigt, sondern dass aus einer marginalisierten Perspektive Missstände aufgezeigt werden, die mitten ins Herz der Gesellschaft führen.’” Translated from the German by Don MacCoitir.

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pression that the colonial narratives and interpretive authorities connected with the institution as a place of authoritative knowledge are gaining the upper hand in these discussions about the future of the things stored and displayed in ethnographic museums. This is particularly obvious in the case of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, for which Neil MacGregor, in his role as founding director, is partly responsible. The discussion about the restitution of the objects in this collection, requested by activist groups like No Humboldt 21, was strategically replaced in German-language discourse with debates about provenience research, exhibition displays, and the participation of non-Western curators and researchers, thus stabilizing the ethnographic museum as the dominant epistemic space.3 Above all, though, Hirst’s Treasures exhibition is not a state-owned museum, but rather a megalomaniac exhibition project marked by the financial greed in the art market caused by capital-seeking speculative investments. Hirst has frequently addressed the topic of the salability of art, as in the vitrines with assorted pill boxes with which he began his career, or the tanks showing animals conserved in formaldehyde, and the display vitrines full of crystals. This exhibition also features vitrines with coins, shells, and bowls, and the way that hybrid items from pop culture and classical artworks are mixed with imaginary ethnographica is mirrored in the display practices of museums of world cultures, which tend to integrate contemporary art in order to update their dispositif. The fable about the sunken ship established in the mockumentary and in the videos of salvaging work shown at the exhibition is elaborated upon in the exhibition display, which connects the loose threads of all sorts of seamen’s yarns in one single narrative. The overall concept of Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which shares the same relationship with an ethnographic museum as a mockumentary does with a documentary film, supports a powerful master narrative of modern art. It is characterized by progress and diversity organized by an author-artist, whereas non-Western art is a-historicized, framed as ‘traditional’ and ‘artisanal,’ representative of a ‘sunken’ culture, to be viewed in the vitrines as hybrid objects and ‘treasures.’ This colonial framework plays a role in the way that the representation of the British Museum’s Ife Head is copied and pasted to remove it from its production, use, and significance within its culture of origin and transplanted to a (fictitious) Western-dominated canon of ‘world cultural heritage,’ and in the fact that Hirst assumes the right to construct and interpret it. Translations are entangled within a specific sociocultural and political framework that needs to be analyzed closely. Contemporary art is always situated in a tradition of translation to begin with and is brought forth by practices of hybridization and the disruption of frames. Appropriation thus perpetuates colonial power structures and establishes a violent relationship between the white artist and his ‘oth3 |  S ee also the publications and statements by the activists of the collective NoHumboldt21.

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ers.’ The analysis of the racist power structures created and marginalized through the ‘othering’ practices of Western hegemony can be linked to a leftist critique and practice that takes material conditions into account: ‘appreciation’ is thus what leads toward a deeper, dialogic, and solidary engagement with the ‘original’ of the ‘others,’ rather than continuously producing commodities and commercialized folklore. Often, the struggle for visibility and participation in the art market is not primarily interested in criticizing capitalist structures of exploitation and is thus itself frequently party to neoliberalism’s complicity with the prevailing (post-)colonial conditions. But as Jan Nederveen Pieterse states: “Essentialism will remain strategic as a mobilizational device as long as the units of nation, state, region, civilization, ethnicity remain strategic: and for just as long hybridization remains a relevant approach.” (Nederveen Pieterse 2015: 91) Hence, criticism motivated by identity politics must also develop a serious critique of capitalism and discover its resistant, transformative potential in order to acquire strength and power that goes beyond particularistic interests. This could make a serious contribution to polyphonies and relations of solidarity by also identifying and naming the capitalist structures of oppression and exploitation in which we are embedded together. A new framework established through appreciation will also allow us to test the potential of new, transcultural hybrids that display their own multilayered translatedness and multidirectional orientation, as “the very process of hybridization shows the difference to be relative and, with a slight shift of perspective, the relationship can also be described in terms of an affirmation of similarity” (Nederveen Pieterse 2015:86). Within this framework, we will be able to explore the subversive and dissident potential of hybridization. Such discursive work in the field of art could then also play a role in transformative processes.

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R eferences Bhabha, Homi K. (2017): “Cultural Appropriation—A Roundtable,” interview by Michelle Kuo with Salome Asega, Gregg Bordowitz, Homi K. Bhabha, Joan Kee, Ajay Kurian, and Jacolby Satterwhite. In: Artforum summer 2017 (https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201706&id=68677). Clifford, James (2004): “Traditional futures.” In: Mark Phillips/Gordon Schochet (eds.), Questions of Tradition, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, pp. 152–168. Corry, Amie (2017): Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable: Damien Hirst, Venice/London: Marsilio Editori/Other Criteria. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title organized by and presented at the Palazzo Grassi Punta della Dogana, Venice, April 9-December 3, 2017 (http://www.palazzograssi.it/site/assets/files/6176/guida_damien_hirst_eng.pdf). Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix (1987): A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dowling, Emma/Dyk, Silke van/Graefe, Stefanie (2017): “Rückkehr des Hauptwiderspruchs?“ In: PROKLA. Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft, 47(188), pp. 411–420 Hardt, Michael/Negri, Antonio (2000): Empire, Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Hobsbawn, Eric/Ranger, Terence (1983): The Invention of Traditions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan (2015): Globalization & Culture. Global Mélange. Third Edition, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. MacGregor, Neil: “63. Ife head.” In: A History of the World in 100 Objects, London: British Museum/BBC (http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/a_history_of_ the_world/objects.aspx#63). Okeke-Agulu, Chika (2017): “On Damien Hirst’s Ife Head controversy.” In: Ofodunka May 14, 2017 (http://chikaokeke-agulu.blogspot.com/2017/05/ondamien-hirsts-ife-head-so-called.html). Ott, Michaela (2018): Dividuations: Theories of Participation, New York/London: Palgrave Macmillan. Parke, Phoebe (2017): Damien Hirst accused of copying African art at Venice Biennale. In: CNN African Voices March 29, 2017 (https://edition.cnn. com/2017/03/29/africa/ooni-of-ife-london-visit/index.html). Putschert, Patricia (2017): Es gibt kein Jenseits der Identitätspolitik. Lernen vom Combahee River Collective. In: Widerspruch 36: pp. 15–24. Shohat, Ella (1992): “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’” In: Social Text 31/32: pp. 99–113.

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Biographies Claudia Benthien has been a professor at the Institute for German Language and Literature at the University of Hamburg since 2005. Within the realm of literary studies, her work focuses on cultural theory, gender studies, intellectual history, historical anthropology, and aesthetics, as well as performance studies and intermedial approaches. Her most recent research projects are Literarizität in der Medienkunst, investigating the aesthetics of oral and scriptural language in media art, and Performing Poetry, dealing with medial translations and situational framings of contemporary poetry. Recent book publications include The Literariness of Media Art, written together with Jordis Lau and Maraike M. Marxsen (London/ New York: Routledge, 2018); Übersetzen und Rahmen: Praktiken medialer Transformationen (ed. with Gabriele Klein; Paderborn: Fink, 2017); ‘Impure Languages’: Linguistic and Literary Hybridity in Contemporary Cultures (ed. with Rama Kant Agnihotri and Tatiana Oranskaia; New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2015); and Handbuch Literatur & Visuelle Kultur (ed. with Brigitte Weingart; Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). Ramsay Burt is Professor of Dance History at De Montfort University, UK, and is a regular visiting teacher at PARTS in Brussels. In 1999, he was Visiting Professor at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. His research expertise includes dance, gender, and sexuality, aesthetics and ethics, dance history, Judson Dance Theater, contemporary European dance, and UK-based dance artists who are black. In 2013-2014, he undertook a research project on British dance and the African diaspora, resulting in the edited volume British Dance: Black Routes (London/New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2017). His publications include Ungoverning Dance (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Writing Dancing Together (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (Oxford/New York: Routledge, 2006); and The Male Dancer (Oxford/New York: Routledge, 1995/2007). Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of Philosophy and Francophone Studies at Columbia University. His fields of research and teaching include the history of philosophy, the history of logic and mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African

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literature and philosophy. His most recent publications are African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2011); Bergson postcolonial: L’élan vital dans la pensée de Léopold Sédar Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2011); The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Dakar: Codesria, 2016); Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Gabriele Klein is Professor of Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Hamburg and is Director of Performance Studies Hamburg. She was the director of the research group Translating and Framing: Practices of Medial Transformations at the University of Hamburg. Her research fields include the sociology of the body, dance and performance theory, and the transnationalization of dance cultures, as well as urban dance cultures, and gender and performance art. Her English publications include books such as Dance [and] Theory (Bielefeld: transcript 2013) and Emerging Bodies (Bielefeld: transcript 2011), the Performance Research issue “On Labour and Performance” (2013), and numerous articles such as “Urban Choreographies” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and “Dance Theory as a Practice of Critique” in Dance [and] Theory. Sophie Lembcke was a Research Assistant in the research group Translating and Framing: Practices of Medial Transformations at the Universität Hamburg and the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK). She studied comparative literature and fine arts in Vienna, Paris, and Hamburg. She graduated by submitting a queer-feminist diploma thesis about visual autobiographies. She is doing her doctorate, a “PHD in practice,” on the resistant potentials of art within practices of hybridization. Her research interests include narrative characters such as tricksters, witches, and pirates, with which she explores dissident constructions of subjectivity and practices of authorship. She coorganized the symposium Translating Pasts into Futures at the HFBK in 2017. She copublished the volume Archive dekolonialisieren – Praktiken medialer und epistemischer Transformationen (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), and the volume Spannungsfelder Literatur und Freiheit (Marburg: Tectum, 2010), a publication to accompany the Studierendenkongress der Komparatistik, which she cofounded in 2009. Michaela Ott has been Professor of Aesthetic Theories at the Academy of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg since 2005. Her main research interests include poststructuralist theories, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, the aesthetics of film, theories of space, theories of affections and dividuations, theories of artistic research and biennials, and (post)colonial theories. Her main publications in this context are Affizierung: Zu einer ästhetisch-epistemischen Figur (Munich:

Biographies

edition text und kritik, 2010); Timing of Affect: Epistemologies of Affection (ed. with Marie-Luise Angerer and Bernd Bösel; Berlin: diaphanes, 2014); Dividuationen: Theorien der Teilhabe (Berlin: b_books, 2015); Dividuations: Theories of Parti­cipation (New York/London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Affizierung: Überlebens­affekte im zeitgenössischen Film (Hamburg: textem, 2018); and Welches Außen des Denkens: Französische Theorien in (post)kolonialer Kritik (Vienna/ Berlin: Turia und Kant, 2018). Martin Jörg Schäfer is Professor of Modern German Literature and Theater at the University of Hamburg. In his research, he is interested in interdependencies between literature, theater, and theory from the 18th century to the present, figures of translation, the imaginary of politics, narratives of rupture and crisis, labor and idleness, and discourses and practices of education. His books include Das Theater der Erziehung: Goethes “pädagogische Provinz” und die Vorgeschichten der Thea­ tralisierung von Bildung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016); The Art of Being Many: Towards a New Theory and Practice of Gathering (as coeditor; Bielefeld: transcript, 2016); art works: Ästhetik des Postfordismus (as part of the research network Kunst&Arbeit; Berlin: b_books, 2015); Die Gewalt der Muße: Wechselverhältnisse von Arbeit, Nichtarbeit, Ästhetik (Zurich: diaphanes, 2013); Szenischer Materialismus: Dionysische Theatralität zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel (Vienna: Passagen, 2003). Johannes C. P. Schmid is the recipient of a one-year PhD completion scholarship at the the University of Hamburg, where he was Research Assistant in the research project Media-Aesthetic Strategies of Framing and Translation in Graphic Novels from 2015 to 2017. His dissertation project is entitled The Frames of Documentary Comics, and his recent book, Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood: The Photographic Image in the Graphic War Memoir (Berlin: Bachmann, 2016) received the University of Hamburg’s 2015 American Studies Award. Together with Andreas Veits and Wiebke Vorrath, he coedited the volume Praktiken medialer Transformationen: Übersetzungen in und aus dem digitalen Raum (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018). Besides nonfiction comics, his research interests include digital visual culture and frame theory. William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University. He is principal investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which explores the frontiers of interactive and participatory reality-based sorytelling.  His work explores the frontiers of new media, at times using a historical lens (old media when they were new, such as 19th Century television) and at times by working with interactive and algorithmically generated media forms (interactive documentaries and games in particular). His publications include: Many More Lives of the Batman (2015); We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (2008); Media Cultures (2006).

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Marc Wagenbach was a Research Assistant in the project Translating Movements: Transformations of Dance Aesthetics and their Medial Framing – The Example of ‘African Dance.’” He studied theater, film, and television studies and completed his PhD on digital cultures and aesthetics at the University of Cologne. He is now Director of the International Research Center Ekeby Art and Research in the Netherlands. His fields of research include archiving, cultural heritage, creative production, and dance studies. His recent publications include Inheriting Dance: An Invitation From Pina (ed. with the Pina Bausch Foundation; Bielefeld: transcript 2014); and “Archive des Kolonialen: Übersetzungen kulturellen Erbes im Tanz” (in: Eva Knopf/Sophie Lembeck/Mara Recklies (eds.): Archive dekolonialisieren, Bielefeld: transcript, 2018, pp.191- 206). Thomas Weber has been Professor of Media Studies at the University of Hamburg since October 2011. He headed the project Topics and Aesthetics of the Documentary Film as part of the DFG project History of the German Documentary Film after 1945 and was head of the project Transforming Authenticity in the research group Translating and Framing: Practices of Medial Transformations. He is also a member of the graduate school Vergegenwärtigungen (representations of the Shoah) and founder of the dokART lab in Hamburg. His publications include Medienkulturen des Dokumentarischen (ed. with Carsten Heinze; Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017); Mediale Transformationen des Holocausts (ed. with Ursula von Keitz; Berlin: Avinus, 2013); and “Documentary Film in Media Transformation” in InterDisciplines – Journal of History and Sociology, vol. 4, No. 1 (2013). For further information, see www.thomas-weber.avinus.de. Birgit Weyhe spent her childhood in East Africa before moving back to Germany to study German literature and history. In 2002, she began studying illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She works as an illustrator and comic book artist. Her work has been exhibited in numerous European countries and her comics have been published in a wide range of international magazines and anthologies. Her graphic novels have been nominated for numerous prizes in France and Germany, and Madgermanes (Berlin: avant, 2016) won the Comic Book Prize of the Leibinger Stiftung and the Max-und-Moritz-Preis for the best German comic. She has given lectures on her work and held various international workshops on behalf of the Goethe Institute. She has spent time in São Paulo and Helsinki on artist exchange programs. She has taught at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Muthesius Kunsthochschule (Kiel), Heinrich Heine Universität (Düsseldorf), and at Allegheny College, Pennsylvania.

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