I’m in the middle of a dozen small tasks when the phone rings: explaining to W why he needs to leave spaces between words, timing M’s next trip to the potty, sorting the laundry, performing triage on my inbox. I check the caller ID: it is T. So he’s not dead. That’s good.

T is a translator and he’s coming to work in Seoul for the summer. T is also bipolar. Once a brilliant gay rights activist, his psychological instability lost him friends and followers. I begin to pace, weighing the phone in my hand, trying to be open and ready. For what I don’t know. I answer the call.

On the phone he speaks calmly and cheerfully. He doesn’t ask about me — he never does. He announces that he has been seeing the ghost of his dead sister for the last ten years and thinks we should have a gut — a shamanist ritual — to help her spirit pass. This is the first I’ve heard of any ghosts. As he talks I am running through a mental checklist, looking for the signs, but they are not there. His pacing is normal. He responds to my questions. He’s been sleeping regularly. He doesn’t mention spending a lot of money. He seems logical. Except for the ghosts, of course. Is he manic?

I call E, my best friend and a clinical psychologist. “Is he hearing voices?” She asks. “Ghosts are not ... well... culturally inappropriate. But are the ghosts telling him to do something? Is he taking his meds? You need to be careful. If he’s manic you know this could get a lot worse. Lots of people kill themselves during manic stages... And he’s coming next week? Is there any way to delay?” But there is no way to delay.

* * *

A month later, the ghosts have multiplied. Some of them speak to him in what he thinks is Mongolian, including the mother of Ghenghis Khan, who gives him instructions that will enable his family line to prosper and become powerful again. He visits his ancestral lands and unearths old documents, tracing his family tree back through the generations to royalty. T tells me that he hasn’t taken his medication for a long time. His system rejected the pills, he says, they’d just come out in diarrhea. He has been reading up on shamanism and tells me that this is the mark of a true shaman. When he first arrived he seemed exasperated by the ghosts, asking for the gut so that he could have some peace. But after we agreed to try to find someone to perform the ritual he began to backpedal, saying that the ghosts were helping him make money and bringing him luck.

He tells us that whenever he tries to see a shaman “something” prevents him. “I was in a taxi on my way there and all the sudden the driver started yelling at me. He kicked me out of the car. And when I got out I was standing in front of my old house, and there was a little girl skipping rope in front of it, and she was singing the same song my sister and I used to sing.... That’s when I knew it was real, that she was really there.” Tears run down his face and he doesn’t bother to wipe them away.

Once he thought of himself as the failure of the family — the one who couldn’t hold a job, who always needed money, who couldn’t finish grad school, who would never have children. But the appearance of the ghosts have made him appreciate his gifts; the ghosts will, he claims, bring him money and luck. After decades of feeling dependent and ashamed he has found a way to serve the family by becoming the voice of the ancestors lost. He is the gatekeeper for the past and present. As the only one who can communicate with them he has gained authority without responsibility. He opens a personal investigation into his sister’s death. He criticizes his brother and father, not as the son who seeks the seeds of his problems in his troubled childhood, but as the omniscient speaker for the dead.

“How should I deliver this message to my aunt?” he asks. “ I have to tell her someone close to her is dead. Some translators deliver their messages flat, monotone. Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh. Like that. Some try to mimic the tone of voice as well as the gestures. How should I tell her?”

At home I call E and update her. “The ghosts are multiplying. He had asked us to find a Shaman or something to help get rid of the ghosts so we spent all this time trying to find someone but now it seems like he doesn’t want help, he doesn’t want to get rid of the ghosts. This is the guy who always lives in the past, who always wants to dredge up the past for blame or excuses about why his life hasn’t turned out the way he thinks it should have, and now he has free reign to talk about the past, to say whatever, to deliver his ‘messages’ without any responsibility for the content. But... he sounds logical, he is sleeping, he is eating... he doesn’t have all the symptoms of mania.”

“He’s crazy. He’s grandiose. He’s experiencing psychosis. He can say the sky is green but that doesn’t mean it’s really green.”

* * *

He finally agrees to see a dosa, a master in a brand of breathing and meditation similar to qigong. The dosa is a cherubic-looking man, probably in his 50s. I admit I was expecting an old man with a wispy grey beard and an atmosphere of mysticism, but this man just seemed (except for his perfect skin) like a normal, very cheerful guy.

We sit down and K performs the introductions. The others make small talk. I am quiet, too nervous to talk, wondering how to broach the subject of ghosts, curious about what will happen, unsure whether this is the right way to go.

After ordering some food, K leans into the table and clears his throat. “So... we’re here today... because T is having some problems...” T explodes in English, “You ruin everything! Why did you have to say that? I told you, I told you not to say that, or how else would I know what is real? You just have to ruin everything, don’t you?” He’s talking loudly, and people at neighboring tables turn to look. I am afraid K will explode back; he looks like he might punch T. The dosa seems nonplussed. I feel like I should say something to him as they continue to fight, but I have no idea what to say.

“So... did you come far?” I ask, feeling like a complete asshole, thinking, We’re wasting your time. All this was for nothing, and at the very best we’re going to sit here and talk about nothing for the rest of the meal. He answers lightly, telling me where he lives. I continue to ask him about what mode of transportation he came on, about traffic in this area, how he likes the area he lives in, whatever else I can think of. K and T have lapsed into silence. K’s face is like granite, but I can feel the explosive energy radiating from him. He refuses to look at me or anyone else. I wish I was sitting next to him so I could take his hand. But instead I just sit there, back straight, feeling helplessly idiotic, unable to think of any more small talk. T sits and looks at the table and eats, pissed but seeming not to care about the moods of the rest of us.

The dosa seems oblivious, talking about this and that, about his business, on and on, until I start to think he must be kind of stupid. T is making comments here and there: “Oh, is that right?” “Oh, really?” “Wow, that’s so interesting” with such an obviously false sense of interest that is completely insulting to the dosa and everyone else at the table. I feel sorry for the dosa but he doesn’t seem to notice or react in any way. He talks on and on as if we are all really interested in his software business and in breathing techniques. K gradually joins in, though I can see that he is still very, very angry. All the sudden T gets up and goes to the bathroom. I relax a little; the three of us talk about the food. K apologizes for T’s behavior. The dosa says, “Oh, don’t worry about it, just give him some time.”

T comes back and abruptly begins talking about his ghosts. He is talking quickly, nonstop, not pausing to let anyone comment or to wait for any reaction. “When I go to the doctor, they tell me I’m crazy, they give me pills. And I take them! Because it makes the doctors feel better. They go right through my body, they don’t affect me at all. When I talk to Christians they say I’m possessed by spirits. They sprinkle water on me and bless me. I let them. I let them because it makes them feel better! It doesn’t affect me. I don’t know what to do!” He shrugs and laughs. He talks with such force that spit sprays from his mouth. “Everybody has an opinion. When I talk to the shamanists they say I am a shaman.”

The dosa smiles and nods, agreeing quietly with everything T says, encouraging him.

“So the thing is that when I talk to other people about this, they don’t try to help me, they ask me for help. I think I must be more powerful than they are. I see ghosts, all sorts of ghosts, and some of them help me make money. I make more money than my brother now.”

“But sometimes there are nasty spirits, spirits I don’t like, they throw things and slam doors. They scare me.”

The dosa tells him, “Yes, there are nasty spirits. But you can ignore them. Tell them to go away. Tell them this is my body [he moves his arms along his chest], and you are dead. Go away. Don’t bother me. Then they don’t have any power.”

They continue like this for quite some time, T talking on and on, words running from his mouth, the dosa adding this and that, sharing his own experiences here and there.

Finally, spent, T says, “It’s nice to meet someone who knows. Who doesn’t think I’m this or that. My family, they don’t listen, they just get mad because I talk like a girl, dress like a queer, or because I don’t act the way they think I should act. She [pointing to me] listens to me, but she probably thinks I’m really weird.”

After dinner K and the dosa head off to have coffee together and I walk towards my apartment with T. He seems relaxed, happy. He says again that its nice to talk to someone who actually listens to what he says instead of just criticizing the way he talks. I tell him carefully, “You do the same thing, you can’t stand the way your brother and your father speak to you in informal language, the way they command you. It’s just the way they talk, you know. Your brother spends all day commanding people at work, he’s older than you, it's just his way of trying to be helpful, by giving you advice. You react to the way he talks, not to the message.” T agrees. We part, both relieved.

The dosa tells K that he didn’t see any ghosts around T, and that T is not as powerful as he thinks he is. “I moved some qi to him to calm him down and make him talk,” the dosa says.

On the phone with E she warns me that although I’m on his good side now, T may turn on me, as he has in the past. “You need to protect yourself. Think of him like a drug addict. You need to keep him at a distance.”

I assure her that I am fine, that I am keeping myself emotionally removed and that I am interested in the movement back and forth — from the vocabulary of mental illness to spiritual possession to shamanistic talent. I feel a quiet sympathy for this man who once campaigned for the rights of the group, whose every claim is now met with distrust, disbelief, and sometimes disgust. Ghosts or no ghosts he has been ill for our entire acquaintance, but it is hard to detach the illness of his mind from the festering relationships with his family members. They cannot trust him because he has hurt them time and time again, and never taken any responsibility for that hurt. He needs them but resents needing them, resents his dependence, resents the fact that they continue to support him even while he criticizes them for not doing more. He lashes out at them to avoid hating himself. He lives in the past so he can avoid the failures of the present, seeking to find in the past the causes of his current situation, and with the ghosts on his side he has found a new way to authorize his point of view.

* * *

And the answer to that big question is here.

---------------
(Before I get going let me say that a particular kind of moralistic obnoxiousness, here eschewed, would have allowed me to go on to respond by discussing the recent elections in Serbia [go pro-EU parties!] and Zimbabwe [booo, Mugabe!], and then to pretend to be all surprised when my interlocutor said that he meant the US election... )

Anyway. Time for some Printculture history. When five spunky kids with nothing in their pockets but a craving for meaning founded this here blog, they did so in response to the dessicated emotional and political landscape of late 2004, conceiving the idea shortly after the Democratic dream deferred embodied (awkwardly) by John Kerry foundered on the shoals of the fear and loathing of fifty-three percent of the American voting public, and meeting F2F (as the kids say) at the Philadelphia MLA to hash out their dastardly program.

Many of our early posts were explicitly about politics--thoughts on Abu Ghraib, parsings of the presidential press secretary's latest run-ins with the media, analyses of news photography. We even, in a fit of joinery and excitement, protested against the approval of Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General. Part of this had to do with the times, I think, but also with the structure of blogging, in which the first year or so is easy: an information dump of all the things you'd thought of but never written down.

Lately, as Babykong notes, not much that's political makes it onto the site. Speaking now only for myself, I can't say that's because there's any less interest in politics around here. I actually think I enjoy the horse race more than the other folks, and spend more time reading political blogs than they do. But, despite my profound attention to the presidential contest (and indeed to the more obscure House special elections, e.g. LA-06), I don't really feel like I have much to say about it.

Why not? Well, partly because the political stuff is getting said, faster than I can say it, and just as well, elsewhere. Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and Digby are all very very good; Greenwald in particular writes posts that are the kind of thing I would like to write if I were a full-time political blogger, had researchers, and so on (though sometimes I find the truths he's laying out so hard to take I have to stop reading). That is: there is a professional class of blogger out there, who simply wasn't there in 2004, who is doing the kind of writing that I would like to do, and is leavening it with really interesting discussions of policy issues that I have no time to research. Yglesias and Klein also leaven their blogs with occasional posts on cultural issues or sports, making them more like Printculture than most blogs were back in 2004. (Though the Printculture strategy, which is kind of an n+1 model done without famous people or really any writing that takes time, has failed consistently to build up a constituency of readers; whether this is because we're no good or because in fact single-issue blogs trump flanerie every time I don't know, though I suspect it has at least partly to do with the latter.)

I've actually sat around and wondered: what would a Printculture (tm) post on the elections look like? What kind of take would typify the particular tone/style of this site, and what could I (or one of my cohorts) bring to the table that would actually have the chance to teach one of these folks (that is, the folks I already admire) something s/he didn't know?

Here is the closest I've come:

Waiting it out

It feels right now like the whole country is in a bizarre holding pattern, a twilit stasis that precedes, we hope, another dawn. I feel like we're all waiting for it to end, and that though we agree that Bush has done terrible things, it's just not worth thinking about or complaining about any more: everyone who's convinceable has been convinced, and the last 28 percent, including Bush himself, are basically immune to information.

So here we sit in history's foxhole, waiting out the artillery fire. It's not a position of total hopelessness or abandonment: I have fantasies of having a conversation with Bush in which I convince him, through a combination of persuasiveness and rage, to actually recognize himself as I recognize him, a conversation I imagine breaking him in a fundamental way, allowing him to return to alcoholism, so that he dies, alone, drunk, and furious, but slowly, over the next twenty years. But the very fact that that's my fantasy: and not some program to restore the Constitution, is probably a sign of how far down I'm keeping my head.

That said, the waiting is borne of a basic faith in the apparatus of democracy. Still II believe that come January we'll have a new president. I think I'm just waiting for that, hoping nothing terrible happens, and daring to imagine that things will be different. If the country elects McCain I feel like maybe I'll be done. (Though I felt that way in 2004 and look at me now: not done.) If it's Obama I worry that I'm going to be too hopeful, that he won't be able to fulfill all my dreams and plans for what his administration might be like, rainbow bridges to the future and all.

Anyway, that's where I think we are, where I feel like the country is. Bush is still president, but everyone pretends that he's not, even as the violence done in our names continues apace — does anyone doubt that our government is still torturing people, or detaining them illegally? — and the economy falls apart as the strain put on it by the nation's collective failure to look at reality finally comes home to roost. It's not, then, that anything's improved. It's just that there is only so much reality we can take. I am waiting for something else in the hopes that if certain parts of the reality improve, I can actually attend to other ones in which I might make a difference. It's not pushing colored stones into the cave walls, but it is, it seems to me, the recognition of a kind of collective limit to what we can take. And so, with six months to the election, I'm just waiting it out.

Coda: sometimes I sit around and remember what it was like during the Bush and Clinton years, when all these things mattered that seem to matter very little now. I remember the euphoria of Clinton's election in 1992, the feeling that after 12 years the country was finally changing (being 20 years old helped with that). There was, I think, a sense of epic there. But how small that epic seems now! What was it about? Abortion? Welfare reform? Not that these don't matter, but how easy we had it then...

A. At a particularly charged moment during the scholarly deliberations:

B. Dialectic, after hours and off the premises:

Anyone have analogous experiences to offer?

The problem with both the pills and the thought-pattern training is that they concieve of the depression as something that is wrong with you, something in your skull. If your attitude could be adjusted, you would become “functional” again.

And that's as far as they want, or perhaps are licensed, to take you.

I am not licensed to do anything grander than driving, but I say that it's not all in your head. The solution isn't replacing an unpleasant illusion with a pleasanter one. People are what depresses people, and you should figure out who is making you miserable and do something about it. A little experimentation may be required. You may cause pain to others and yourself, and you may find that it's not the first person you think of who causes the trouble. But only breaking or reconfiguring your relations to the other social animals in your life will get you out of the helplessness that is the root of the condition. Painting the cell walls a brighter color won't do it.

(Follow-up remark, May 10: Of course these suggestions are not to be taken dogmatically as the exclusive, guaranteed road to happiness. “Experimentation” means: use the scientific method. Try something and if it doesn't work, stop and try something else. Be ready to test founding assumptions. When possible, have a back-up plan.)

Then one goes and explains the thing that has just been named by its foreign name, its name in language A. It is always possible, I think, to explain sherbet or sharawadgi; that is how we honor Davidson’s principle of translatability; but in doing so we mark the foreign thing with a name that does not come from language B, the language in which we are doing the explaining, but rather reproduce a name from language A. We do not translate but transcribe. We become mimics. If the foreign word subsequently takes, if it becomes the word in language B for the item we were trying to translate from language A, we speak of it as a “loan word”—a significant term, because it is a lie: a loaned object is one you sooner or later have to give back to the giver, but we have been using amok since 1642, sharawadgi since 1685, kaolin since 1741, and show no signs of returning them to the speakers of Malay or Chinese. The feeling that the word is not completely ours, that it belongs somewhere else, makes us call it, apologetically, a borrowing though in fact we snatched it and intend to keep it.

All languages are full of loan words. Much of what is not loan words in a language is calques, that is, formations of native words used to imitate a foreign word. “Interaction,” one of the favorite terms of people in translation studies, was coined around 1830 in imitation of a German term, “Wechselwirkung.” “Translation” was coined in ancient Rome to imitate the Greek “metaphora.” And who knows how “Wechselwirkung” and “metaphora” emerged: possibly as calques on a precedent term that we have lost track of.

In Chinese, loan words are often doubled by calques. Historically the loan word comes first and then is covered, or covered over, by a nativizing term that makes it appear as if the correspondence between the Chinese vocabulary and the vocabularies of the entire world were seamless, as if translation had always already happened. The loan word is mildly shocking; it sticks out like a sore thumb or a new penny. For Chinese is an ancient and rich language, with subtle distinctions and countless inter-references; if you can’t say something in proper Chinese, maybe it isn’t worth saying. But new objects and practices emerge and must be named somehow. For example, the telephone. When this object was new and began to be used in the international districts of Shanghai, some people referred to it as the delüfeng 德律風. From the sound of it, I assume the original term was French—téléphone—rather than English, but no matter; it was definitely foreign, as you can see from its three-character structure and the fact that the word sequence is absurd: if you didn’t know what a téléphone was, how could you guess from hearing it named as a “wind of virtuous proportion”?
Afterwards, or perhaps simultaneously but in a different neighborhood, one where a stricter sense of linguistic propriety ruled the roost, someone created a name for the new thing that made it seem as if it had always already had a name in Chinese: dianhua 電話, “electric speech,” which correlates meaningfully with such other objects and institutions as dianying 電影, “electric shadows” or cinema, dianbao 電報, “electric messenger” or telegraph, and on down the nineteenth century’s list of amazing media discoveries. Dianhua, properly speaking, translates the telephone; delüfeng transcribes it.

Dianhua and delüfeng correspond to two profoundly different attitudes about language, about the Chinese language and foreign languages, and about innovation or importation. Dianhua accentuates the readiness of Chinese to make room for all kinds of new things as if they had been there all along and just needed to be noticed; delüfeng accuses the Chinese language of incompleteness, asserts that there is no way to name the new thing without taking out a foreign loan. The polemical gesture of words like delüfeng emerges more clearly in the scholarly field, where using a term like ai-si-te-ti-ke 埃斯特惕克 ;implicitly rebukes those who use the homegrown and comfortable term of meixue 美學 (the study of the beautiful, or aesthetics) for their laziness and complacency; to seek yin-si-pi-li-chun 烟士披里纯, inspiration, rather than the traditional linggan 靈感 (spirit response), means that you are not going to accept some familiar Chinese substitute for a demanding and precise foreign concept, but have gone the whole hog in opting for conceptual estrangement. (I owe the last two examples, and many more, to my friend Liu Dong.) This gesture was of course repeated thousands of times in writing from the period of innovation, roughly 1920-1940, when the mastery of the Chinese language was up for grabs, the authority of settled terms was shaken, and Lu Xun, for example, a notably subtle and precise writer, could advocate yingyi 硬譯, “mechanical translation,” as a means of shaking Chinese readers and writers out of the complacency of familiar terms and old social arrangements. Yingyi, he thought, would bring people face to face with truths that language normally veiled. In most languages, I think loan words provoke anxiety about purity.

Loan words are an opposite to translation in the following sense: with translation, interpretation always precedes the restatement; but with loan words, incorporation occurs without interpretation. Translation works out what the meaning of the foreign text is, then elaborates a corresponding set of meanings that will suitably address the speakers of the target language. With transliteration, foreigners are putting words in your mouth. As often as not, this happens quite literally. Many of the things named with loan words are products meant to be eaten: a-si-pi-ling 阿斯匹靈 (aspirin), for example. Someone could have created a phrase like zhitong yao 止痛藥 (the medicine that stops pain), or a chemical definition like acetylsalicylic acid. But a-si-pi-ling, like aspirin, denotes a brand name, not a category of effects; it comes in a package, with a seal. I insist on the packing and the seal, because they materialize the mysterious character of the classic loan word, the fact that when you handle one you never quite know what the contents are, but simply convey it as a lump or unit: there is no knowledge to be derived from the a, si, pi, and ling of a-si-pi-ling. Similarly with another signifier that connotes the whole field of neologism and loan words, modeng 摩登, which as a package or brand name for modernity feels different from xiandai 現代. You don’t know if it’s ku’er 酷兒 (cool) or just a mi-si 迷思 (myth).

Presumably people dislike handling mysterious packages of unknown origin; they also have trouble remembering them. So in Chinese, many loan words have been devised so as to carry a subsequent interpretation. The borrowing was incorporation with no interpretation, pure mimicry as when English speakers imitated the sounds of amok, ketchup, kayak or samurai; but the Chinese language allows this mimicry to be doubled with an appearance of meaning, so that vitamins, wei-ta-ming 維他命, suggest that they have the function of “guarding one’s life,” or Viagra, wei-ge 偉哥, offers to equip you with a “huge brother.” As these examples indicate, the semantic supplement added to the pure loan words is mostly in the nature of advertising, and not always to be believed; this is not precisely translation, just a technique of borrowing that is cleverly adapted to the context of the arrival-point. We should refine our initial formulation, then: it is not so much incorporation without interpretation, but incorporation separated from interpretation (the interpretation comes after the incorporation and is optional, poetic even).

Loan words are most frequent in certain contexts. Obviously, foreign place and personal names will usually be represented by mimicry, sometimes re-semanticized: Bali 巴黎, Lundun 倫敦, Mosike 莫斯科, Malilian Menglu 瑪麗蓮夢露. Exotic food preparations (tusi 土司, bing qilin 冰淇淋, quji 曲吉, hanbao 漢堡, shadie 沙爹, xiangbin 香檳). The great linguist Chao Yuan-ren memorably transliterated the martini with a warning label as a ma-ti-ni 馬蹄你 (horse kicks you). Foreign institutions (the xiu 秀 or show, the tuofu 托福 or TOEFL exam). Above all, technological objects, for these are new in general—e-mail, for example, was barely part of the awareness of English speakers before it had become the object of a simultaneous Chinese calque (dianyou 電郵, or electric post) and loanword (yi mei-er 伊妹兒, or little sister Yi).

In many languages, certain provinces of vocabulary are thick with loan words, and for a reason. Food having been mentioned, it is good to be reminded that the peoples of the world know each other most intimately, from the inside out as it were, by tasting each other’s recipes. In many European languages the technical terms for sailing—yawl, bight, sloop, jib, and so forth—are practically the same across languages, and have a Norman or Scandinavian common past. Those are the people who got around on the water, and they left names in every port. Astronomy still bears traces of the Arabic and Indian intellectual input centuries ago: azimuth, Betelgeuse, nadir, zenith. An international specialist group found it easier and more convenient for mutual communication of their results to repeat the words the Arabs had used than to invent equivalents for each vernacular language. English has exported words relating to computers, no doubt thanks to the many Indian and Chinese engineers who work in North America and write manuals in the language of Noah Webster.

Transliteration or transcription thus operates as a complementary dynamic to translation, and unlike translation, it works on language as such, directly. It speaks to the signifier, it forces us to mimic inhabitual gestures, it often violates sense and grammar in the act of making room for a new word. In genetics, the complementarity of transcription and translation is one of the core principles: in expressing the genetic heritage of an individual, part of the information required is passed on by a process of translation, in which the markers are rendered by their opposite and parallel numbers, and part by a process of transcription, in which they simply repeat. (I am remembering eighth-grade biology, and very indistinctly: a bow to Crick and Watson and a plea for forgiveness!) The reason biologists use these terms, transcription and translation, derives from a philosophical parable invented by John von Neumann in the years before the structure of DNA had been identified. Mathematicians were trying to figure out what the logical prerequisites for heritability would be, and von Neumann came up with this analogy: Suppose you had a room, with wallpaper, furniture, and all the rest, and you had a camera capable of photographing every part of the room so that you might hang up the photographs in another, empty room, and reproduce the contents of the original room. After you had finished taking pictures of all the furnishings, carpet, etc., and pasting them in the corresponding places of the empty room, what is left to be recreated? Only the camera itself. The photographs in the empty room are translations of the first room, and the camera, which we have to suppose can be reproduced or cloned somehow, must be a transcription of itself, that is, a pure reiteration. You could say that in cases of linguistic transliteration, or the loan word process, von Neumann’s camera has failed to output a piece of the linguistic environment from room A to room B and has turned to reproducing itself.

New words do enlarge the worlds of speakers. They are a strong argument against the bland form of linguistic relativity that holds that no two languages are different in any important way, in any way that constrains the thinking or action of speakers. There is a longstanding controversy about the perception of colors and their naming in different languages. Every decade or so, a new formulation of the problem, or new experimental results, leads linguists to think, by a narrow margin in disputed polls, that perception either determines the colors we name, or that language chops up the spectrum in arbitrary chunks that we then treat as objectively existing. My contribution to this debate, a modest one, is “orange.” I am sure that things of the color orange existed and could be talked about for centuries before the word orange was imported into Northern European languages from Arabic via Spanish, along with the fruit. But before there were examples of the color orange—i.e., oranges—other things that happened to be orange might be subsumed under the categories yellow, golden, tawny, or fiery. The loan word adds a compartment to English, Dutch, and, with more dolorous consequences, Northern Irish.

The languages that make the heaviest use of loan words are creoles: for example, Haitian Creole, a language that consists of words largely taken from French (and French remains for Kreyòl a reservoir of available terms) set into grammatical patterns deriving from West African languages. According to a probable legend, the planters of the colony of Santo Domingo made sure that the slaves on any estate were a mixture of speakers of different African languages, taken from different regions, so that no large number of them would be able to plot together and rise up against their masters; the medium of communication between slaves and masters, and then of slaves among themselves, would have to be French. But opportunities to have sustained conversations about wide-ranging topics in French were few, and the slaves learned French words one by one, by imitation, and were not encouraged to become fluent speakers, not to mention readers and writers. (Some did, of course, like the great Toussaint Louverture.) Kreyol developed in this condition of limited language contact, with an elegant grammar consisting, like weiqi or Go, of few rules having great flexibility. The French words it uses have split off significantly from their French meanings and been adapted to the prosody of the new language. “N’ap fe anpil bagay pou pwoteje dwa moun nan kontinan ki rele Azi,” though it is almost all French in content, probably means almost nothing to an average French speaker: “Nous faisons beaucoup pour la protection des droits de l’homme en Asie,” or “We are doing a lot of things for the protection of human rights in Asia.” The logic of incorporation and mimicry does not mean at all that the imitation will be slavish; rather, a creole language changes and recombines the elements it has taken from a predecessor language. However, those elements are in an overwhelmingly dominant measure loan words. English has been described as a creole of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. Probably all languages are creoles that have forgotten where they came from.

The seemingly limitless extension of translation here finds another limit. Emily Apter’s book The Translation Zone devotes several chapters to writing by so-called Francophone authors from North Africa and the Caribbean. (This word, like Anglophone, bothers me; it seems to be designed to convey, in a hypocritical fashion, the information that Francophones are French-speakers but don’t look like French people. Try addressing a white Frenchman as a Francophone and tell me the results.) The style, which Apter describes enthusiastically as an adventurous new blend, clash and translation of French with other idioms, is basically a creolized French, that is, French with frequent doses of loan words from foreign languages and from creoles that originally derived from French but have now come to see unrecognizable and exotic to French people. However, it is the untranslated quality of these creole passages that captures my attention, the fact that they mix, without altering or nativizing, words from all over; and to describe this as a translation asserts a dominance of semantics, of meaning and interpretation, that simply doesn’t occur here. It is rather about interpretation being brought up short. As the interpreter of purdah, sofa, samovar or teepee was once brought up short.

Apter’s book concludes with a fantasia about digital communication as the ultimate extension of translation. Translation makes certain information accessible to more people more of the time than the untranslated text does; similarly, digital communication promises to make everything accessible to everybody all of the time. Mark Hansen, in his excellent New Philosophy for New Media, remarks of binary code that it serves as a “digital Esperanto” for word, sound, image, movement, money, every kind of data and difference in the world. But here too, the persuasive metaphor is the precisely wrong one, for digital media do not interpret the contents they vehicle in any meaningful way. Your computer does not understand the Word file you type into it, or express its content to another computer’s understanding when you email the file to a friend. Rather, it codes the letters and formatting into a sequence of ones and zeroes that are then copied onto the hard disk and recopied, through instructions, onto the other person’s computer, then re-represented as letters and formatting. Transliteration again, incorporation without interpretation; translating or summarizing content (as when I tell you about a conversation I had last week with another person) is a very different matter. Media do not deal with content; they vehicle content, they permit it to be packaged, they subject it to algorithms and encoding, that’s all. And when we deal with digital media, as with technological objects generally, we do not “open up the black box,” so to speak, and understand it from the inside. Rather, our relation with media is one of quotation, block citation, repetition and selection. A digitally mediated message is in creole, to the degree that it is complex and multi-medial. I cut and paste; I drop a film clip or a photograph into a Power Point presentation. To do this, I do not in the least need to understand the movie camera, the digitization process, the computer program that runs the film clip or the LCD screen that lights up to display it. Each of these things is for me, practically speaking, a black box with a button on it, and maybe a cable that I can use to connect it to another black box. This is wonderful, because things happen regardless of my subjective comprehension of the process, but it is what makes us already, always already, post-human.

Most technology is inscriptional and transcriptional, rather than translational. We use translation to talk to other humans, because humans are keyed to the meaning-based behaviors that translation can address, but machines simply repeat. When we use loan words, when we devise creoles, we are acknowledging the repetition, the inclusion of otherness in ourselves, transcription as the internal limit of translation. We are answering the call of the delüfeng. It rings for thee.

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It occurs to me, thanks to a typo, that Watership Down would be a very different novel if it were about rabbis.

But it is a novel about rabbits, and, I had forgotten this, it is full of the mythology of rabbits, of stories about the rabbit-prince, whose embodiment of rabbitness — trickery, speed, cleverness, features vaguely connected I think to Brer Rabbit, but without the American racial subtext — constitutes the moral guide of the species, and gives the book much of its anthropological pleasure.

(A good deal of contemporary science fiction and fantasy literature could be thought of as “anthropological” literature, in the sense that much of its pleasure comes from its imagination and filling in of a cultural world different than our own.)

Anyway. The rabbits on the run (lie quiet, Updike) arrive at this warren. The rabbits there do not behave in accordance with the laws of rabbithood laid down by the Mythic Prince (who has a name, but I cannot remember it; one of the rules of “Spoiler Alert” is that I can't look anything up). Two of the most disturbing features of their difference are: (1) They push colored stones into the warren walls to make pictures; (2) They engage in ritual dance and chanting. Also (important clue): every once in a while fresh lettuce and carrots simply appear in a spot near their warren — the natural rabbits ask where it comes from, and the unnatural rabbits do not reply. (In rabbit mythology, rabbits are supposed to risk their lives to steal these items from farmers, or obtain them through trickery; they do not just appear.)

The strangeness of these is so profound to the natural rabbits that they cannot discern what the images on the walls are, even once it has been explained to them that these are images (and not, which would make sense to them, some kind of anti-fox, wall-reinforcing strategy).

Why are these rabbits so strange, one wonders? And then: Bigger gets caught in a snare near where the lettuce and carrots appear. His friends rush into the warren and ask for help getting him out of the snare, but the unnatural rabbits ignore them, pretend not to hear them. It is revealed that the price of living this life, full of wealth and free of predators, is that the farmer, who lays out the fresh vegetables, occasionally culls a member or two of the group.

The good rabbits free Bigger, and they leave. As they leave one of the other rabbits comes after them, and begs them to take him with them. They may or may not allow this; I have a memory of Bigger driving him away, but I also have a memory of him being taken along and then dying later (partly because he does not have the kinds of skills and instincts he would need to survive in the wild).

In any case, this is the main thing I remember about this novel. And it seems so rich, so full of mystery and significance, so close to Freud on sublimation, or to Althusser on ideology, so tied to notions of nature and culture, that it opens up all sorts of thinking space. But it does so, also, through the trauma of my memory; I remember, even then, finding the anthropological sphere coordinated by these strange rabbits to be horrifying, extraordinary, and in many ways terribly moving; even then I knew that I was not “against” art, and that a simple reading of the story led down a road I did not want to travel. The complexities of that emotion and that knowledge are with me still, locked up in that kernel, as I tell this story to people for whom it cannot, since they are hearing it for the first time, mean nearly so much.
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As for the rest of the novel: the rabbits reach General Wigglewort's warren. They live there, Bigger becomes a lieutenant. Then they escape (it is the model of a totalitarian state, as I said last time; some particular outrage surely prompts their going). They found their own warren. Wigglewort, raveled by rage, tracks them down and attacks with his lieutenants. He and Bigger meet in a final fight; Bigger wins. The liberal idealist who is the major focalizer of the novel remembers Wigglewort with respect, despite all he has done, noting that the general's drive to exceed rabbitness, to stand on equal grounds with the lynx or the fox, has in it a touch of greatness. Wigglewort must die, however, to secure the future of the liberal state, which is embodied in the final warren established by our heroes at novel's end. As I recall, the novel ends with the death of Fiver; the Mythic Prince, who had had no room in his mythology for shamanistc future-telling, accepts him into his heaven, and the rabbit myth adjusts, like Eliot's tradition, to accept him there. The nature of rabbits is thereby simultaneously retained and transformed.

-- The End --

Tom told the tale with a great deal of sheepish wit and I was thoroughly charmed, not just by his storytelling ability but by the idea of a intrepid band of adventurers from all over the world joining together to get things done in the face of sudden danger. I get a tingle from stories like this, and if pressed I would guess that Americans in general like them too, especially when the stories enlist people of various racial, class, and national backgrounds for a common cause. These stories echo the American melting pot story — people of difference coming together for goodness, adventure, and flashes unexpected ingenuity. United we stand, divided we fall — the plot of so many adventure movies in which a scraggly, plucky band rise against the odds to survive a natural disaster, terrorist attack, etc. This is a spur-of-the-moment collectivity in which we all prove ourselves heroic, brave, and talented, and in which the threats of mother nature or bad guys gives the regular Joe a chance to display his moral fiber.

Later in the same party the host put in the DVD U2 Go Home: Live from Slane Castle, which opens with the song Elevation. I had never heard that song before, but watching the crowd rise and fall, as if with one body, in response to Bono gave me that tingly feeling again. This time, though, I was reliving the memory of a U2 concert and that kind of spur-of-the-moment collectivity in response to a charismatic leader. It was 1993 and I had spent the summer in a small town in Slovakia, near the Hungarian border. I was lonely and homesick. I hadn’t adjusted well and didn’t get along with the other American teacher there, who left unexpectedly before our term was finished. The two organizers, Slovaks of Hungarian descent, took me into Budapest for the concert but the car broke down on the way and I headed to the concert first, by myself, while they dealt with it. By the time I arrived the concert had just begun and the shock of entering that enormous, screaming, crowd was both physical and psychological. We seemed all strung together, a bundle of strings vibrating in response to what was happening on the stage and with the lights. Sound, color, and emotion were all just different types of energy, transforming from one to another.

I haven’t spent much time in crowds. I’ve never been a church-goer and am not a frequent attendee of pep or protest rallies. There was never (as far as I can recall) any point in that concert when I lost a sense of myself as an individual or forgot that I had to, at some point, figure out how to reunite with my two lost companions. I’m not a person who easily loses a sense of myself as an individual; perhaps I am too self-conscious, too used to calculating the differences between me and the people around me. I hadn’t thought about that concert in a long time but at the party that night, in a room with a group of non-scraggly, mostly unknown people from all over the world, I remembered how pleasurable that sense of collectivity had been and wished to feel it again.

I’m curious about collectivity for a number of reasons. It’s taken me a while to post this because frankly I’m undecided about where I’m going with it. In several places (E Hayot’s recent post, the article he links to, and a recent Bitch PdH post) people have wondered why younger women are reluctant to take the label “feminist.” The comments to the Bitch PhD post seemed to echo the Fortini article: younger women have not felt the sting of discrimination in the world and don’t see that there’s much work to be done. Some mentioned not wanting to be associated with the more radical feminists, at least one mentioned that she felt that she couldn’t be a proper feminist and choose to stay home with her children. (This is what “feminist” has become, I fear: a scraggly group of diverse people who look at each other out of the corner of their eyes and, rather than having choices, have only a continuous sense of guilt.) Still other commentors felt that the younger generation is less interested in identifying with groups. So here are the breaking points: differential experiences leading to different goals, difference within the group which is divisive rather than powerful, and arguments about the effectiveness of group identification.

Another reason for my curiosity is that I’m still mulling over the images in the documentary A State of Mind. If we’re telling stories about collectivity, we can’t leave out the fact of its association with dangerous isms: nationalism, fascism, and communism. And angry mobs. Watching the two young North Korean gymnasts prepare for and perform in the Mass Games worked on me emotionally like the Everest story and the concert; I became invested in these girls, I was moved and so proud of them during the final performance. Whoever picked those girls did a good job — they come across as modest (even shy), honest, and unexpectedly normal, even when one talks about how they hate Americans for causing all the blackouts in the city. Of course, the kind of collectivity we see in this film is coordinated, bred, coerced; it also relies on a charismatic leader abusing his power. But watching this movie was useful to me because it got me away from thinking of the end point of political action. It made me think of the process of transformation. The Mass Games are important not just because of the spectacle itself but because the process of training a participant makes him or her into the ideal communist citizen: responsive, obedient, members of the group.

Which leads me to my last point of curiosity — what drives people to collective identification or participation? Listening to Tom’s tale, I thought there must be an element of pressure or coercion (by disaster or a leader) — enough to shape people’s priorities in similar ways. Watching the concert I thought of unspoken emotional and psychological needs. Watching the Mass Games I thought that there has to be a mode of collectivity too. I think of myself, not a church goer, uncomfortable in crowds, content to offset my carbon online, vote by absentee ballot, and sign petitions by e-mail. Perhaps the younger generation is less excited to identify with collectives because, frankly, collectives aren’t that exciting. Maybe we need more spectacle, more bonfires, more light shows, more Bono.

Here’s a confession: sometimes I hate blogging because it forces me to try to articulate thoughts I haven’t had time to think through. But part of being a part of the plucky, scraggly Printculture collective means that I have to embrace the rawness and write my posts anyway.

The story begins with men gassing the rabbit warrens inhabited by the protagonists. Fiver, the last-born of five rabbits in his litter, who is physically weak but has shamanistic powers, has foreseen the disaster, and has not been believed. Cassandra's curse rests heavy upon him.

The men insert tubes into the warrens; gas exits. The descriptions make it clear what is happening, but the novel is focalized through a rabbit's perspective, and so the reader bears witness to a double horror: the horror of gas, and the horror of a failure to grasp horror. Even as a child I understood that this was somehow connected to the concentration camps; now I see perhaps that it is a more general metaphor for a pre-Zizekian theory of ideology.

In any case the novel is written in plain English, so it does not have quite the dislocating effect of A Clockwork Orange; nonetheless a Weltanschauung, a specialized vocabulary and an entire anthropology of the rabbit-world, slowly unfold over the first few chapters. I remember none of this vocabulary except for a word that was written vaguely like this — silflay — which meant to graze. Some of it will surely come back to me as I write.

Some rabbits escape, Fiver among them; also Fiver's older brother, who is the liberal idealist of the group, and a tough fighting rabbit, former member of the warren's guard, whose suspicions of Fiver will be worn down over time. His name is something like Bigger, but of course it is not Bigger because that is the first name of the protagonist of Native Son.

They are on the run. They cross railroad tracks; they call vehicles hrududu (rabbits have, yes, onomatopoeia). They have heard of a warren, run by a rabbit named General Wigglewort (or something). They are running towards it. Wigglewort has an unbending reputation; he is something of a rabbit Che Guevara or Marshall Tito, fiercely rabbit-proud, disdainful of humans, and willing to take on the traditional rabbit enemies — foxes, lynxes, what have you — in a fight. His rabbits do not cower. The price they pay for this strength is, we discover later, that they live in a totalitarian society.

Along the way there are adventures. All of these escape me but one, the one that became for me a figure or figment of mental life, and which I retell on occasion to my students. Because I am writing to procrastinate, but also because even I have limits, I will save it, and the conclusion to Watership Down, for another week.