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translating // the transcultural


Soenke Zehle June 22, 2010

Edward Burtynsky, China Recycling #5, Phone Dials, Zeguo, Zhejiang Province, 2004

access – to language, explore conceptual reaches, collate connotations, record resonances across multiple registers of articulation, capture aspects of the contemporary conjuncture

antagonisms – a refusal of the inheritance of sovereignty, a refusal to bracket questions of violence involved in processes of cultural constitution, a refusal of the subsumption of knowledges to serve predictability, risk management, creative neo-industrialization 

 

common – always-already there, retrieved rather than created, creating possibilities to speak universality without sovereignty

 

echoes – echoes of a will to connect that reverberates across borders, of post-tricontinentalist projects subsumed, to dismiss, to depoliticize, to de-singularize, under the all-too-generous umbrella of the postcolonial, echoes that cannot but involve our acts of communication in genealogies of usage 

 

ecologies – trace renegotiations of culture/nature dichotomies, follow shifts from disciplinary to security in regimes of nature, map the logistic of apparatuses, discourses, institutions that turn objects into objects, subjects into subjects, relations into relations 

 

labour – the becoming-cultural of the economic, economies of expenditure rather than efficiency, a labour of loss at work in the return of the soul 

 

network – grasping the simultaneity of condition, state, process, of constitutive dimensions of contemporary and historical forms of networking 

 

science – the production of knowledges to sustain ethico-aesthetic practices, sciences of sensibility rather than service 

 

translation – paradoxes of correspondence and incommensurability, of acts of translation that are also acts of refusal, attentive to traces of the way experiences of migration inscribe themselves in specific idioms and languages, a practice to bring into existence alternative worlds and their representations