Ideology And Translation Essay - 1,851 words

Ideology and translation When, in conjunction with mimesis, we speak of ideology and translation, terms drawn from the social realm on the one hand and the linguistic on the other, we need to keep in mind that the binding power of ideology lies in its ability to confirm the identity of a community and that translatability presumes identity between languages. This explains the regularity with which the concepts of mimesis and representation appear in definitions of ideology. Theodor Adorno defined it as "socially necessary appearance," Louis Althusser as the "imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence," and Hannah Arendt as the subjugation of reality to "laws of 'scientifically' established movements with which through the process of imitation it the mind becomes integrated." (George Steiner 77) Mimeticism functions as an instrument of identification. In pursuing the issue of ideology by way of translation, the researchers suggest that the appeal of interpreting ideology through a framework of cultural symbology lies, to a great extent, in the power of narrative. A certain logic binds imitation, which is a mode of fashioning, with fiction or narrative discourse. This logic is that of semblance, which dictates that mimetic representation bridges the division between verbal and non-verbal, between language and the given or phenomenal.


Mimetic theories of representation have to state themselves in narrative. A mimetic theory that does not distinguish logos from lexis, a mimetic theory such as that propounded by Benjamin, does not conceive of mimesis as simulacrum but as language. "Works of art attract by a resembling unlikeness. Colloquial poetry is to real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. In every art I can think of we are dammed and clogged by the mimetic" (Luise Von Flotow 111). The researchers attack mimetic art as a slavish effort to reproduce the likeness of the original, but his concern is with stoppage or blockage, not with resemblance.


So conceived, the only true mimetic form would be translation, the archive of non-sensuous or linguistic correspondences. That which prevents translation, prevents the circulation of words, is the enemy. The poetic image-as-trope exhausts itself in the play of word and object, to the exclusion of the other or social discourse, appears to deny the heterogeneity of the literary work. However, the notion of the object in artistic prose proves the dialogism belongs to a reflexive theory that fails to confront radical alterity. The object is a focal point for herteroglot voices among which the prose writer's voice may sound; these voices create the background necessary for his own voice." (Hatim and Mason 116) Such a hermeneutics seeks the dialogical resolution of heterogeneous voices in which languages are said to be "dialogically implicated in each other and begin to exist for each other." (Hatim and Mason 117) The readings, especially when they focus on analogies between language and money, themselves construct a reflexive system that, rather than undo ideology, reconfirm ideology insofar as they fail to address the mimetic basis of language. In other words, readings that treat the other as the negative in a reflexive system are producing allegories, narratives that confuse the contingent and metonymic with the mimetic and metaphoric. If it is argued, for instance, that the Jew is the Other in Pound's works, an enabling other that allows for the chain of substitutions between money and language, then such readings are treating metonymy, the substitution of one signifier for another, as metaphor, the resemblance between one signified and another. (Sherry Simon 142) We can pause here to note that when an analogy is established between language and money, one has a conceptual system that little can withstand.


After all, why else is it so hard to get rid of metaphysics? Because when we talk of the analogy between money and language, when we coin analogies, we are participating in a mode of thought that is mimetic and, therefore, belongs to logocentrism. The difference lies not in what the critics conceive to be "proper to man" but in the narratives they make of resemblance. (Sherry Simon 157) Narratives that turn upon an equation of language and economics may be called a specular economy that recuperates the other as the same. In the closed economy of a specular system everything is fungible, that is, exchangeable for something else. Money is fungible; it is the universal commodity, as Marx says. (Suzanne Jill Levine 119) The resistance language meets is only itself, resistance being what allows the referent to become an object of knowledge for the subject.


"To language, all of the real is fungible but itself, and the resistance that language opposes to itself - which may take the form of troping - establishes the reality of language to language, which then constructs all other forms of reference upon this fundamental model." (Suzanne Jill Levine 150) The resistance of language to language, in this formula, takes many forms in theory today and is represented by ideology, the unconscious. The problem with these models lies in their attributing the resistance. Argument by analogy is argument by metaphor. A certain misreading of Derrida's "White Mythology" underlies this interpretation. (Suzanne Jill Levine 204) In analyzing metaphor as that which philosophy wishes to expunge from its text, Derrida is not arguing that metaphor is a foreign poison in metaphysics but that it belongs to metaphysics. Literature is not the Oth ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: translation, ideology, narrative, resistance, jill

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