The workshop “’After Identity?’” was organized by the research group “Idioms of Social Analysis” at the Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Integration”, University of Konstanz. It was dedicated to the exploration of the following epistemological constellation: While the category of identity indexes important problematics in contemporary societies, its potential to treat exhaustively those problematics can be questioned precisely because of the performativity that the category has developed. It shuttles between attempts at rigorous academic theorization and political tactics to employ it in power struggles, thereby blurring the line that separates these domains.
The workshop’s contributors were asked to contextualize the notion of identity from three perspectives: idiom, translation, migration. First, identity is often seen as discursively constructed. In contrast to discourse’s connotations of universality, generality, and structural closedness, the notion of the idiom foregrounds the radical and insurmountable singularity of individuals, groups, and imagined communities. Second, if identities are usually thought of as being constructed in and through discourse, the process of translation paradigmatically highlights the idiomaticity of articulations that precedes any discourse and identity. Just as translation creates its unintended effects of meaning, so identity must be seen as a symbolic excess resulting from its being translated. Third, migration highlights the problematic performativity of identity. It is especially in migration contexts that the (academic) category of “identity” functions as a marker for a certain methodology (“culture matters in migration processes”) and at the same time produces a certain style of interpretation (“problems connected to migration are cultural problems”).
Introductory remarks were presented by the inviters, JOHN N. KIM (Konstanz and UC Riverside) and ANDREAS LANGENOHL (Konstanz). They called for a reassessment of the problems associated with the category of identity and at the same time warned against a complete dismissal of the notion, as it has been helpful in focusing researchers’ attention on such important issues like the construction of alterity, the ongoing proclamation of the sameness of invented collectivities which remains at odds with worldwide biopolitical shifts, or the inter-relation of cultural self-conceptions, political articulation as well as a burgeoning global multilingualism. Their theoretical contribution consisted in a transferral of the critiques of the notion of “identity” to a critique” of that of “discourse.” While many studies still take it for granted that identity is “discursively constructed,” the notion of discourse fails to acknowledge, in Kim’s and Langenohl’s argument, the perspective of the radical singularity and phenomenality of identity which, if taken seriously, adds an important dimension to the usual deconstruction of identity as a discursive effect. The term of the “idiom” came to stand for an alternative to that of “discourse” in the theorization of identity: idioms represent a logic of locality and particularity in which the general meaning of articulations is not achieved through their self-proclaimed totality and deductive logic (as in discourse) but through their taken for granted self-evidence. The idiom puts a limit to a seemingly all-encompassing notion of discourse which, in the times of self-proclaimed globalization, lacks the conceptual means to ward off the drive to transpose itself onto the global level, thereby glossing over localized differentiations.
Some presenters focused on the practice of cultural translation and its social, political and economic embeddedness and use. BLAI GUARNÉ (Barcelona), in his presentation “Written in Translation: Questioning Identity and Difference through Japanese Katakana,“ critically assessed cultural anthropology’s contribution to the problem of intercultural translation. Following Prof. Ingold, he argued that the notion of “culture” as used in anthropology created rather than solved the problem of translation, because the concept of culture was from the very outset designed to make accessible non-Western cultures and their alleged “totality” to a Western readership. This rather common criticism, however, was complicated by Guarné’s empirical focus, namely, katakana as a Japanese script designed for the representation of non-Japanese concepts. The presenter termed it a “graphical representation of marginality” which, comparable to Western anthropology’s discourse, produces the illusion of an accurate perspective of the other. Thus, the argument that translation constructs rather than represents the other has to be freed from its fixation on “Western discourse” and be applied to other historico-geographical contexts and to other types of representations.
At issue at the workshop was also the ambiguity of cultural translation as a double-edged sword. On the one hand translation, if made visible and approached reflexively, can lead to a form of solidarity that some presenters described, using Paul Ricoeur’s notion, as linguistic or translational “hospitality,” while others, deploying a term borrowed from Naoki Sakai, called it “heterolingual address” because it deliberately declines the strategic advantages coming along with homolingual address. On the other hand, practices of translation are also inserted into the production of flexible subjectivities and thus display a certain complicity with the often critiqued, forced subjectivizations in neo-liberal or “flexible” capitalism. Thus, CARLES PRADO FONTS (Barcelona), referring to the case of the indirect translation of Chinese novelist Gao Xingjian’s work via French into Spanish (and from there into Catalan), argued that indirect translation helps dissolving the fictitious border between the “original” and the translated “copy,” but at the same time affirmatively responds to market mechanisms. GIULIANA BENVENUTI (Bologna), in her theoretical contribution on “A Non-colonial Theory of Translation,” identified “semiotic violence” in the idea that everything is translatable, and called for a “definition of the common” (as opposed to a definition of identity) through translation which is apt to produce co-foreigners instead of co-citizens; however, translation is not only a liberating practice because the heterolingual address that it encourages can be compromised by the market mechanisms of flexible capitalism.
ROBERT CRAWSHAW (Lancaster) focused on the relation between social reality and creative fiction, arguing that identity has to guarantee an “upstream validity,” that is, a retrospectively construed plausibility. This plausibility, and its relation to social institutions and economic orders, is challenged in migrant literature (in Crawshaw’s example, in Great Britain), which exposes the hybrid identity of migrant subjects which is as retrospective as it is fictitious. Thereby, literature becomes a function in the social sciences as it makes attainable the fictitiousness of identity construction precisely because literature must be fiction, while it is at the same time rooted and functionalized in social contexts.
A second group of presentations dealt with the production of borders, subjectivities and identities in societal constellations which cannot be described by reference to the nation-state alone but have to be contextualized by some notion of modernity. Thus, RICHARD CALICHMAN (New York) explored the political effects, preconditions and ramifications of the Kyoto School philosophers in the ambiguous formation of the Japanese empire as a nation-state plus colonies. He argued that the Kyoto school, through its notion of “subjective nothingness,” effectively inscribed itself into an imperial project that construed its subjects not as having identity but as having the potential to develop it in the future. In a similar way, JON D. SOLOMON (Taipei) made a case for the potentiality and futurity of modernity’s subject production, arguing that “the fundamental project of modernity is to design a better species, or life itself.” Focusing on East Asia can, according to Solomon, better highlight the productive (as opposed to restrictive) effects of modernity’s bio-power than concentrating on the historical West. This demonstrates again that modernity has decoupled itself from the West (as Europe plus settler colonies).
ANNE-SOPHIE KROSSA (Lancaster) generalized the concerns of many social scientists and humanities scholars that the nation-state can no longer count as the prime analytical category, but also circumvented the construction of an ambitious notion of the transnational. Contrary to many approaches in contemporary social theory, she advocated an understanding of sociality which deliberately refrains from taking into account the project-character, and thus the inherent normativity, of many macro-social formations and concepts. Especially “integration” has to be understood as a non-teleological process driven by conflicts and the underlying heterogeneity. Krossa used “glocalization” in order to depict the simultaneous globality and locality of all instances of “sociation.” In certain contrast to this argument, SANDRO MEZZADRA’s (Bologna) contribution insisted on the political significance of the fundamental heterogeneity of late-modern spaces and migration regimes. Extending the notion of the international division of labor by that of the “multiplication of labor,” he referred to the differentiation and specialization of border regimes and strategies of channelling people according to the different economic functionalities migrants hold within the global capitalist economy, thereby indexing Laclau’s notion of “internal frontiers in society” as well as Balibar’s “internal borders.” This led him to the argument that “borders follow migrants” rather than the other way round. Like in other contributions to the conference, Mezzadra held a critical attitude toward translation, as he contextualized it with regimes of economic and social equivalence, conversion, and mobility.
SAYUMI TAKAHASHI (New London) closed the conference with a paper examining the problem of identity in translation through the numerical position of zero. Refuting the commonplace notion of translation as an identitarian transfer of meaning from one language to another, Takahashi observed that the numerical position of zero is strictly speaking untranslatable, for “zero” is not identical to “nothing” and is formally a position without identity. It gives order to the Arabic numerical system but is itself a non-position. She used this observation to argue that any discourse that poses itself as a closed narrative contains within it a position of non-identity such as the number zero.
The workshop’s contributions and discussion indicated that the category of identity is surely here to stay, both in academic and non-academic contexts. Insofar as the “after” in the workshop’s title turns out to be a “post” as used in “postcolonial” or “postsocialist,” “after identity” does not signal the call for an abandonment of the category, but rather an ambiguous shift in its denotative meaning brought about by its performative effects: ambiguous, because identity is a category as inevitable as it is problematic. The contemporary world is a world “after identity” because it is marked by the social and cultural effects that the category has triggered.
Konferenzübersicht:
Andreas Langenohl & John Kim: Introductory Remarks – Identities and Translations from the Viewpoint of the Idiom
Panel 1: “Traveling Scripts”
Richard Calichman (New York): Introductory Remarks on the Kyoto School Debate
Blai Guarné (Barcelona): Written in Translation: Questioning Identity and Difference through Japanese Katakana
Carles Prado Fonts (Barcelona): In Alien Nation: Translation, Migration and Gao Xingjian's Works in Spain and Catalonia
Panel 2: “Borderlines, Limits, Closures: Translation as Arrested Movement”
Sandro Mezzadra (Bologna): Border as Method. Rethinking the Politics of Migration and Translation
Anne-Sophie Krossa (Lancaster): Conceptualising European Society on Non-normative Grounds: Sociality, Glocalization and the Potential of Conflict
Jon D. Solomon (Taipeh): After Identity, After Catastrophe
Panel 3: “Gains and Losses of Translation”
Giuliana Benvenuti (Bologna): Politics of Translation,
or A Non-colonial Theory of Translation
Robert Crawshaw (Lancaster): Being in the World, Space-Time Compression and Narratives of Migration
Sayumi Takahashi (Connecticut College): Identity Ground Zero: A New Calculus for What is Lost in Translation