Abstract
This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as ‘political labour’ across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemonic. Finally, with Latour’s major project, the Inquiry into Modes of Existence, translation continues its descriptive task, but carries so much weight over the various modes of existence that it qualifies as a key philosophical concept of considerable analytic value.
. . . whom can we turn to in our need? Not Angels, not humans, and the sly animals see at once how little at home we are in the interpreted world. (Rainer Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow)
Bruno Latour’s world is indeed a translated one, a world full of translations of various kinds, as his writing ranged from his first work on the enigmas of biblical exegesis to the transformations of the planet that have brought us a new climatic regime. 1 It is a world of indeterminate significations, transmutations and the work of constant recomposition. As someone who has translated a few of his texts, I’m interested in the processes of transposition that linguistic translation involves, but I’m also interested in detailing the political labour of translation and the central position that the concept has played in his more philosophical work.
Extending His Identity
Translating Bruno Latour into English means transporting and extending an identity from France into the Anglosphere. But the Anglosphere is only part of the global extension of Latour’s work and identity, as impressed commentators might note that We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1993 [1991]) has not only been translated into English, but also Bulgarian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Estonian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian, Slovakian, Croatian, Italian, Persian, Romanian, Georgian, Russian, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and possibly others that are not listed on his website. 2 This is a literal extension of a network of readers, academics, commentators and students. The English edition has been cited 28,936 times according to Google Scholar; the French 5,362 times.
Each time Latour ‘lands’ in another country or linguistic community, his thought will be somewhat domesticated, either literally in the language of the text, or via a translator’s preface, or in the minds of readers who accommodate him to their own habits of thought and traditions. Yet he will remain French for them, or rather he will become a kind of a diasporic Latour, with a flickering identity that my friend Ghassan Hage (2021) calls ‘lenticular’. Hage is thinking of those tourist scene photographs that incorporate two images in the same frame. Change the angle, and a different image appears. These images flicker as they ‘compete, intrude and dialogue with each other’ (Hage, 2021: 93). Latour never becomes Anglo, of course, but English-speaking readers seem to have found him five times more citable than his own compatriots in the process of his moves away from Paris. He would often travel to other countries, but the translations of books such as We Have Never Been Modern by Harvard would precede the many talks he gave in English-speaking countries, accommodating himself to the local culture, as he did when Rita Felski and I hosted him at the University of Virginia in September 2015, a project that was attempting to translate Latour’s largely STS thought into ‘the Humanities’, a category with no exact equivalent in French. Afterwards he reflected on this in a culturally and linguistically adaptive fashion, in the closing article for the collection, in the form of a letter:
Paris, 1 June 2016 Dear Rita and Stephen, Thank you for allowing me to conclude this set of papers with some personal – and I am afraid not terribly coherent – reflections on, or rather recollections of, my own encounters with what has been called the ‘humanities’ in this symposium you have so kindly assembled. As you know, in French the word ‘les humanités’ is no longer very common, and it certainly doesn’t refer to an organized field that is to be promoted, defined, or defended against other disciplines. So it would make no sense for me to situate myself inside the field of ‘les humanités’. This is why, following your suggestion, I would rather reminisce on my own connections with what French people would call ‘littérature’, ‘écriture’, ‘style’, ‘texte’, ‘textualité’ in their relation to thought and politics – a series of links so typical of French culture that it will probably appear amusingly exotic to your readers. Please take the following attempt as no more than an ethnographic testimony to a quickly disappearing culture of writing. (Latour, 2016b: 463)
Political Labour
Translation is thus all about movement and transformation, as Latour in the letter cited above addresses Americans, but from Paris, the text itself incorporating a span of the globe, while avoiding the actual transatlantic flight to Charlottesville, VA. Travel can be arduous, and so are thinking, writing and translating: they all involve work; one cannot get from A to B without ‘paying the price’, as he says. The idea of transparent communication, without cost or distortion, is an old dream. It is long discredited, but still dominant, and Latour identifies it with ‘Double Click’, the ‘evil genius’: ‘Double Click completely denies that information needs to pass through any hiatus, any discontinuity, any translation whatsoever’ (Latour, 2018a: 137).
Another myth it is useful to banish is that of the unity of language, and this despite the very best efforts of the Académie Française, over many years, to maintain the purity of the national language and keep any contaminating influences at bay. Naoki Sakai has rather cleverly shown that the unity of language is, in fact, a kind of schematic, an effort of the imagination. No-one ever experiences a language in all its unity, but what we do experience all the time are acts of translation. So, as he says, ‘Translation is anterior to the organic unity of language and . . . this unity is posited through the specific representation of translation’. We conventionally represent translation as bridging two languages, as a ‘communication model of equivalence and exchange’, but that is not what it is; it is a ‘form of political labour to create continuity at the elusive point of discontinuity in the social’ (Sakai, 2009: 72).
Major political labour indeed to ‘create continuity’ within Standard French by supressing dialects and neighbouring languages, as if there were no internal translation going on all the time; the labour of language that makes poetry, philosophical thought, fictions, or any kind of meaning possible. Within the illusion of the unified language, transgressive thinkers, Bruno Latour among them, have battled against Double Click, clichés and other formulae, and this often means reaching out to, or at least thinking with, Others, whether exotic or domestic. But how, and in what language? In which direction are the translations going?
Translation and Colonisation
Allow me to indulge in a reflection on the history of linguistic translation in Australia, my home country. Hundreds of Aboriginal languages are now extinct or threatened with disappearance, and today only a few have more than a thousand speakers. It will not be news to anyone that imperial powers had a non-translation policy (Chambers and Demir, 2024). The languages of the peoples they were invading were oppressed, as cultural conquest came hot on the heels of military conquest. These peoples were expected, in Australia as elsewhere, to learn English in order to survive. But when called upon to speak, it was because the invaders wanted information translated into their own terms, which the novelist J.M. Coetzee calls ‘uninterrogated belief’:
I do not like the way in which [English] crushes the minor languages that it finds in its path. I don’t like its universalist pretensions, by which I mean its uninterrogated belief that the world is as it seems to be in the mirror of the English language. I don’t like the arrogance that this situation breeds in its native speakers. Therefore, I do what little I can to resist the hegemony of the English language. (Coetzee in Marshall, 2022)
So, this reflected world, ‘as it seems to be in the mirror of the English language’, is an untranslated world, a reduced world, to echo the central concept of Latour’s (1988) foundational essay, ‘Irreductions’. In Australia, when speakers of Walmatjarri, Nyikina or some other language were asked for information they had a translation job to do. They had to narrow their world view to whatever it was that this whitefella might be wanting to hear: from a parched early explorer wanting to find water, to a geologist, today, looking for some kind of mineral. The ‘worlds’ on both sides are stripped down to an instrumental referential language, but with enough information only going one way to enrich the colonists’ world. Translation in such contexts operates as a ‘knowledge valve’. It was only later, with anthropologists and linguists learning Indigenous languages, that an Aboriginal world could begin to be conceived of, by Europeans, as multiply ontological and therefore filling up as a cosmos. Latour has sometimes been accused of not paying enough attention to the operations of power in these kinds of colonisation histories, specifically the hegemonic power that inhibits Europeans from referencing ‘Indigenous thinkers in a direct, contemporary and meaningful way’ (Todd, 2016: 7).
Zoe Todd registered her disappointment with this Eurocentrism precisely because the Indigenous knowledges she was familiar with were so aligned with what Latour was saying when she heard him deliver the 2013 Gifford lecture on Gaia. She saw this as part of a broader problem of colonialism ‘replicating Indigenous thought, seemingly with no awareness’ (Todd, 2016: 15). Latour, in his defence, did develop conceptions of ‘symmetric anthropology’ (Latour, 2016a) and diplomacy, which are premised on the need for detailed descriptions of worlds for any dialogue to have any value. For this to happen, the Moderns have to pull back from Coetzee’s ‘universalist pretensions’ and ‘uninterrogated belief’ by first knowing their own modes of existence and their limits, as was attempted with the Inquiry into Modes of Existence project. This certainly means giving up mastery, because the Inquiry ‘claims to be teaching the art of speaking well to one’s interlocutors about what they are doing – what they are going through, what they are – and what they care about’ (Latour, 2018a: 64).
The conception of the unity of individual languages that was coupled to the political rise of national languages has had another result, which is the normalisation of monolingualism. This is despite the fact that there are far more bilingual and multilingual speakers in the world than there are monolinguals. Code-switching is the default position for language usage, for it also occurs with sociolinguistic variation within languages. Accordingly, Emily Apter, introducing the English translation of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables, sounds a warning about the hegemony of English in European scholarship:
. . . with the European Union’s endorsement of English as its lingua franca . . . students increasingly naturalise English as the singular language of universal knowledge, thereby erasing translation-effects, and etymological histories, the trajectories of words in exile and in the wake of political and ecological catastrophes. (Apter, 2014: xi)
The danger is a kind of intellectual laziness if one assumes it is enough to know English, and an impoverishment of thought if one assumes that a concept like ‘truth’ is easily translatable in contemporary languages, and that its philological history is not extremely enlightening (Cassin, 2014). Where would we be if we were ignorant about the translations through history that have created the conceptual environment we now inhabit? This is why Barbara Cassin, Latour’s philologist friend, is included in Making Things Public (Cassin, 2005).
Philosophising in Translation
‘Without translation,’ claims Iwona Janicka, ‘Latour’s entire conceptual framework arguably could not work.’ This is because by ‘tracing the paths of translation, he establishes a new taxonomy of beings in the world, particularly in the form of “modes of existence”, and, as a result, redistributes intelligibility in the world’ (Janicka, 2023: 847). Janicka sees this beginning with la sociologie de la traduction in the early 1980s at the École des Mines, where the very concept of society was expanded to include non-humans and technologies and their active agencies (Akrich et al., 2006). Philosophically, this meant not only opposing the critical sociology of the Bourdieu school, which would only deal with human struggles, but also the dominant phenomenological framework that prioritised human consciousness and intentions acting on and interpreting a passive objective world.
But if the sociology of translation saw a germ or a virus as going about its business and in the process acting on ‘society’ (now made up not just of humans) so as to transform it radically, then the way to understand this phenomenon was by tracing the pathways, what they came to call the Actor Network, in and among germs, humans, clinics and labs, politicians, news media, etc., avoiding ‘the straight lines of causality’ (Latour, 2018a: 353) that traditional philosophical argumentation tended to favour. Instead of such idealised logic, the new approach needed translation to describe what was happening pragmatically: the opportunism of the politician who translates the danger of infection into a vote-gathering exercise, alongside a lab director translating test results (made of chemical reactions, i.e. translations) into a bid for increased funding. ‘Intelligibility’ here is achieved neither by brilliant philosophical interpretation nor by critically explaining the workings of ideology; it describes the world in a much more banal way (Despret et al., 2024), but in doing this it traces a world of tightly interconnected links. This makes us aware of how the distance needed for masterful interpretation and explanation, a key aspect of human exceptionalism, had been artificially fabricated. ANT’s close-to-the-ground descriptions, Latour would claim, were more realistic than either of the above alternatives, but he would go on to add that they would have to be multiply real, as in the multiple modes of existence in the Inquiry.
The Inquiry, as a ‘new taxonomy of beings’ (Janicka, 2023: 847), is the philosophical culmination of translation as a key analytical concept in Latour’s oeuvre. Here, we leave the linguistics of translation far behind, because ‘Multiplying the modes of existence implies draining language of its importance’ (Latour, 2018a: 234) as Latour closes the era of the ‘linguistic turn’ and introduces the ontological one that is still evolving. The concept of translation becomes more central, while remaining descriptive. Each mode of existence, with its unique ‘felicity conditions’ has to find its way of moving forward, remaining the same, but adapting and transforming. As Latour puts it in relation to networks:
The essence of a situation, as it were, will be, for a [NET], the list of the other beings through which it is necessary to pass so that this situation can endure, can be prolonged, maintained, or extended. To trace a network is thus always to reconstitute by a trial (an investigation is a trial, but so is an innovation, and so is a crisis) the antecedents and the consequences, the precursors and the heirs, the ins and outs, as it were, of a being. Or, to put it more philosophically, the others through which one has to pass in order to become or remain the same – which presupposes, as we shall see later on, that no one can simply ‘remain the same’, as it were, ‘without doing anything.’ To remain, one needs to pass – or at all events to ‘pass through’ – something we shall call a translation. (Latour, 2018a: 41)
There is a blossoming of other terms around this idea of ‘passing through’. There are ‘hiatus’, ‘trial’, ‘test’ and ‘mini-transcendences’. Why? Why would the whole scheme fall apart without them? Latour is constantly elaborating these gaps: ‘there is always a leap, a fault line, a lag, a risk, a difference between one stage and the next, one mediation and the next, n and n + 1, all along a path of alterations. Continuity is always lacking’ (Latour, 2018a: 210). Translation-work fabricates the continuity peculiar to each mode of existence, which is ‘naturally’ full of bewildering discontinuities, gaps and leaps. The law, as one mode of existence, only seems to operate smoothly, as at one moment a witness is asked to swear on the Bible (what on earth is religion doing there?), and the next the accused is metamorphosed into a criminal as the judge utters a performative speech act.
The institution of the law, as a mode of existence, is an immanent field in the sense that all these little alterations are proper to its ongoing existence. They have to be mini-transcendences, because there is no mega other-worldly transcendental level above it that can change everything about the law with one decisive action. Just as the judge presiding in a courtroom can make more-or-less habitual judgements that involve little translations (‘interpretations’) of the law, the law must remain the same; the law is more powerful than any passing judge. But should the law become automatic, applied without any thought, debate or judgments, i.e. with alterations or translations, it would become simply dictatorial and it would cease to be the law. This is why the concept of translation is central to this mode of existence, and to all the others in Latour’s Modes of Inquiry. It is a concept that has illuminated our worlds differently: it takes us outside of the limits of human society and language, it introduces process into the writing of descriptions, and it encourages us to learn to negotiate with others on a more equal basis.
Footnotes
