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The ‘relational’ notion of translation that I am proposing here draws on a sociological model of power elaborated by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon that suggests that power as a reified quality possessed by single actors is a myth. Instead, they propose a notion of power that can only be exerted with the support of other social actors or associates who aid in its implementation, albeit while often diverting its intended goals for their own aims. Programmatically, Latour contrasts ‘a diffusion model of power in which a successful command moves under an impetus given it from a central source’ to

a translation model in which such a command, if it is successful, results from the actions of a chain of agents each of whom ‘translates’ it in accordance with his/her own projects. (Latour 1986: 264)

The mobile character of translation, its fundamental operation of transport or ‘displacement’ (typically of a text, from one language to another) generates a different notion of agency: ‘displacement [of the order or command or token of power] … is the consequence of the energy given to the token by everyone in the chain who does something with it’ (ibid: 268). As Latour (ibid: 264) explains, ‘[i]n the translation model the study of society therefore moves … to a study of methods of association.’ Callon (1986: 223) makes this point even more explicit:

To translate is to displace … but to translate is also express in one’s own language what others say and want, why they act in they way they do and associate with each other; it is to establish oneself as a spokesman.

In other words, displacement is not simply spatial, it also effects the nature of the utterance, statement, command, or information being transmitted, because each translative relay in some way ‘traduces’ or abuses or distorts the statement being conveyed as a result of the translators’ own agendas. This is why the actors in this multi-actantial model of translation are not mere ‘transmitters’, but actively intervening—indeed interfering—translators who transform the message they convey because it is useful for their own aims:

the chain is made of actors—not of patients—and since the token [or core message] is in everyone’s hands in turn, everyone shapes it according to their different projects. This is why it is called a model of translation. The token changes as it moves from hand to hand and the faithful transmission of a statement becomes a single and unusual case among many, more likely, others. (Latour 1986: 268)

In this book, I will be drawing upon this generalized notion of translation in which a multitude of actors participate as they secure their position in the order of things by inserting themselves in a process of transmitted social dynamism.

However, rather than concentrating upon the trajectory of a statement or command or token—or a text—as it travels from one transmitter/translator to another, I would like to focus upon the multiple moments of translation: ‘Instead of the transmission of the same token—simply deflected or slowed down by friction—you get, in the second model, the continuous transformation of the token’ (Latour 1986: 268). It is this ‘continuous transformation of the token’ that interests me as a generalized process, out of which single moments of translative exchange can be isolated and examined, some of which will be instances of interlingual translation. If we take Latour at his word, and accept that every communal event in the dynamic maintenance of society is a translative act, this in turn should bring us to re-assess translation as a generic operation, as one that is central to the existence of society, and see every encounter as a transmission of social energy (Greenblatt 1987) that is inevitably a transformation.

In other words, Latour uses ‘translation’ in a very general sense to sketch a model of collaborative, multi-actantial chains of information, in which the progress of the ‘token’ would not be possible except via the co-agency of the ‘translators’; these in turn transform the ‘token’ at every instance of exchange, where transformation itself devolves from the multiple interests of dispersed co-actants. Latour is not talking about translation in the interlingual sense here, but his model allows us to rethink interlingual translation as a subset of the much broader processes he is describing and/or modelling here.

Significantly, Latour (1986: 279 n18) acknowledges the similarity of his model of power to that of Foucault, with his notion of micro-power(s) and diffused ‘dispositifs’ or apparatuses of power (Foucault 1975; 1976). In this book, I’m less interested in the notion of socially refacted and diffused power than in the idea of translation that underpins it, and in the possibility, hinted at by Latour’s nod to Foucault, of a diffusion of translation that would make it the key to agency: every transformative encounter between actants beyond the nature/society divide would be a transmissive-translative-transformative engagement. Blurring the nature society divide is a crucial move here, because it is the central moment of a true generalization of translation as a generic operation. Lest we complain that this blurring is an artificially imposed, even ideological move, it is worth paying heed to Callon (1986: 200-1), who confirms this suspicion, albeit for unexpected reasons: ‘The observer must abandon all a priori distinctions between natural and social events … These divisions are considered to be conflictual, for they are the result of analysis rather than its point of departure.’ In other words, the nature/society divide is a division imposed upon a previous system of entangled realities of words and things, a realm of magical ‘correspondences’, what Foucault (1966: 32-59; 2002: 19-50) once called the ‘prose of the world’. This division of the world into the opposed realms of human society and nature, dating from the late 1600s (Latour 2006), lays the basis for subsequent operations upon reality rather than being embedded in its ontological fabric. To that extent the ‘great divide’ must be constantly reasserted via a multitude of performative epistemic speech acts over centuries that reinforce and maintain its aura of reality, making the non-naturalness of society a ‘natural’ phenomenon (for a parallel argument about gender see Butler 1990). These repeated speech acts are ‘conflictual’ in Callon’s turn of phrase, because they involve a repeated ‘violence done to things’ (Foucault 1971: 55). Translation understood thus is therefore the process of coopted ontological dynamism arising out of interactions between a multiplicity of actants, whether human or nonhuman, that constitutes the vibrant, mobile be-ing of the world. In sum, then, to quote Callon (1986: 224), ‘Translation is a process before it is a result … Translation is the mechanism by which social and natural world progressively take form.’ Here we glimpse the positive, almost jubilant face of what Berman (1985: 42-3), albeit in disapproving tone of voice, calls a ‘traduction généralisée’ [‘generalized translation’]—not however as an implausible extension of an unfounded metaphorization of translation, but as the recognition of the dynamic, material, even cosmic matrix out of which interlingual translation is an offshoot.

Building upon the notion of ‘translation’ elaborated by Latour and Callon, the contention of the present book is that translation is an activity taking place everywhere and always, at the smallest and greatest micro- and macro-levels of material existence. By extension, I posit, human translation is a mere derivative subset of translation activity in general. Interlingual translation is a sub-translation of translation. The caveat raised about the material agency of translators is important not because it allows one to draw a distinction, but rather, because it draws attention to the real nature of this generalized translation. Translation is work: it is the material work done by a multiplicity of actors that allows them to exist, but far more, it is the interactive exchange of ‘information’ out of which they in fact emerge. Translation, then, is the essential substance of the underlying processuality of life itself. Translation and natural generativity are synonymous with one another. This is the primary argument that underpins the present book. In a subsequent secondary argument, the notion of the cosmic universal of translation will be folded back upon a single ‘natural’ and ‘national’ language, German, to suggest an inherent hybridity and translative nature of the language itself.

The following chapters of the first part of this book stage a double movement. First, in chapters 2 and 3, I orchestrate a contractive movement that suggest that human language is actually only a very minor part of the larger cosmic business of the exchange of information. Here, I examine anthropological theories elaborated by Kohn, Viveiros de Castro and Ingold. Second, in chapter 4, I rehearse an expansive movement that elevates translation from a restricted linguistic operation to a universal operator of information exchange. I call upon the work of Michel Serres and Juri Lotman to explore these ideas. Building upon this double movement, a third moment in the argument (chapter 5) uses the same double scaling of great and small to introduce a theory of quantum translation. Finally, in chapter 6, I turn back to German as a national language to ask what a quantum theory of translative linguistics might do to our conception of civic subjecthood informed and infused by a particular natural language.