Читать книгу German as Contact Zone - Russell West-Pavlov - Страница 27

Summing up the difference between the anthropologist’s and the Amerindian shaman’s translative work, Viveiros de Castro (2004b: 7) notes that

Amerindian ontologies are inherently comparative: they presuppose a comparison between the ways different kinds of bodies ‘naturally’ experience the world as an affectual multiplicity. They are, thus, a kind of inverted anthropology, for the latter proceeds by way of an explicit comparison between the ways different types of mentality ‘culturally’ represent the world, seen as the unitary origin or virtual focus of its different conceptual versions.

The ‘comparative’ in this quotation is the marker of translation. But this comparison is inflected by, indeed predicated upon another attribute, that of affect.

The work of metaphorical translation that the anthropologist undertakes assumes metaphorical substitution of one term for another. That work of substitution is necessary because the terms are fundamentally incompatible. They are, as it were, separated by the underlying ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983: 31) that structures the anthropological gaze across the cultural gap. By contrast, the shaman’s translative work depends upon identifying the various identities, and by synecdochic extension, the multiverses, that nestle and overlap in a single object or entity. Here the work of translation is not one of bringing together terms that are far distant from one another—a distance that the anthropologist in fact cements in the act of ‘explaining’. Rather, the shaman teases apart terms that are ineluctably entangled with one another, crowded into the confined space of the entity but by the same token, adjacent to each other in relations of ‘convivial’ neighbourliness. What defines the translative work of the shaman is the negotiations of contiguity that she or he must undertake.

Contiguity is the structuring principle of what has come, in another of the cultural turns of recent decades, to be termed ‘affect’ (Clough and Halley, eds 2007). Affect is the power to effect change, to make something happen, to bring about transformation, that one entity exerts upon another. Affect is the name of agency measured not as an attribute of the self but as the effect that results from an interaction with one’s neighbour. Affect is thus the transformative character of relationships between entities (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 313-5; 1987: 256-8). Affect is therefore inherently material, even though its effects may extend into the domain of the conceptual or the theoretical. Such apparently ideational realms of action find themselves, in the orbit of notions of affect, drawn back into the scope of materiality (where indeed, they already always were: there is no cognition without the material infrastructure of neural architecture, nerve fibres with their constitutive axons and connective synapses, and the corresponding alternation between electronic and chemical transmission of impulses).

Affect is a deceptive term, easily misunderstood as pertaining to emotion. Emotion, however, is merely the named, packaged, reified and individualized equivalent of affect that is conceptualized in the early eighteenth century alongside reconceptualizations of individual subjectivity as they emerge from newly developing theories of the nervous system (e.g. Fletcher 1995: 290-93). Emotion thus caps and contains affect, reducing it to an internalized and personalized sense of ‘feeling’ that is incrementally disconnected, or only indirectly connected, to the emotions of others; even in the Romantic period feeling remains connected to the material environment only in a highly mediated manner, working to stress that creative individual’s separateness, rather than to disperse his (rarely her) subjectivity in that environment.

Affect must thus be conceptualized as a connective medium that links multiple entities to each other in material relations of reciprocally devolved agency. These material relations are simultaneously semiotic modes of communication that may bypass more narrowly intellectualized versions of cognition and may allow bodies to communicate with each other in more im-mediate modes that those, for instance, of speech or writing. (A theory of affect would nonetheless also draw both of these mediate modes of communication into its orbit, demanding that we address their neglected affective dimensions.) Affect is by definition a border-crossing medium of sensuous communication that functions via material contiguity. To the extent that it is a border-crossing medium, it ignores the customary barriers between human and non-human actants. Affect travels, as it easily acknowledged, between humans and animals. Our pets pick up our moods and we pick up theirs. But it also travels between humans and the vegetable and mineral worlds. It travels between entities that are generally held to be intangible, such as ideas, to the extent that ideas have a material existence within a material infrastructure and in a material environment. Affect is thus inherently translative. It connects, it makes things happen, and these happenings are transformative. In its promiscuity and its productivity, ‘affect’ is thus inherently ‘multiple’. This is what Viveiros de Castro (2004b: 7) means by ‘affectual multiplicity’ that defines the way ‘different kinds of bodies “naturally” experience the world’.

At this juncture, a renewed comparison with Kohn may be illuminating. As demonstrated above, Kohn’s deployment of the difference between the symbolic function of language and the iconic/indexical functions works to rein in the potentially uncontrollable results of an unlimited expansion of the community of actants such as we find within the Amerindian world. Kohn’s claims for this relocated but not abolished border between higher- and lower-order beings, as also showed above, are constructed in such a way as to make them self-authorizing statements. They operate according to the protocols of systemic autopoesis, self-constructing by creating, from within, a closed system that demands an ongoing process of maintenance (see chapter 2 above). Kohn as anthropologist widens somewhat the community of beings that belong to culture, but nature as a mute, inert background remains stable. Translation, in this view of autopoetic processual being that is, would be the creation of metaphoric equivalences between closed systems (or ethnic groups) within the world of culture.

Viveiros de Castro takes this structure and—in a trope that we have already seen recurring on several occasions—turns it inside-out. Communication between entities is always already happening via what we call affect. Affect is inherently connective. Entities are inherently multiple, because they belong to multiple universes. Translation is not something that comes in the wake of the entity’s existence, a communication necessitated by their systemic closure, and thus logically triggered by what is outside that closure. Rather, and it is here that the turning-inside-out is evident, translation is coeval with their coming to being. They are always already translating within themselves, and the translator-shaman’s work is to identify and harness this already extant process of translation. The translator is thus part of a system of open systems that are translating themselves from inside-out, as it were, dispersing their translativity in the world. Some of that translativity is devolved to the shaman, who takes it up as his own task.

It is clear, that this point, that the autopoetic processuality of the systemic closure of the human and the role of symbolic function of language as performed by Kohn’s notion of human exceptionalism is countered, in Viveiros de Castro’s idea of symmetrical, animist perspectivism, by a similarly inverted notion of processuality. This processuality does not work to maintain the system’s closure, to ‘except’ or ‘excerpt’ it from its environment. On the contrary, openness and porosity is the condition of its self-maintenance, and thus processuality is merely the temporal exquivalent of systemic, or spatial openness (although in fact, the spatial and the temporal aspects of systemic openness cannot be kept apart; their distinction here is merely a heuristic device). In what follows, in order to elucidate the processual nature of this systemic openness, I turn to the work of Tim Ingold and the role of language in the cosmic porosity of animist beliefs.