Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.

Asad, Talal (1986) The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 14164. BachmannMedick, Doris (2006) Meanings of Translation in Cultural Anthropology, in Theo Hermans (ed.) Translating Others, Vol. 1, Manchester: St Jerome, 3342. Feleppa, Robert (1988) Convention, Translation, and Understanding: Philosophical Problems in the Comparative Study of Culture, Albany: SUNY Press. Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992) Siting Translation: History, PostStructuralism and the Postcolonial Context, Berkeley: University of California Press. Plsson, Gsli (ed.) (1993) Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation, and Anthropological Discourse, Oxford: Berg. Sturge, Kate (1997) Translation Strategies in Ethnography, The Translator 3 (1): 2138. Sturge, Kate (2007) Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum, Manchester: St Jerome. Rubel, Paula G. and Abraham Rosman (eds) (2003) Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, Oxford: Berg. Trivedi, Harish (2005) Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation, 91st Meridian, May 2005, http://www.uiowa.edu/91st/vol4_n1/index.html (accessed 16 July 2008). The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tar zan (1997) by Eric Cheyfitz, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (1997) by Douglas Robin son, Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1999), a collection of essays edi ted by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi.

Power and knowledge The longer I continue, the more it seems to me that the formation of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analysed, not in terms of types of consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics and strategies of power.foulco,77 Modern humanism is therefore mistaken in drawing this line between knowledge and power. Knowledge and power are integrated with one another, and there is no point in dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to depend on power; this is just a way of reviving humanism in a utopian guise. It is not possible for power to be exercised without

knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power. Liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism : maybe it s a good slogan, but it will never be more than a slogan.52f Though a theory of right is a necessary companion to this grid, it cannot in any event provide the terms of its endorsement. Hence these two limits, a right of sovereignty and a mechanism of discipline, which define, I believe, the arena in which power is exercised. But these two limits are so heterogeneous that they cannot possibly be reduced to each other. The powers of modern society are exercised through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism.106 But the procedures of power that are at work in modern societies are much more numerous, diverse and rich.148f The State is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth.122 foulc What I want to show is how power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the subject s own representations. If power takes hold on the body, this isn t through its having first to be interiorised in people s consciousnesses. There is a network or circuit of bio-power, or somatopower, which acts as the formative matrix of sexuality itself as the historical and cultural phenomenon within which we seem at once to recognise and lose ourselves186f Every relation of force implies at each moment a relation of power (which is in a sense its momentary expression) and every power relation makes a reference, as its effect but also as its condition of possibility, to a political field of which it forms a part.189 In so far as power relations are an unequal and relatively stable relation of fo rces, it s clear that this implies an above and a below, a difference of potentials. 200-201 Agreed, but what I meant was that in order for there to be a movement from above to below there has to be a capillarity from below to above at the same time. Take a simple example, the feudal form of power relation. Between the serfs tied to the land and the lord who levies rent from them, there exists a local, relatively autonomous relation, almost a tete-iI-tete. For this relation to hold, it must indeed have the backing of a certain pyramidal ordering of the feudal system. But it s certain that the power of the French kings and the apparatuses of State which they gradually established from the eleventh century onward had as their condition of possibility a rooting in forms of behaviour, bodies and local relations of power which should not at all be seen as a simple projection of the central power.201 f

Capitalism, Culture Civilization has two dimensions. "To be safe, civilized man must have a blind devotion to immediate practical tasks, a devotion which recalls the Victorian cult of work. For Conrad as for Carlyle work is protection against unwholesome doubt or neurotic paralysis of will." And second is the idea of fidelity, a necessary trust in others. conrad, cited in bell,5 I divide society, analytically, into the techno-economic structure, the polity, and the culture. These are not congruent with one another and have different rhythms of change; they follow different norms which legitimate different, and even contrasting, types of behavior. It is the discordances between these realms which are responsible for the various contradictions within society.bell,10 I mean by cultureand here I follow Ernst Cassirerthe realm of symbolic forms and, in the context of the argument in this book, more narrowly the arena of expressive symholism: those efforts, in painting, poetry, and fiction, or within the religious forms of litany, liturgy, and ritual, which seek to explore and express the meanings of human existence in some imaginative form. The modalities of culture are few, and they derive from the existential situations which confront all human beings, through all times, in the nature of consciousness: how one meets death, the nature of tragedy and the character of heroism, the definition of loyalty and obligation, the redemption of the soul, the meaning of love and of sacrifice, the understanding of compassion, the tension between an animal and a human nature, the claims of instinct and restraint. Historically, therefore, culture has been fused with religion .bell,12 But in culture there is always a ricorso, a return to the concerns and questions that are the existential agonies of human beings.bell,13 The enlargement of a social sphere leads to greater interaction, and this interaction in turn leads to specialization, complementary relations, and structural differentiation.bell,13 But in culture the increase in interaction, owing to the breakdown of segmented societies or of parochial cultures, leads to syncretism -the mingling of strange gods, as in the time of Constantine, or the melange of cultural artifacts in modern art (or even in the living rooms of middle-class professional families).bell,13 Syncretism is the jumbling of styles in modern art, which absorbs African masks or Japanese prints into its modes of depicting spatial perceptions; or the merging of Oriental and Western religions, detached from their histories, in a modern meditative consciousness.bell,13 Such freedom comes from the fact that the axial principle of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the "self" in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment.bell,13 and a culture which is concerned with the enhancement and fulfillment of the self and the "whole" person.bell14 In these contradictions, one perceives many of the latent social conflicts that have been expressed ideologically as alienation, depersonalization, the attack on authority, and the like. In these adversary relations, one sees the disjunction of realms.bell,14

The fundamental assumption of modernity, the thread that has run through Western civilization since the sixteenth century, is that the social unit of society is not the group, the guild, the tribe, or the city, but the person. The Western ideal was the autonomous man who, in becoming self-determining, would achieve freedom. With this "new man" there was a repudiation of institutions (the striking result of the Reformation, which installed individual conscience as the source of judgment); the opening of new geographical and social frontiers; the desire, and the growing ability, to master nature and to make of oneself what one can, and even, in discarding old roots, to remake oneself altogether. What began to count was not the past but the future.bell,16 In the culture, we have the rise of the independent artist, released from church and princely patron, writing and painting what pleases him rather than his sponsor; the market will make him free.13 In the development of culture, this search for independence, the will to be free not only of patron but of all conventions, finds its expression in modernism and, in its extreme form, in the idea of the untrammeled self.bell,16 The impulse driving both the entrepreneur and the artist is a restlessness to search out the new, to rework nature, and to refashion consciousness.bell,16 "To be a useful man has always appeared to me as something quite hideous," Baudelaire declared. cited in bell ,17 In the history of bourgeois society, a number of sociological "crossovers" took place which radically transformed both the cultural and economic realms. In the culture there was a radical change in the meaning of the individual from a being to a self. Of equal import, there was a shift from the hold of restraint to the acceptance of impulse. In the economy, there was a crucial change in the character of the motivations which lead a man to work and to relate himself positively and negatively to work.bell,18 But in the modern consciousness, there is not a common being but a self, and the concern of this self is with its individual authenticity, its unique, irreducible character 1 rce of the contrivances and conventions, the masks and hypocrisies, the distortions of the self by society. This concern with the authentic self makes the motive and not the actionthe impact on the self, not the moral consequence to societythe source of ethical and aesthetic judgments.bell,19 Today modernism is exhausted. There is no tension. The creative impulses have gone slack.bell20 The psychological origin of inequality, as Rousseau brilliantly sketched it in the Second Discourse, comes when "solitary" man begins to assemble and finds that the strongest, the handsomest, the best dancer and the best singer get an undue share of the goods.bell,22 If consumption represents the psychological competition for status, then one can say that bourgeois society is the institutionalization of envy.bell,22

Orientalism In the age of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, representation has thus had to contend not only with the consciousness of linguistic forms and con-ventions, but also with the pressures of such transpersonal, transhuman, and transcultural forces a s class, the unconscious, gender, race, and struc-ture.saied,206

To represent someone or even something has now become an endeavor as complex and as problematic as an asymptote, with consequences for certainty and decidabilit y as fraught with difficulties as can be imagined.saeid,206 And far from being a category that signified supplication and self-pity, "the co lonized" has since expanded considerably to include women, subjugated and oppres sed classes, national minorities, and even margin-alized or incorporated academi c subspecialties.saeid,207 Thus the status of colonized people has been fixed in zones of dependency and pe ripherality, stigmatized in the designation of underdeveloped, less-developed, d eveloping states, ruled by a superior, developed, or metropolitan colonizer who was theoretically posited as a categorically antithetical overlord. saeid,207 Thus to be one of the colonized is potentially to be a great many different, but inferior, things, in many different places, at many different times.saeid,207 One of the major tendencies within disciplinary debates during the past twenty o r so years has derived from an awareness of the role played in the study and rep resentation of "primitive" or less-developed non-Western societies by Western co lonialism, the exploitation of dependence, the oppression of peasants, and the m anipulation or management of native societies for imperial purposes saeid,207. I am impressed, however, that few of the scholars who have contributed to such c ollections as Writing Culture or Anthropologya s Cultural Critique5_-to mention two highly visible recent books-have explicitly called for an end to anthropolog y as, for example, a number of literary scholars have indeed recommended for the concept of literature. saeid,208 I suppose there is also some (justified) fear that today s anthropologists can n o longer go to the postcolonial field with quite the same ease as in former time s. This of course is a political challenge to ethnography on exactly the same te rrain where, in earlier times, anthropologists were relatively sovereign.saeid,2 09. To convert them into topics of discussion or fields of research is necessarily t o change them into something fundamentally and constitutively different. And so the paradox remains.saeid,209 The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orie ntalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with con-siderable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the th ick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of kno wledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the va rious sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. saeid,211 Look at the many pages of very brilliantly sophisticated argument in the works o f the metatheoretical scholars, or in Sahlins and Wolf, and you will begin perha ps suddenly to note how someone, an authoritative, explorative, elegant, learned voice, speaks and analyzes, amasses evidence, theorizes, speculates about every -thing-except itself.saeid,212 Like my own field of comparative literature, anthropology, however, is predicate d on the fact of otherness and difference, on the lively, in-formative thrust su pplied to it by what is strange or foreign, "deep-down freshness" in Gerard Manl ey Hopkins phrase.saeid,213 the conclusion drawn by Jiirgen Golte in a reflective essay on "the anthropology of conquest" is that even non-American and hence "indigenous" anthropology is " intimately tied to imperialism," so dominant is the global power radiating out f rom the great metropolitan center.saeid,213 There are armies, and armies of scholars at work politically, militarily, ideolo gically.saeid,214 Certainly the media is saturated with ideological material, but just as certainl y not everything in the media is saturated to the same degree.saeid,215 By all means we should recognize dis-tinctions, make differentiations, but, we m

ust add, we should not lose sight of the gross fact that the swathe the United S tates cuts through the world is considerable, and is not merely the result of on e Reagan and a couple of Kirkpatricks so to speak, but is also heavily dependent on cultural discourse, on the knowledge industry, on the production and dissemi nation of texts and textuality, in short, not on "culture" as a general anthropo logical realm, which is routinely discussed and analyzed in studies of cultural poetics and textualization, but quite specifically on our culture.saeid,215 In short what is now before us nationally, and in the full imperial panorama, is the deep, the profoundly perturbed and perturbing question of our relationship to others-other cultures, other states, other histories, other experiences, trad itions, peoples, and destinies. The difficulty with the question is that there i s no vantage outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, between un equal imperial and nonimperial powers, between different Others, a vantage that might allow one the episte-mological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, a nd interpreting free of the encumbering interests, emotions, and engagements of the Critical Inquiry Winter 1989 217 ongoing relationships themselves.saeid,216-17 Now it is certainly the case that the contemporary travails of recent European a nd American anthropology reflect the conundrums and the embroilments of the prob lem symptomatically. The history of that cultural practice in Europe and the Uni ted States carries within it as a major constitutive element, the unequal relati onship of force between the outside Western ethnographer-observer and a primitiv e, or at least different but certainly weaker and less developed, non-Western so ciety.saeid,217 As to whether these efforts succeed or fail, that is a less interesting matter t han the very fact that what distinguishes them, what makes them possible is some very acutely embarrassed if disguised awareness of the imperial setting, which after all is all pervasive and unavoidable. For, in fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within our culture (a culture by the way wi th a whole history of exterminism and incorporation behind it) without also appr ehending the imperial contest itself. And this I would say is a cultural fact of extraordinary political as well as interpretive importance, because it is the t rue defining horizon, and to some extent, the enabling condition of such otherwi se abstract and groundless concepts like "otherness" and "difference." The real problem remains to haunt us: the relationship between anthropology as an ongoing enterprise and, on the other hand, empire as an ongoing concern.saeid,217 In ethnography the exercise of sheer power in exerting control over geography is strong.saeid,218 How does work on remote or primitive or "other" cultures, societies, peoples in Central America, Africa, the Middle East, various parts of Asia, feed into, conn ect with, impede, or enhance the active political processes of de-pendency, domi nation, or hegemony?saeid,218 But those were different times, and what that discovery through translation led to was not any enhanced interest in translation but rather the founding of the d iscipline of comparative philology, and of course, if we are to believe Edward S aid, further and more effective colonization. trivedi,meridiam, p.1 Two instances, the Middle East and Latin America, provide evidence of a direct c onnection between specialized "area" scholarship and public policy, in which med ia representations reinforce not sympathy and un-derstanding, but the use of for ce and brutality against native societies.saeid,218 Instead, the Western Africanists read African writers as source material for the ir research, Western Middle East specialists treat Arab or Iranian texts as prim ary evidence for their research, while the direct, even importunate solicitation s of debate and intellectual engagement from the formerly colonized are left lar gely un-attended.saeid,219 At bottom the realignment has to do, I think, first with the new and less formal istic understanding that we are acquiring of narrative procedures, and then seco nd, with a far more developed awareness of the need for ideas about alternative

and emergent counterdominant practices.saeid,17 Nationalism, resurgent or new, fastens on narratives for structuring, assimilati ng, or excluding one or another version of history. saeid,17 Yet narrative has also been at issue in the by now massive theoretical literatur e on postmodernism, which can also be seen as bearing on current political debat e. Jean-Frangois Lyotard s thesis is that the two great nar-ratives of emancipat ion and enlightenment have lost their legitimizing power and are now replaced by smaller local narratives (petits recits) based for their legitimacy on performa tivity, that is, on the user s ability to manipulate the codes in order to get t hings done.21 A nice manageable state of affairs, which according to Lyotard cam e about for entirely Eu-ropean or Western reasons: the great narratives just los t their power.saeid,18 They lost their legit-imation in large measure as a result of the crisis of mode rnism, which foundered on or was frozen in contemplative irony for various reaso ns, of which one was the disturbing appearance in Europe of various Others, whos e provenance was the imperial domain. Europe and the West, in short, were being asked to take the Other seriously. Thi s, I think, is the fundamental historical problem of modernism. The subaltern an d the constitutively different suddenly achieved disruptive articulation exactly where in European culture silence and compliance could previously be depended o n to quiet them down.saeid,19 If we seek refuge in rhetoric about our powerlessness or ineffectiveness or indi fference, then we must be prepared also to admit that such rhetoric finally cont ributes to one tendency or the other. The point is that anthropological repre-se ntations bear as much on the representer s world as on who or what is represente d.saeid,21 If we no longer think of the relationship between cultures and their adherents a s perfectly contiguous, totally synchronous, wholly correspondent, and if we thi nk of cultures as permeable and, on the whole, defensive boundaries between poli ties, a more promising situation appears.saeid,21 Cultures may then be represented as zones of control or of abandonment, of recol lection and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusiveness or of sha ring, all taking place in the global history that is our element. Exile, immigra tion, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can therefore provide us with new narrative forms or, in John Berger s phrase, with other ways of tell ing. saeid,21 Postmodernityknowledge

Scientific knowledge is .. a kind of discourse.lit,3 And it is fair to say that rorthe last forty years the "leading" sciences and technologies have had to do with language: I fi phono logy a 1cl.!Jl~[ics," _problcmsat communit ation 11 :lOd cybernctics,5 modern th~orics of algebra andlilformatics,6 ~J computcrs and their anguages,7 problcms of translation and the, search for arcas of compatibility among computer languages,S problems of information storage and data banks,9 te1cmatics and theperfectlon 0 flOreIIIgent lcrm.maIS," paradoxa aigy". Thc facts speak for themselves (and this list is not exhaustive).lit,3-4 The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already takcn by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they producc and Consume -that is, the form of valuerKnowledge is and will be

produced in order to be sold, it is and wilt be consumed in order to ,t be valorized in a new production: in both cases, thc goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its "use-val~e.. ~lit,4-5 A new field is opened for industrial and com~erclal strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategtes on the other.lit,5 It IS not, hard to Visualize kWling cjtc:ulating-along..the-same.lines a.t ~oney! 11lstea~ of ~~ts~ucational"value or political (administrative, diplomatic, mlhtary) Importance; the pertinent distinction ~vould no lo~ger be between knowledge and ignorance, but rather, as . lS the case With money, between "payment knowledge" and "investment k.n?wledg~"-in,other words, betwecn units of knowledge exchanged m a daily mamtenance framework (the rcconstitution of the wo~k ,f?rce, "survival") versus funds of knowledge dedicated to optimIZIng the performance of a project,lit,6 this [TRANSFORMATION OF KNOWLEDGE]scenario, akin to the one that g~es by the n~m e "tIM:, s:-omB~teriza- ...ll/ . n of socierv" <although ours IS advanced 10 an enmely dlffere~t~~ no J__ .., 1 IVl ( spiri07" makes no ~laims of be;~_&.. Orlgl~a, or e~en true..lit,7 Thisis as much as to say that the hypothesis is banal. But only to lhe extent that it fails to chaUenge the general paradigm of progress in science and technology, to which economic growth and the expansion of sociopolitic~1 power seem ~6 be natu!al .complements:lit,7 The point is that there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics: they both stem from the same perspective, the same "choice" if you will-the choice calJed the Occident.lit,8 In thc computer age, 1t>h.e question of knowledge is now more than ever a qu estlon f 0 Govcrnmen.lit,9 This breaking up of the grand Narratives (discussed below, sections 9 and 10) leads to what some authors analyze-in terms of the dissolu- ;1 tion of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian I motion. 55 Nothing of the kind is happening: this point of view, it seems to me, is haunted by the paradisaic representation of a lost "organie" society. .lit,15. A self docs not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever b:cf~.lit, 15 Another characteristic meriting special attention is the rclation he~\V~cn this kind ?f knowledge and Custom.lit,19 respectl\ eJy) accepted in the social circle of the "knower s" interlocutors. The early philosophers called this mode of lecritimaring 67 ~. stat~ments opmlon.lit,19 The consensus that permits such knowledge to be clrcumscn e and makes it possible to distinguish one who knows I from one who doesn t (the foreigner, the child) is what constitutes the culture of a people.lit,19 spccics.[tamenting the "loss of meaning" In postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative.lit,26 lThis unequal relationship IS an intrinSIC eff~et of the.rulc~ speCifiC to each game. We all know its symptoms. It IS the ~n~l.rc ~IStory ~f

cultural imperialism from the. dawn of W~stern c~vlhzatlon. lt IS important to recognize its speCial tenor, which sets I[ apart from ~n other forms of imperialism: it is governed by the demand for legltima[ iori) lit,26 It is, of course, understandable that both capitalist renewal and prosperity and the disorienting upsurge of technology would have an impact on the status of knowledge.lit,38 This procedure operates within the following framework: since "reality" is what provides the evidence used as proof in scientific argumentation, and also provides prescriptions and promises of a juridical, ethical, and political nature with results, one can master all of these games by mastering "reality." That is precisely what technology can do, By reinforcing technology, onc "reinforces" reality, and one s chances of being just and right increase accordingly. Reciprocally, technology is reinforced all the more effectively if one has access to scientific knowledge and decision-making authority.Lit, 47. The relationship between science and technology is reversed, The complexity of the argumentation becomes relevant here, especialJy because it necessitates greater sophistication in the means of obtaining proof, and that in turn benefits performativity. Research funds are allocated by States, corporations, and nationalized companies in ~ccordance with this logic of power growth. Lit, 47 The application of new technologies to this stock may have a considerable impact on the medium of communication. It does nor seem absolutely necessary that the medium be a lecture delivered in person by a teacher in front of silent srudents, with questions reserved for sections or "practical work" sessions run by an assistant.lit, 50 Another characteristic meriting special attention is the rclation he~\V~cn this kind ?f knowledge and Custom. What is a "good" pre- scnptlvc or evaluative utterance, a "good" performance in denotative or technical matters? They are all judged to be "good" because they conform to th.e relevant criteria (of justice, beauty, nuth, and efficiency respectl\ eJy) accepted in the social circle of the "knower s" interlocutors. The early philosophers called this mode of lecritimaring 67 ~. stat~ments opmlon. The consensus that permits such knowledge to be clrcumscn e and makes it possible to distinguish one who knows I from one who doesn t (the foreigner, the child) is what constitutes the culture of a people.lit,19 This briel reminder of what knowledge can be in the way of trainI~ g ~d culture draws ~n eumo!ogical d:scription for its justification. .But an~~opologtc~1 stu~hes and hterature that take rapidly develop109 SOCieties as their object can attest to the survival of this type of knowledge within them, at least in some of their sectors. Lit, 19 E.Q; itisisW is c Idegree zerQ of cQntempQrary gen~I culture: Qne hst!;ns to reg gae .... watchcs a western, ea s c Qnara s Qod for lunch and IQcal cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and "retrQ" clQthcs in Hong Kong; knowledge is a mattcr for TV games. Artistic and literary research is doubly threatened, once by the "cultural policy" and once by the art and book market,lit,76 Now reality is becoming only the social world, excluding nature and things, and experienced primarily through the recipr

ocal consciousness of others, rather than some external reality.bell,149 I have presented three settingsthe natural world, the technical world, and the social worldand three modes of relation to these realities.bell,149 ft of to in in is reasonable to suppose that thc proliferation information-processing machines is having, and will continue have, as much of an effect on the circulation of learning as did advancements human circulation (transportation systems) and later, the circulation of sounds and visual images (the media).lit, 4

The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan)*7 is the first great formula o f this new era.budriar,20 Such a blending, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium , without the possibility of isolating the effects - spectralized, like these adve rtising laser sculptures in the empty space of the event filtered by the medium - dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV - indiscernible chemical solution: we are all Lo uds doomed not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and blackmail by the media and the mod els, but to their induction, to their infiltration, to their illegible violence.b,20 TV is watching us, TV alienates us, TV manipulates us, TV informs us ... In all this, one remains dependent on the analytical conception of the media, on an external active and effective agent, o n "perspectival" information with the horizon of the real and of meaning as the va nishing point.b,20 a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion - an absorpti on of the radiating mode of causality, of the differential mode of determination , with its positive and negative charge - an implosion of meaning. That is where simulation begins.b,23 History thus made its triumphal entry into cinema, posthumously (the term histor ical has undergone the same fate: a "historical" moment, monument, congress, figure are i n this way designated as fossils). Its reinjection has no value as conscious awareness but only as nostalgia for a lost referential.b,32 The medium/message confusion is certainly a corollary of that between the sender and the receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all dual, polar structures that formed the discursive organization of language, of all determined articulation of meaning r eflecting Jakobson s famous grid of functionsbudrillard, Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of express ion into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are a bsorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously for

gotten.baudrillard, This anticipation, this precession, this short circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no mor e dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity, implosion of antagonistic po les), is what allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from w hich they derive, in a generalized cycle.bud,13 In fact, this whole process can only be understood in its negative form: nothing separates one pole from another anymore, the beginning from the end; there is a kind of contraction of o ne over the other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion - an absorption of the radiating mode of causality, of the differentia l mode of determination, with its positive and negative charge - an implosion of meaning. That is where simulation begins.BUD Everywhere, in no matter what domain - political, biological, psychological, med iatized in which the distinction between these two poles can no longer be maintained, on e enters into simulation, and thus into absolute manipulation - not into passivity, but i nto the differentiation of the active and the passive. DNA realizes this aleatory reduct ion at the level of living matter. Television, in the case of the Louds, also reaches this indefinite limit in which, vis--vis TV, they are neither more nor less active or passive tha n a living substance is vis-a-vis its molecular code. Here and there, a single nebula whose simple elements are indecipherable, whose truth is indecipherable.BUD. However many contradictory and conflicted meanings the notion of postmodernity h as acquired, it is so essentially part of contemporary discourse that it is hard ly possible not to use it.(jameson,1991,xxii). Cited in Kiasa Koskinen, 2000).

Hybridity But the importance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like a translation, so that hybridity puts together the traces of certain other meanings or discourses. Bhabha, in janatan. A hybrid text is a text that results from a translation process. It shows featur es that somehow seem out of place / strange / unusual for the receiving cultur e, i.e. the target culture. These features, however, are not the result of a lac k of translational competence or examples of translationese , but they are evid ence of conscious and deliberate decisions by the translator. Although the text is not yet fully established in the target culture (because it does not conform

to established norms and conventions), a hybrid text is accepted in its target c ulture because it fulfils its intended purpose in the communicative situation (a t least for a certain time).shafner and adab,p4 Neubert and Shreve (1992: 120) discuss hybridity in the context of mediated inte rtextuality: The translator extends the communicative reach of the L1 text. Interes tingly enough, it might also be possible to create exotic intertextual hybrids. By allowing the intertextuality of the L1 text to show through in the L2 text, the translator can make it possible for L2 readers to acquaint themselves with the communicative culture of the L1. In shaf,4 From a more negative perspective Snell-Hornby (1992) notes that interference bet ween two languages in contact can result in the production of a text which fails to fulfil its function as a text, due to the use of meaningless syntax and the d isregard of basic (advertising) conventions so that the text produced results in, a cu ltural jar because it is, both in structure and expression, unconvincing (Snell-Hor nby 1992: 341-355).in sh,p4

Hatim and Mason (1996:146) refer to practices in the dubbing of imported English -language television serials into minority status target languages, wheren const raints of this form of translation may result in the importing of source languag e (SL) norms into the target language (TL) culture, thus undermining existing TL conventions and creating new text type features. (1996:146).ibid . Robinsons view of the hybrid text is therefore in contrast to that proposed in our ownthe discussion paper, since he sees it as being the result of unconscious action rather than deliberate choice.in shaf. In Descriptive Translation Studies, the notion of translation itself has been de scribed as hybrid. Hermans for example, argues that [t]Translation is irreducible: it always leaves loose ends, is always hybrid, plural and different. (Hermans 19 96: 45)ibid. Anthony Pym discusses the nature of the hybrid as composite of features drawn fr om two distinct entities and queries whether, in the context of translation, the very existence of a hybrid text serves to underline a hypothetical optimum text existing in both cultures and languages in contact. He sees translation as acti ng as an agent for dehybridisation and takes a historical perspective, from clas sical to contemporary authors, asserting the need to study the evolution of a co mmunity of translators as people who inhabit a cultural interspace.ibid,10 . Mary Snell-Hornby argues that hybridity is a feature of the contemporary world , a result of exploitation of intercultural contact in a positive sense.ibid. (p ostmodernity and implosion. Sherry Simon tackles the concept of hybridity from the perspective of cultural a ffiliation, where new cultural identities have been formed through intercultural interaction and mutual influence of one on the other, in other words, by consid ering where the borders of identity lie.ibid (Simon)She considers the status of the translator in such a situation ltural affiliation and identity, echoing Snell-Hornbys perception of -between cultures created through and by translation and reflected in and textual features. Hybridity is created by and contributes to the of conflict.ibid of dual cu the world in text types resolution

We can use the word difference as a motif for that uprooting of certainty. It represents an experience of change, transformation and hybridity, in vogue because it acts as a focus for all those complementary fears, anxieties, confusions and arguments that accompany change.janathan, 10. Difference ceases to threaten, or to signify power relations. Otherness is sought after for its exchange value, its exoticism and the pleasures, thrills and adventures it can offer. janathan, 11 Just now everybody wants to talk about identity . As a keyword in contemporary politics it has taken on so many different connotations that sometimes it is obvious that people are not even talking about the same thing. One thing at least is clear - identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. From this angle, the eagerness to talk about identity is symptomatic of the postmodern predicament of contemporary politics. Kobena, 43, in Rutherford Identity is about belonging, about what you have in common with some people and what differentiates you from others. At its most basic it gives you a sense of personal location, the stable core to your individuality. But it is also about your social relationships, your complex involvement with others, and in the modern world these have become ever more complex and confusing. JEFFREY WEEKS, in janathan,88 Issues of identity are now, however, at the centre of modern politics. . JEFFREY WEEKS, in janathan,88 Identities are not neutral. Behind the quest for identity are different, and often conflicting values. By saying who we are, we are also striving to express what we are, what we believe and what we desire. The problem is that these beliefs, needs and desires are often patently in conflict, not only between different communities but within individuals themselves. JEFFREY WEEKS, in janathan,89 The novelist Fay Weldon has put it sharply: Our attempt at multi-culturalism has failed ... The uniculturalist policy of the United States worked, welding its new peoples, from every race, every belief, into a whole .10 Pluralism is in fact institutionalised rather than obliterated in the USA, and intercommunal strife is not exactly unknown. But the philsophy of assimilation, where differences dissolve in the great melting pot of America, obviously still has a powerful appeal. JEFFREY WEEKS, in janathan,97 Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a production , which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term, cultural identity , lays claim. STUART HALL, in janathan,222. It continues to be a very powerful and creative force in emergent forms of representation amongst hitherto marginalised peoples. In post-colonial societies, the rediscovery of this identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once called a passionate research ... directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others. fanon, 223 ,in janathan

Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power. STUART HALL, in janathan 225, Not only, in Said s Orientalist sense, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as Other . Every regime of representation is a regime ofpower formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet, power/knowledge . But this kind of knowledge is internal, not external. It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that knowledge , not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm. STUART HALL, in janathan,225-6 Identity The concept of identity, according to Taylor (1989), was unthinkable before the sixteenth century: the pre-modern, feudal era in Europe. Today, it is a heavily theorised, academic concept that is a paradigmatic product of its historical conditions, formulated and reformulated in strategic ways by the period or movement under which it arises and the preoccupations of its theorists. Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe,17 The first recorded use of the word identity appears in 1570 as identitie, meaning the quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness (OED 2002). Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe,18 Although Descartess critical, deductive rationalism and Lockes radically detached, inductive empiricism seem at odds, both facilitated the creation of a model of identity which has dominated popular understandings ever since the Enlightenment: that of identity as an instrumental project of the self . ). Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe,19 Bauman (2004: 32) uses the term liquid modernity to refer to a world in which everything is elusive and identities are the most acute, the most deeply felt and the most troublesome incarnations of ambivalence. Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe,23 Cultural Translation, Third Space and hybridity.

"The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colo nial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference - r acial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the bo dy is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power." (Bhabha 1994: 67) "What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differen ces. These in-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of sel fhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovati ve sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself."Bhabha, Location, 1-2

This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or impose d hierarchy" (Bhabha 1994: 3, 4). "Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting force s and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domi nation through disavowal [...]. Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption o f colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. [ ---] Hybridity is the name of this displacement of value from symbol to sign tha t causes the dominant discourse to split along the axis of its power to be repre sentative, authoritative. [---] [Hybridity] is not a third term that resolves th e tension between two cultures, or the two scenes of the book [of English coloni al fiction] in a dialectical play of recognition. [---] Hybridity reverses the for mal process of disavowal so that the violent dislocation of the act of colonizat ion becomes the conditionality of colonial discourse." (Bhabha 1994: 112-114)

The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the Mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a spac e of translation: a space of heredity, figuratively speaking, where the construc tion of a political object that is new, nether the one nor the other, properly a lienates our political expectations, and changes ,as it must, the very function our recognition of the moment of politics. Bhabha, the location of culture, 25 As the Writing Culture critics pointed out, cultural descriptions based on this conception participated in constructing the alleged primitivism of nonwestern peop les by representing them as radically separate and sealed off from the describin g western societies. Baker & sal, 68 Here a related but more figurative and farreaching use of the term cultural trans lation comes to the fore: the notion, common in POSTCOLONIAL studies, that translation is less a procedure to which cu ltures can be subjected than itself the very fabric of culture. In this case, tra nslation is not meant as interlingual transfer but metaphorically, as the alteration of colonizing discourses by the discourses of the colonized and vice versa. . Baker & sal, 69 Western connoisseurship is the capacity to understand and locate cultures in a u niversal time-frame that acknowledges their various historical and social contex ts only eventually to transcend them and render them transparent. Interview with Homi Bhabha, 208 As BachmannMedick (2006) hints, in a nightmare scenario cultural translation could mean the adaptation of everything to the dominant idiom of western capitalism, thus destroying difference or relegating it to unheard margins of global society . For critics such as Trivedi, the challenge to translation studies is thus to r eassert the crucial role of translation in all its senses within interdisciplina ry debates on cultural difference and GLOBALIZATION. society. baker & sal, 69 By translation I first of all mean a process by which, in order to objectify cul tural meaning, there always has to be a process of alienation and of secondariness in relation to itself. In that sense there is no in itself and for itself within cultures because they are always subject to intrinsic forms of translation.Bhab ha,in third space, 210 Now the notion of hybridity comes from the two prior

descriptions I ve given of the genealogy of difference and the idea of translation, because if, as I was saying, the act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture, then we see that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. Bhabha,in third spac e, 211 No, not so much identity as identification (in the psychoanalytic sense). I try to talk about hybridity through a psychoanalytic analogy, so that identification is a process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness, at which point the agency of identification - the subject - is itself always ambivalent, because of the intervention of that otherness. But the import ance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices wh ich inform it, just like a translation, so that hybridity puts together the traces of certain other meanings or discourses. Bhabha,in third space, 211 [AFTER CATFORD in Translation, History and Culture (1990) ] the unit of translat ion was no longer a word or a sentence or a paragraph or a page or even a text, but indeed the whole language and culture in which that text was constituted. tr ivedi, meridiam, 2 .in these multifaceted interdisciplines, isolation is counter-productive. . . .T he study of translation, like the study of culture, needs a plurality of voices. And similarly, the study of culture always involves an examination of the proce sses of encoding and decoding that comprise translation. (Bassnett and Lefevere 138-39)inconstructing cultures)as cited in Trivedi,2. Since Bhabha first articulated it, the distinctly postmodernist idea of cultural translation in this non-textual non-linguistic sense has found an echo in much contemporary writing, both critical and creative.trivedi,2 And whether I write as an American or an Indian, about things American or Indian or otherwise, one thing remains constant: I translate, therefore I am (Lahiri 1 20).as cited in trivedi. All the recent talk of multiculturalism relates, it may be noted, not to the man y different cultures located all over the world, but merely to expedient social management of a small sample of migrants from some of these cultures who have ac tually dislocated themselves and arrived in the First World, and who now must be melted down in that pot, or tossed in that salad, or fitted as an odd little pi ece into that mosaic.trivedi,meridiam, Migrancy, often upper-class elite migrancy as for example from India, has alread y provided the First World with as much newness as it needs and can cope with, a nd given it the illusion that this tiny fraction of the Third World has already made the First World the whole world, the only world there is. Those of us still located on our own home turf and in our own cultures and speaking our own langu ages can no longer be seen or heard[because we speak in our own language]..trive di, meridiam, In this brave new dystopian world of cultural translation, translation ironicall y would have been translated back to its literal, etymological meaning, of human migration .trivedi, meridiam

Anthropology Usually cultural translations have been done through a frame which either stres ses differences or serves as a means in which the other is portrayed in categories which are understandable to a Wester n audience. Aram A. Yengoyan, in Translating Cultures,25

Models See Basnet and Lefever,in constructing cultures,1-12 We are confronted with what we may term the Holiday Inn Syndrome, where everything foreign and exotic is standardized, to a great extent. At least this is the ca se with texts that can be considered to build the cultural capital of a civilizati on. The question dose not even arise for another type of text, and for reasons that have little to do with translation as such: the day when computer manuals w ill be translated from Uzbek into English,rather than the other way around, is o bviously not near. Basnet and Lefever,in constructing cultures,4

Globalization The term globalization has been used to broadly describe the profound nature of ch anges affecting economies, cultures and societies worldwide from the late twenti eth century onwards. Anthony Giddens has defined globalization as the intensifica tion of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way t hat local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice ver sa (1990:64). In Baker 7 sal,126 A central feature of the new, global economy which has emerged in the context of intensified relations is that it is informational. ibid For the economy to work as a unit in a multilingual world, however, the mediatio n of translation is necessary. ibid. In other words, rather than simply taking a web site at a point in time and putt ing it into another language a provision must now be made to translate continuou sly updated and revised content. ibid If information is acknowledged to be the basic raw material of the new global ec onomy and significant economic gains are to be made from the production of goods with a high cognitive content, then not only is language a key factor in the expression of that information but language also represents a crucial means of accessing the information.ibid "Poststructuralism has in fact initiated a radical reconsideration of the tradit ional topoi of translation theory. Largely through commentaries on Walter Benjam ins essay The Task of the Translator, poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derri da and Paul de Man explode the binary opposition between original and translation whic h underwrites the translators invisibility today." (Venuti 1992a: 6)

Prestige, cultural interferences A culture becomes a source by prestige. A culture may become a source because it is considered a model to emulate. Vario us factors contribute to making a culture prestigious. Establishedness, and high ly visible presence in a world network, which create a high degree of interconne ctedness, are among the factors of prestige. Political and/or economic power are not necessary conditions for acquiring prestige per se, but are certainly indis pensable for creating high visibility/presence which in its turn late create pre stige. Itamar Even-Zohar LAWS OF CULTURAL INTERFERENCE* Naturally, a precondition for interference must be some kind of contact -- wheth er direct or indirect -- but the opposite is not necessarily true: contact may o ccur without generating any substantial interference.ibid,para, 3 Contacts can be defined as a relation(ship) between cultures, whereby a certain culture A (a source culture) may become a source of direct or indirect transfer for another culture B (a target culture).(see globalization). . Itamar Even-Zoha r LAWS OF CULTURAL INTERFERENCE*para, 2 Interference is thus a procedure emerging in the environment of contacts, one wh ere transfer has taken place. One of the manifestations of contacts is an exchange of goods. Whether unilatera lly or multilaterally, imported goods may become important items in the culture of the importing society.ibid, p.4 Naturally, the "borders" between cases of active contact (i.e. a strong presence of imported goods) and interference are not clear-cut. Nevertheless, the basic principle here is the separation of the transferred item from the exporting sour ce and its ensuing independence: once the source is no longer needed for the mak ing of the item-of-repertoire in question, it is justified to regard the case as interference. Once interference has taken place, the question. Ibid, p 4 Different kinds of contacts may create different kinds of interference, dependin g chiefly on whether contacts are direct or indirect.ibid In the case of direct contacts, a source culture is available to, and accessed b y, members of the target culture without institutionalized intermediaries. in the second type, contacts are intermediated through agencies, such as various kinds of importers. But such an exposure per se is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition fo r interference to take place. Interference functions for all sizes and levels of social configurations: famili es, clans, tribes, "classes", ethnic groups, geographically organized groups, as well as nations, or groups of nations.ibid,p.6 1. General principles of interference. 1.1. Interference is always imminent. 1.2. Interference is mostly unilateral. 1.3. Interference may be restricted to certain domains 2. Conditions for the emergence and occurrence of interference. 2.1. Contacts will sooner or later generate interference if no resisting conditi ons arise. 2.2. Interference occurs when a system is in need of items unavailable within it s own repertoire. 2.3. A culture becomes a source by prestige. 2.4. A culture becomes a source by dominance.ibid. At the same time, with communities geographically separated from one another, pa rtial interference is fully conceivable.ibid. A target culture is never exposed to the totality of some source, even when geog

raphically close to it or mixed with it. Studies on immigration, acculturation, and assimilation provide ample evidence supporting this.ibid Contacts between communities do not necessarily generate interference. Communiti es may exchange any kind of goods, information, political support, or tourism wi thout subsequently being affected. Durable contacts, while not producing conspicuously visible interference, may, h owever, generate conditions of availability, which will facilitate interference. ibid.

Media Baudrillard has developed a theory to make intelligible one of the fascinating a nd perplexing aspects of advanced industrial society: the proliferation of commu nications through the media. Mark Poster,p1 For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.mc. It has now been explained that media, or the extensions of man, are "make happen " agents, but not "make aware" agents.mc luhan, They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outs ide us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all.mcluhan. In fact, of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures. The giving to man of an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and polit ically, probably the most radical explosion mat can occur in any social structur e. This explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in "backward areas," we call W esternization. With literacy now about to hybridize the cultures of the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans, we are about to experience such a release of hum an power and aggressive violence as makes the previous history of phonetic alpha bet technology seem quite tame.mc sign value and use value Here[in sign value], the advertising process of conferring value transmutes use goods {biens d usage) into sign values. Here technique and knowledge are divorce d from their objective practice and recovered by the "cultural" system of differ entiation. Baudrillard, selected writing, p. 58 UVSbE: The field of consumption (consumation as opposed to the usual French, cons ommation), that is, of the destruction of use value (or of economic exchange val ue, cf. 6); longer, however, in order to produce sign values, but in the mode o f a transgression of the economic, reinstating symbolic exchange. The presentation, the gift, the festival [fete).ibid. On the other hand, the existence of the postcolonial hybrid text reveals the pow er structures still in force between world languages and indigenous languages of limited diffusion. This is particularly the case where English is concerned, wh ich has assumed a hitherto unparalleled role as an international lingua franca and world language, or rather, as Henry Widdowson has put it, as world pro perty (1994). This has meant that, while fostering their cultural identity by means of their own language, developing communities now frequently use English translation as a means of reaching a wider audience for their indigenous literat ure.snell Hornby , p.2010

In our fast-moving lives borders have grown fuzzy, and changes rather than stability have become the norm. The increasing globalisation of communicati on processes has helped to overcome geographical barriers.hornby,215

This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each time allows for all the possible interpretat ions, even the most contradictory all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generali zed cycle.ibid,175

Implosion Baudrillard contends, objects and discourses that have no firm origin, no refere nt, no ground or foundation.POSTER,2. Culture is now dominated by simulations, Baudrillard contends, objects and disco urses that have no firm origin, no referent, no ground or foundation. Mark Poste r,p1 Only a semiological model, he argues, can decipher the meaning structure of the modern commodity. Mark Poster,p1 Like the post-structuralists, Baudrillard rejects traditional assump2 Introduction tions about referentiality. As Lyotard put it, the metanarratives of the past have collapsed, creating a new theoretical situation in which the conce pt can no longer pretend to control or grasp its object.3 In Baudrillard s terms , "hyperreality" is the new linguistic condition of society, rendering impotent theories that still rely on materialist reductionism or rationalist referentiali ty. Mark Poster,p1 The medium/message confusion is certainly a corollary of that between the sender and the receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all dual, polar structures that formed the discursive organization of language, of all determined articulation of meaning r eflecting Jakobson s famous grid of functions budrillard He explores the possibility that consumption has become the chief basis of the social order and of its internal classifications. . Mark Poster,2

He argues that consumer objects constitute a classification system that codes be havior and groups. As such, consumer objects must be analysed by use of linguist ic categories rather than those of Marxian or liberal economics, Freudian or beh aviorist psychology, anthropological or sociological theories of needs. Consumer objects have their effect in structurin g behavior through a linguistic sign function. Advertising codes products throug h symbols that differentiate them from other products, thereby fitting the objec t into a series. The object has its effect when it is consumed by transferring i ts "meaning" to the individual consumer. A potentially infinite play of signs is thus instituted which orders society while providing the individual with an ill usory sense of freedom and self-determination. The System of Objects went beyond earlier discussions of consumer society by systematically imposing linguistic c ategories to reveal the force of the code. Mark Poster,2 We can imagine that each individual feels unique while resembling everyone else: all we need is a schema of collective and mythological projection a model.baudrillard,p.11,s elected writing 2) within such purism, translation is commonly perceived as the expression or representation of one entity (texts, languages, cultures, systems, and so on) in terms of another (e.g., translation is the expression or representation of a sou rcelanguage text in a target language),pym, 195

Difference The aspect of difference has also been taken up more recently in translation stu dies, however from a different perspective. In debates about postcolonialism and multiculturalism it has been stressed that collective identities are not natura lly-evolved phenomena, but are constituted by specific cultural conditions. Auth ors writing on postcolonialism have shown that the fact of moving between the cu ltures means that life and the world are experienced as a permanent drifting of difference, locally, temporally and socially. This drifting is a constitutive el ement of postcolonial literature and theory-forming (e.g. Bhaba 1994). Focusing on difference instead of identity means that each culture is characterised by hy bridity, and the emergence of hybrid texts reflects an existence in the space be tween. This point is taken up from the perspective of translation studies in the contributions by Snell-Hornby and Simon.in shafner For Alexis Nouss, on the other hand, hybridity in translated literary texts high lights the existence of conflict between cultures. These texts have their own ex istence and play a role in preserving a sense of alterity which facilitates cul tural contact and mutual understanding through a blurring of boundaries between cultural identities.ibid,10

In anthropology, categorisation depends on assigning groups to different positio ns within a classificatory system, so that the marking of difference is thus the ba sis of that symbolic order which we call culture (Hall 1997).i, shafner and adab.p. 2

Social groups impose meaning on their world by ordering and organising things in to classificatory systems, based on clear differences, and it is impossible to c onceive of meaning without order .(Levy Sstrauss 1978).in sh,p.2 ). Just as cultural identity depends on classification and order, so effective c ommunication depends in part upon the recognition of text-typological features. Sh,2 Klaus Gommlich and Esim Erdim consider the question of how to enable a target cu lture to assimilate unfamiliar concepts and understand the otherness of the sour ce culture. They see the hybrid text as a platform for many voices, also many ideolo gies, which may be taken by some as universals, by others as a form of otherness whi ch the TL reader should be able to recognise and ponder. For these authors too, hybridity can resolve conflictibid.11

UVSbE: The field of consumption (consumation as opposed to the usual French, cons ommation), that is, of the destruction of use value (or of economic exchange val ue, cf. 6); no longer, however, in order to produce sign values, but in the mode of a transgression of the economic, reinstating symbolic exchange. The presenta tion, the gift, the festival [fete). seen as a modelling activity in that the result of the operation, the translated text, commonly claims, explicitly or implicitly, to represent an anterior disco urse in a way comparable to the representational function of models. (P. 181). hybridisation may result in thevemergence of new domestic text types and genres.

channel through which fashionable repertoire is brought home

Mehrez (1992, p.121, as cited in Snell-Hornby, 2001, p. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

hybridity to me is the

third space which enables other positions to emerge.