A sleight of hand?

Literature thus is alone today in bearing the entire responsibility for language;

for though science needs language, it is not, like literature, within language.

—Roland Barthes (c. 1984)

   While linguistics is a search for grounds which are binding or natural, poetics is premised on the idea that the ground is not only arbitrary or not obligatory but also a fiction made in a dynamic of precarious or post-essential contrast. Whereas linguistics is a quest for a fixed point of reference, poetics, by the supplement of extralinguistic rules, foregrounds the elusive or shadowy status of the ground of a ''natural'' base of language. By the same stroke, it renders its own position precarious by positing the unstable and indeterminate nature of the material against which it measures its distance and recognizes its own identity.

   Won't poetics be like a sleight of hand, a levitating trick involving the shuffling of two shadowy points of referents in which the values of the norm and the variation emerge as reversible images? What always gets foregrounded are the reading codes or habits which are affirmed and subverted or ''loosened'' at the same time. The linguistic haunts the poetic in the same way the poetic haunts the linguistic as each other’s condition of possibility and impossibility. We need to speak of a beta-language to complement that of a meta-language in this case since language cannot be presupposed as an already known pre-existent substantial whole.

   (Thus, “integration,” in pedagogy or research, shouldn’t be seen as the unification of opposites in which one is the illumination of the other, or where one becomes the affirmation of the other’s truth. This is the version of an “integration” dreamed of in positivist heaven, the way translation before was seen as the confirmation of the linguistics which founds the legitimacy of the translation in a circular way.

   Won't such an integration impose once more the master/slave relationship between Science over Art, where Science is the meta-language governing the dynamics of Art as a beta-language? Like the ambition of Structuralism as the meta-language of cultural forms and meaning, as the scientific method over Art and Literature?

   What if the literary itself is its own metalanguage, the question of its own status or nature, a discourse which carries the burden of the question of its own condition of possibility? That it is its own science? And what if, against the nonplay status of linguistic positivism where metalinguisticity is above play, the literary is the very question of the possibility of both meta- and beta- linguisticity, the possibility of reflection as perception and perception as reflection?)

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   Translation as the exploration of the sayable and unsayable, the limits of our sign systems, both as a formal concept and as a cultural practice of signification. It's becoming less and less about equivalence and texts than the interested practice of difference in the geopolitics of transculturation. The arena now is the global communication circuit, a translocal arena more and more aware of the political uses of media technology. The question How to translate? opens toward Why translate? has surpassed its humanist and nationalist alibis or implicit agenda to become the conflicted contact zones of a delocalized and relocalized mythic, virtualized or simulated differences.

   We may, as novice and amateur moonlighters of translation, be just aware of the microcosmic issues of textual and linguistic procedures. Delocalization is unavoidable as textual values migrate, are remediated and become part of an ambiguous tradition of translated texts, uprooted and sharing the married genes of various families. The danger of mutations is always mitigated by a rhetoric of identity, whether nativist, nationalist, or culturalist.

    As Jabès has underlined, perhaps unintentionally implying translation, writing is an errance, a diasporic space of exile. The book is perhaps without origin, except in wandering. It is its nature not to belong, but to be a realization of its perpetual migration, delocalization, or transculturation. Reading/writing is an errance, the perennial shifts in identity, because identity is the idealized imposition on signs, which are the homeless, earthless, groundless vectors of our encounter with the always inaugural: sense always happening and dissipating--without ever reducing our experience of enigma and mystery--in the sea of universal noise and wonder.