Ideology and Translation

I’m currently attending the seminar “Ideology of Translation and Translation of Ideology” (TRAN 5185) which is being taught by Lyse Hébert, here at Glendon. The topic is of interest to me and it’s a great way to start thinking about the seminar I plan to offer this coming fall, which will be about the relationship between translation and communication. The “Ideology of Translation” seminar is offered in the evenings, twice a week, but that doesn’t prevent participants to engage quite actively in the conversation. It all makes for very interesting exchanges, and I find myself scribbling down plenty of notes. Clearly, everyone feels concerned about what is being discussed, including myself. Here, I merely want to share a few of those notes while linking them to ideas I’ve already written about elsewhere.

Althusser on Ideology

What was discussed in the second class of the seminar was ideology: what it is, how it works and how we relate to it. The discussion was mostly organized around Louis Althusser’s classical essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (translated from the French by Ben Brewster; originally published in 1970 as “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État”). Quickly, the discussion about Althusser’s argument identified a central issue: the ubiquitous caracter of ideology and what can be done about it. Althusser writes “there is no practice except by and in an ideology”. He further insists: “what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology”. In an earlier text, anonymously published but attributed to Althusser, ideology is compared to the cement that holds society together:

If, instead, we want to suggest the concrete form of existence of the ideological, it is better to compare it to a “cement” rather than to a floor of a building. The ideological seeps, in fact, into all the rooms of the building: in individuals’ relation to all their practices, to all of their objects, in their relations to science, to technology, to the arts, in their relations to economic practice and political practice, into their “personal” relations, etc. ([Attributed to Louis Althusser], anonymous tr. Jason E. Smith, 2014, “On the Cultural Revolution”, Décalages: Vol. 1: Issue 1)

This is problematic for ideology actually distorts how we represent the relation we have with our real conditions of existence. The objective then should be to see through this distortion, maybe to get out of it altogether. Hence, during the class, this recurring question: is there a way out of ideology? If so, how? Another legitimate question could be to ask if there’s a way out of Althusser that does not lead back to ideology. What I want to quickly sketch here is the idea that the “way out” model may be problematic in itself.

Louis Althusser, photographed in 1973 during a lecture given at the École Normale Suppérieure de Paris. Patrick Guis / Kipa / Corbis

Seeking A Way Out

One of the problems with such a proposition—seeking “a way out”—lies in how it’s being conceived from within the very set of conditions that are to be left behind. In other words, a solution is being built with the material available in the ideological container out of which it pretends to lead us. The risk of carrying over the problems that we wish to leave behind should be carefully taken into account. That being said, everything cannot be left behind either. It is ourselves, after all, that we want to carry over: “we” are looking for a way to exist outside of ideology. Herein lies another, more serious problem.

One of the original contributions of Althusser is to insist on the fact that ideology does not merely operate as an imaginary representation of reality: i.e. a false inversion of what is real. Instead, it has to do first with imaginary relations: relation to each other, relation to the conditions of production, etc. He summarizes this with the following equation: “ideology = an imaginary relation to real relations”¹. Three years before Althusser published his essay, Guy Debord wrote in his The Society of the Spectacle: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” (Thesis 4)². At the very least, this allows us to understand how ideology—like the spectacle—is not something out there, menacingly hovering on the horizon, objectively separated from us. It is rather the very nature of the relations we all live by and engage in on an everyday basis. Thus ideology is not a veil that we could lift to reveal an unadulterated reality. Quite on the contrary, as Slavoj Zizek have argued over and over again³: the idea that you could lift the veil of ideology to see clearly how the world really is, this in itself is the ultimate ideological apparatus (although Zizek does allude to the possibility of “stepping out” of ideology).

At this point, the idea about finding “a way out” should appear in a different light: less as being part of a possible solution than as being part of the actual problem. Althusser is relentless in his diagnostic: “there is no practice except by and in an ideology”. He further argues that “ideology has no outside”. At times, he seems to suggest that science could at least provide a way to recognize the situation. However, he will also underlines the fact that ideological effects are to be found “even [in] scientific discourses”⁴

Hence, contrary to what a daily plethora of critical rants suggests (against governments, corporations, media, etc.), an efficient take on ideology is not an easy task to achieve. Ideology is not a container we could leave given sufficient awareness, its wall dissolving the instant we would somehow manage to overcome “false consciousness”, allowing us to wake up to reality, indeed as if from a bad dream. Ideology, in a way, is us: how we live together and interact.

The Interrregnum and Us

Besides, the situation we now find ourselves in does not quite look like a dream. Already in 1930, decades before Althusser’s essay, Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci—whose work was also mentioned during our seminar that evening—offered the following description of what we’re in all likelihood still going through:

The crisis consists precisely of the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear (Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1992, p. 276)

The paradigm of “interregnum”—with its long history going all the way back to ancient Roman law—was rediscovered by contemporary commentators who offered—unsurprisingly—to think “a way out” of it⁵. While getting rid of the morbid symptoms makes a lot of sense, there may be an opportunity in this apparent dead end worth thinking about. For example, we could examine the opportunities offered by the specificities of a situation characterized as an unprecedented political in-between: what would it involve developing ways of living together insubordinate to a political regnum? Maybe that’s what’s being explored recently both by intellectuals and activists when propositions are being developed around the idea of a “destituent power” and calls are being to become “ungovernable”. From the perspective of my ongoing research, all this relates to the way we’re continuously and collectively trying to shape the way we relate to one another: this is, after all, one possible meaning of the process of communication. The coming meetings of the “Ideology of Translation” seminar will likely offer the opportunity to further develop this issue and to explore how it relates to the process of translation.

References

↑1	This makes ideology an especially relevant topic for communication studies: at its core, it is a process of mediation. This shouldn’t come as a surprise if we take into account the significant transformation communication technologies brought to the traditional “conditions of production”, especially in the second half of the 20th century.
↑2	I’ve discussed the relationship between conceptions of ideology in Marx, Althusser and Debord elsewhere: see “Camera obscura, ideology and Guy Debord’s spectacle”. In the context of the seminar, those reflexions raise the question of visual or optical translation: could the practice of image making or imagination be understood as a practice of translation. If so, what could it bring to our understanding of just how ideology works in the first place?
↑3	See The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York: Verso, 1989, pp. 24-30.
↑4	Five years after the publication of Althusser’s essay, Michel Foucault would further explore the intimate relation of knowledge and power: “We should admit, rather, that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relation.” (Discipline and Punish. The Birth of Prison, tr. by Alan Sheridan, 1977 p. 27; first published in 1975 as Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison)
↑5	See for example Étienne Balibar’s “Out of the interregnum”. I’ve recently examined this problem more closesly in an essay published as part of the ninth special issue of the journal Synthesis entirely dedicated to this issue: see “Interregnum as a Legal and Political Concept: A Brief Contextual Survey”

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Philippe Theophanidis