Translation and Empathy

In Bruno Latour’s exploration of what role network-thinking can play in reconciling the crisis western technological ‘advance’ has found itself in, regarding its relationship to the natural world, he uses an image filled with polemics of other-ness, to allude to how a sense of unity in the world is missed by the de-humanizing style of apprehension that characterizes modernist academia; that is, to isolate sects of knowledge.

“The tiny networks we have unfolded are torn apart like the Kurds by the Iranians, the Iraqis and the Turks; once night has fallen, they slip across borders to get married, and they dream of a common homeland that would be carved out of the three countries which have divided them up.” (P 6-7)

The metaphor is provocative of empathy and sorrow for a human fugitive body that is not granted status and whose image-base is not recognised anywhere within the physical territory available for it to occupy. It points to ostrasization and injustice caused by man-made divisions of identity. It implores, as Latour does, to discover alternatives modes towards knowledge and power distribution.

Latour is suggesting more ‘translativity’, which is a fecund proposition. But in departure from Latour here, I would like to address another mode of knowledge/response, which is also bought to my attention by the image he puts forward. Rightly or wrongly, the personified image of a people also evokes a sentiment toward a fugitive impulse in image making; the compulsion to materialise something between an articulation and an utterance without prior knowledge of the legitimacy of the gesture.

Bergson advocates intuition as a means to understanding, in opposition to Latour’s call for ‘more translativity’ (P ref) “Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects. To analyze, therefore is to express a thing as a function of something other than itself. All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view from which we note as many resemblances as possible between the new object which we are studying and the others which we believe we know already.” (Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. )